The GOP’s Big, Fat Problem

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I understand Rep. Jamie Raskin was on The View today calling Donald Trump “the GOP’s problem.”

“I think he’s a pariah in terms of American politics, while he continues to exercise a stranglehold psychologically and politically and financially over the Republican party,” Raskin told the co-hosts. “And I feel bad for the Republicans, because they had an opportunity to do the right thing for America, for the Constitution, and to render impartial justice. But 43 of them didn’t and now he really is the GOP’s problem.”

This is what I’ve been thinking all along. I have thought that if the GOP and right-wing media heads had any sense at all they would have destroyed Trump after the 2018 midterms. If not through impeachment, they could have worked together to take him down in other ways. But they didn’t. And now much of the GOP seems to be doubling down on Trumpism. Republicans in state legislatures are calling for censure of Republicans who voted for impeachment, for example. See also Lindsey Graham’s toadyism on Fox News shows where the GOP is heading.

A number of news stories today say that Trump will speak at CPAC next weekend and tell the assembled wingnuts that that he is Republicans’ “presumptive 2024 nominee” and that he’s “still in charge” of the party. He also has let it be known he will be going after Repubicans’ who voted to impeach him or who have otherwise shown themselves to be insufficiently obsequious to His Orangeness. See Mike Allen, Scoop: Trump to claim total control of GOP at Axios.

Meanwhile, the Republican voter base is divided between those who think the party didn’t do enough to support Trump and those who are disgusted with Trump and want him to go away. Good luck threading that needle, Republicans.

Also today, the Supreme Court finally said Trump has to turn his tax returns over to the Manhattan District Attorney. We’ll see what Cy Vance does. Vance has a reputation for being soft on white collar crime, but he probably realizes that prosecuting Trump would be a huge boost to his political career.

Also today, Merrick Garland’s confirmation hearing for the Attorney General position finally began. Garland said that investigating the January 6 atrocity at the Capitol will be his top priority. And I believe him.

See also This is Trump’s heaping list of legal problems post-impeachment at CNN. These include a criminal investigation into Trump for his “attempts to influence the administration of the 2020 Georgia general election.”

IMO it’s extremely unlikely Trump is going to skate through all of this. Four years is a long time in politics. I could understand being afraid of Trump’s base if there were an election around the corner. But it’s too early to know what impact he’ll have in 2022 or 2024, and it could well turn out that Republicans will be pretending they never heard of him by the next time voters are lining up at polls.

A Teachable Moment for Texas?

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Here’s a question for you. When the dust (or ice and slush, as it were) settles in Texas, what are the odds the Greg Abbott administration or the Republican Texas legislature will do a dadblamed thing to reform their power system to prevent future disasters?

I’m betting zero. They’ll have some showcase investigations, fire some people, and make some decorative tweaks, and next winter they’ll still have the same old system.

Paul J. Weber and Nomaan Merchant report for the Associated Press:

 As frozen Texas reels under one of the worst electricity outages in U.S. history, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has blamed grid operators and iced-over wind turbines but gone easier on another culprit: an oil and gas industry that is the state’s dominant business and his biggest political contributor.

Ross Ramsey of the Texas Tribune points out that this electric grid disaster has been costly in many ways:

It could leave a lasting bruise on the Texas exceptionalism political and business leaders like to brag about. What happened over the last four or five days, as the state became the subject of national and international pity and head-shaking, could undo years of economic development promotion, corporate relocation work and tourism campaigns.

It makes it a lot easier on the competition. Who wants to go to a failed state? Sure, there is no income tax. But we’re rationing gas, turning off electricity for millions of households and boiling water so it doesn’t poison us. Austin even closed a hospital and moved the patients when they couldn’t rely on heat or water.

In a hospital.

The light regulation here has been a key part of the business pitch. But the dark side was showing this week in the failures of our basic infrastructure.

If you were thinking of building a technology or manufacturing company in Texas, would you still want to do that, after this week? I think not. But what will the Texas government do?

Next week, temperatures will warm and legislators can take off their mittens and start waggling their fingers at House and Senate committee hearings, a customary act of umbrage and self-preservation that directs our attention to potential bad guys and away from the current and former legislators who set the policies that helped put us in this position. …

… Lawmakers have a fresh chance to decide whether cutting this particular corner, swapping light regulations and low energy costs for the risk of leaving Texans exposed to the harshest winter weather, is worth it.

If the public keeps paying attention, it’s probably not. If the public leaves the details to legislators and the usual crowd of special interests, the state might do what it did last time: Waggle those fingers, write a report and put the matter away until it gets cold again.

That’s how politics works.

This isn’t just Texas. This is the Republican Party. It’s been both parties in recent years, I admit. The Dems were too invested in some notion of glorious incrementalism to do anything useful. But they appear to have gotten over that, for the most part.

Republicans, on the other hand, don’t seem to know what governing is any more. Chris Hayes had a segment last night in which he said that all Republicans know how to do is “performative trolling.” It’s worth watching.

As for Ted Cruz, he isn’t up for re-election for four years. It’s possible he will have rehabilitated his image — such as it ever was — by then. But didn’t it occur to him to, you know, help? “There are a million things that a senator can do in the middle of a disaster,” Hayes said, “none of which interests a politician like Ted Cruz, who sees himself as basically Rush Limbaugh with a Senate office.”

See also Biden is poised to sign a major disaster declaration for Texas at Vox.

Former Governor: Texans Should Suffer for Unregulated Energy

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It’s Wednesday. Between two and three million Texans have been without power since Monday.  The heads of the Texas energy system, ERCOT, can’t say when regular power will resume. Temperatures have been dipping into single digits, and the roads are treacherously icy.  Pipes have burst, leaving households without water as well as without heat. According to this BBC report, there have been an unusual number of deaths from traffic accidents. Many have tried to warm themselves with generators in the house, or in running cars, risking carbon monoxide poisoning.

One county said it had seen more than 300 suspected carbon monoxide cases during the cold snap. “It’s turning into a mini mass casualty event,” one Harris County doctor told the Houston Chronicle.

At least four people were killed following a house fire in Houston that officials said may have been sparked by candles. Separately, police said two men found alongside a Houston highway were believed to have died due to the cold.

I am seeing on social media that people are also getting low on food. Groceries are not being stocked, and a lot of groceries are closed.

Former Texas governor Rick Perry is speaking out … against energy regulations. The Houston Chronicle:

Former Texas governor Rick Perry suggests that going days without power is a sacrifice Texans should be willing to make if it means keeping federal regulators out of the state’s power grid. …

… “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business,” Perry is quoted as saying. “Try not to let whatever the crisis of the day is take your eye off of having a resilient grid that keeps America safe personally, economically, and strategically.”

I wonder how Texans without power feel about that. It is unfortunately the case, however, that minority neighborhoods are getting the worst of it, meaning the rich white folks are probably staying warm and well fed.

As I wrote yesterday, a big reason Texans are suffering right now is that Texas has maintained a power grid that is mostly unconnected with those of other states, so that it can avoid federal regulations. See especially Texas seceded from the nation’s power grid. Now it’s paying the price. at WaPo.  The state’s insistence on self-reliance and private, unregulated providers competing for business worked well for them, until now. But there is no financial incentive for investing in backup systems. There is no regulation forcing anyone to invest in backup systems. And because Texas is disconnected from the rest of the nation’s energy grids, there is no way to redirect energy to Texas.

Also from the Houston Chronicle:

Ed Hirs, an energy fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, blamed the failures on the state’s deregulated power system, which doesn’t provide power generators with the returns needed to invest in maintaining and improving power plants.

“The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,” said Hirs. “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.

“For more than a decade, generators have not been able to charge what it costs them to produce electricity,” said Hirs. “If you don’t make a return on your money, how can you keep it up? It’s like not taking care of your car. If you don’t change the oil and tires, you can’t expect your car to be ready to evacuate, let alone get you to work.”

Rational people ought to be able to understand that the Free Market is not a magic wand. “Free market” competition is really good at offering consumers better toasters and television sets at lower prices. But it’s not so good at providing other things, like health care and reliable energy. One of these days Americans will figure this out, maybe.

By now you’ve probably heard about the epic meltdown of the mayor of Colorado City, Texas (population 3,920). It went like this:

“No one owes you [or] your family anything,” Tim Boyd wrote on Tuesday in a now-deleted Facebook post, according to KTXS and KTAB/KRBC. “I’m sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!”…

…“The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING!” he wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.

Boyd suggested that residents without electricity should simply “step up and come up with a game plan.” Those without running water could either deal with it, or “think outside of the box to survive and supply water to your family.” He did not offer any further guidance, such as where safe drinking water or reliable electricity could be found.

“Only the strong will survive and the weak will [perish],” he wrote.

Mayor Boyd has since resigned, saying he might have used “better wording.” The news stories don’t say if Boyd is a Republican, but what he said is pretty much the Republican theory of governance these days — don’t ask the government to do anything for you.

Current Gov. Greg Abbott gave his state of the state speech a couple of weeks ago. He described what he saw as priority issues for Texas. These included five “emergency” items he wants the legislature to address right away. These are expanding broadband internet access; punishing local governments that ‘defund the police’ as he defines it; changing the bail system; addressing “election integrity”; and providing civil liability protections for businesses that were open during the pandemic. Abbott went on from there to call for more abortion restrictions; making Texas a “Second Amendment santuary state”; and new laws to stop “any government entity from shutting down religious activities in Texas,” including during a pandemic, I assume.

Expanding broadband is a good thing, and so is bail system reform, depending on how he wants to “reform” it. In the mouth of a Republican, however, “election integrity” is code for “finding new ways to suppress minority votes.” And the rest of his priorities are truly not needed, by anybody.

What did Abbott not mention? Vaccine distribution. Preparing schools to reopen. Helping those who have lost jobs because of the pandemic.

Texas resident Andrew Exum writes at The Atlantic,

Fixing ERCOT will require actual governance, as opposed to performative governance, and that is something the state’s leadership has struggled with of late. Rather than address the challenges associated with rapid growth, the state’s elected leaders have preferred to focus on various lib-owning initiatives such as the menace of transgender athletes, whether or not NBA games feature the national anthem, and—in a triumph of a certain brand of contemporary “conservatism”—legislating how local municipalities can allocate their own funds.

I’m anxious to see how our governor, in particular, will respond to this crisis, because I have never witnessed a more cowardly politician. When Abbott faces a challenge—and he has faced several in the past year alone—you can always depend on him to take the shape of water, forever finding the path of least resistance. I have no idea why the man became a politician, as I can discern no animating motive behind his acts beyond just staying in office.

I have to say that Missouri’s Republican Governor Parsons is cut from the same cloth. I can’t tell if he actually does anything. Like Abbott, he has resisted statewide pandemic restrictions in favor of letting county and city governments set restrictions if they want to. He’s rarely heard from until somebody criticizes him for something; he responds with some form of tantrum. He’s utterly worthless. But the state government in general has become wonderfully efficient at not doing anything that people need it to do. Last I heard the legislature was debating a bill that would allow people to run over protesters with their cars without facing criminal charges.

And, of course, the rot goes all the way up. The national Republican Party can’t decide what it’s even about any more, other than kissing Donald Trump’s ass.

Speaking of asses, a couple of chapters closed today — Rush Limbaugh is dead, and the last of Trump’s Atlantic City casinos was destroyed with dynamite. Not all the news is bad.

Texas — Like a Whole ‘Nother Country, Especially the Power Grid

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I’m trying really hard to not feel smug about the power outages in Texas. We’ve got our own weather issues here in the Ozarks — snow and single-digit temperatures — and the power flickered on and off a few times today. I am not one to tempt fate in these matters.

And this is not amusing:

At least 14 people are dead in four states from the effects of a record-shattering cold snap and series of winter storms since Sunday. In Texas, as the electricity grid struggles to keep pace with record high demand amid a historic cold outbreak, people are turning to unsafe means to heat their homes. A woman and a girl died from carbon monoxide poisoning in Houston after a car was left running in a garage to keep them warm, according to police.

The Arctic air has also claimed the life of at least one homeless person in Houston, and a 10-year-old boy died after he fell through ice near Millington, Tenn. A tornado associated with the storm system that helped draw Arctic air to the south struck in North Carolina overnight, killing at least three and injuring 10.

But there also are tweets, like this one:

Yes, my dears, Texas has its own power grid, as described at Vox.

Texas operates its own internal power grid that serves much of the state. Managed by the nonprofit Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, the grid provides 90 percent of the state’s electricity and serves 26 million customers.

It draws on a diverse range of power sources in a competitive market. The largest source of electricity in Texas is natural gas, followed by wind and solar, coal, then nuclear. The state is the largest oil, natural gas, and wind energy producer in the US.

Here’s more on the Texas power grid from Houston Public Media. This confirms that the power grid has been kept separate from the rest of the country in order to avoid federal regulation. I also found an informative blog post titled The Ultimate Guide to Texas Electricity Deregulation . It appears the overriding concern in Texas has been to deregulate, deregulate, deregulate, and let competitive market forces provide low-cost energy to Texas consumers.

The extreme cold is causing multiple system failures, but as I understand it the single biggest problem is the natural gas supply. See The Real Reason for Texas’ Rolling Blackouts by Molly Taft at Gizmodo:

 Some of the country’s biggest oil refineries, owned by big names like Saudi Aramco and Exxon, shut down operations in Texas Monday. Last week, several natural gas facilities and pipelines in the state also shut down as temperatures dipped and wellheads froze up.

“We don’t have the supply of gas that we normally do, and we’re consuming gas in record numbers, which is also depressurizing the gas lines,” Rhodes explained. “Natural gas power plants also require a certain pressure to operate, so if they can’t get that pressure, they also have to shut down. Everything that could go wrong is going wrong with the system.”

Natural gas wells in Texas and Oklahoma froze, people. That’s one reason why there is less natural gas now.

But Some People are eager to blame renewables.

A photo of a helicopter de-icing a giant wind turbine went viral. However, that image wasn’t taken in Texas 2021, but in Sweden 2014.

Some old tweets are back in circulation:

I understand a lot of Texas righties are blaming the Green New Deal, which is pretty amazing considering the Green New Deal legislation was never passed. That Green New Deal is powerful stuff. Imagine what it would do if it ever went into effect.

I can’t be too hard on Texas, because the whole country has been living with a creaking, antiquated power grid for many years, and no one seems to be able to address the problem. Mostly because Republicans. The extreme weather has caused blackouts in 13 other states beside Texas. See Severe weather, blackouts show the grid’s biggest problem is infrastructure, not renewables, at Tech Crunch.

The current blackouts have nothing to do with renewables and everything to do with cold weather slowing down natural gas production because of freeze-offs and spiking demand for heating at the same time.

As Dr. Emily Grubert, an assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and, by courtesy, of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology, noted, the problem is more of a total systems issue than one associated with renewable power.

“Let us be absolutely clear: if there are grid failures today, it shows the existing (largely fossil-based) system cannot handle these conditions either,” Grubert wrote on Twitter. “These are scary, climate change-affected conditions that pose extreme challenges to the grid. We are likely to continue to see situations like this where our existing system cannot easily handle them. Any electricity system needs to make massive adaptive improvements.”

Updating energy technology and increasing use of renewables would make the power much more reliable, the article says.

Who Is Going to Meet the Moment?

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As much as I dislike him, I have always believed that Lindsey Graham was smart enough to know his entire career was built on shams and demagoguery to keep the rubes on his side. But now I wonder. At least one of us is a moron, and I don’t think it’s me.

Miz Lindsey did not just whiff on doing his duty in the impeachment vote. He is doubling down on the crazee to help Republicans take back Congress in 2022. Aaron Rupar writes at Vox:

If Graham’s Sunday morning appearance on Fox News Sunday is an indication, his loyalty to the former president is stronger than ever.

“Donald Trump is the most vibrant member of the Republican Party,” Graham said, distancing himself from former UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s comments about Trump not having a future in the GOP. “The Trump movement is alive and well … all I can say is that the most potent force in the Republican Party is President Trump.”

Those comments came at the end of an interview that began with Graham suggesting Republicans will go as far as to retaliate for Trump’s second impeachment by impeaching Vice President Kamala Harris if they take back the House next year.

Rupar goes on to say that “Graham seems to be calculating that Trumpism represents the Republican Party’s best bet to retake one or both chambers of Congress next year.” Maybe, but I question if loyalty to Trump will provide the political capital Graham assumes it will in 2022. I think the political landscape is very much in a state of flux right now. It’s too soon to know what it will look like 20 or so months from now. It may be time for the old dogs to learn new tricks.

Right now congressional Republicans seem to be divided between those who, at the very least, realize the party can’t continue down the same road. That’s the minority. The majority are stubbornly clinging to the shams and demagoguery that have sustained their entire political careers and which have crystallized in the form of blind loyalty to Trump, no matter what he did. See, for example, Dana Milbank, Trump left them to die. 43 Senate Republicans still licked his boots. Among other things, Milbank records this revelatory moment:

On the Senate floor, Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.), an always-Trumper, was seen pointing at Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) and saying “blame you” in a raised voice. Romney was one of five Republicans who joined all 50 Democrats in voting to allow witness testimony.

See also Colbert King, In rallying to Trump, Senate Republicans sacrificed Pence. Yes, they’re okay with Trump trying to get his own vice president killed. But Pence himself is hardly a profile in courage; he remained at a safe and silent distance from the impeachment trial.

See also Peter Wehner, Why Are Republicans Still This Loyal to a Mar-a-Lago Exile?, at the New York Times. Wehner is a Republican who served in various roles in the Reagan and two Bush administrations. The short answer to the question is “tribal loyalty.” But it goes deeper:

For nearly a half-decade, Republicans became accustomed to saying one thing and thinking another. The impeachment vote was the last, best chance to break decisively with Mr. Trump. Yet once again most Republican lawmakers couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Mr. Trump still seems to haunt them, to instill fear in them. More than that, however: He has become them, weaving himself into their minds and communities so seamlessly that they are no longer capable of distinguishing their own moral sensibilities and boundaries from his, as they might once have done.

In short, too many Republicans have become hollowed-out simulations of human beings, incapable of independent thought or moral agency. But in trusting their fortunes to Trump, they are taking terrible risks. Trump, after all, lost. Not only did the Trump GOP lose the White House; it lost the House and Senate also. This hasn’t happened to Republicans since Hoover.

Further, Trump is facing multiple investigations, both criminal and civil. There could be big, splashy trials that reveal a lot of ugly truths.  There could be criminal convictions. There could also be more terrorist activity by his MAGA-head followers. I see no reason why Trump won’t be at least as much of a liability to the Republican Party as he was in the past two elections. Republicans may assume they can’t win without Trump’s rabid base, but I don’t see them winning with that base, either, outside of already deep red territory.

E.J. Dionne writes that it will be “wrenching … for Republican politicians to appease the GOP’s Trump-supporting majority while pretending to be another party altogether.” Frankly, I don’t think they can do it.

Kevin McDermott, a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, thinks The GOP deserves to have Trump stalking their party for the next four years.

Trump’s acquittal may actually turn out to be good for the country.

Why? Because it will be bad for the Republican Party. And the GOP has become a dangerously dysfunctional cadre of extremists, cynics and cowards who would best serve America by sidelining themselves for a while. …

…Happily, Trump’s continued presence on the political stage will be especially bad for the most toxic elements of the GOP — the Josh Hawleys and Ted Cruzes of the world. Hawley, Missouri’s self-pitying, demagogic junior senator, has been positioning himself to inherit Trump’s base for a couple years now; Cruz, the reptilian Texan, has been doing it even longer (throwing his own wife and father under the bus in the process).

Yes, the party out of power does nearly always come roaring back in midterm elections. And there’s always the real possibility that the Democrats will fail to meet the moment, leaving voters confused as to why it matters who they vote for. We’ll see.

But for now the House Republicans who voted for impeachment, and the Republican senators who voted to convict, are facing censure from their own state parties, revealing how deep the rot goes.

Right now there is a bumper crop of editorials and opinion pieces declaring the Republican Party dead, at least as a political party. I say it hasn’t been a real political party for a long time, at least on the national level, but whatever. Now the current GOP is  finally being recognized as just the zombie version of the party it used to be. Will Bunch has an absolutely magnificent obirtuary at the Philadelphia Inquirer that begins:

The Republican Party was born on March 20, 1854, the green shoots of a political spring. Unlike America’s other parties that were often shotgun weddings of convenience, the Republicans burst forth around moral ideas that were so powerful — ending slavery and making America a world industrial power — that the tail of this supernova lasted for more than 166 years and inspired its eventual nickname, the Grand Old Party.

That GOP died — morally, if not officially — in the late afternoon gloaming of a grey and bitterly cold winter’s day, Feb. 13, 2021. After 43 Republican senators who’d been given a green light to “vote their conscience” on Donald Trump’s impeachment still managed to come up empty — thus enshrining the notion that an end-of-term president can foment a deadly insurrection to thwart a peaceful transition of power and not face any consequences — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell strolled to the well of the Senate. He was presumably holding the bloody knife with which he’d repeatedly stabbed American democracy for a dozen years hidden behind his back.

Do click on the link and keep reading. Toward the end Bunch writes,

There is, arguably, a large opening for a completely new second political party — one that actually promotes the economic interests of a multiracial working class and some of its social conservatism, but embraces ethics and eschews racism — but the stench of the GOP’s corpse may have to get worse before that can happen.

In 2021, the only hope for American salvation is not bipartisanship with a dead body but instead a Democratic Party that is every bit as bold as the Republicans are cowardly.

Can the Democrats be bold? Some of them seem ready; some not. I fear we’re going to be held back by the likes of Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin, and Dianne Feinstein. You want to win in 2022 and 2024, Dems? Kill the filibuster and pass H.R. 1. 

If there was ever a time that same old, same old ain’t gonna cut it, this is it. Who will break out of the old, dysfunctional patterns of the past few years? Who is going to meet the moment?

Probably not Lindsey Graham.

Some Trial, Part Two

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The impeachment trial is over, and seven Republicans voted with the Democrats to convict — Sens. Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, Richard Burr, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomey. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough. But I still say this is going to hurt the Republican Party, long term, more than it will hurt Democrats.

And there will be criminal trials ahead for Trump. District Attorney Fani Willis of Fulton County, Georgia, is looking into election fraud charges, for example. Possible civil and criminal charges could come out of New York. Just today, the Wall Street Journal reported that New York state prosecutors are investigating more than $250 million in loans Trump took out on some of his best-known Manhattan properties.

I’m sorry the Dems changed their minds about calling witnesses. David Kurtz at TPM:

Dems seemed to have seized the advantage, backed by five GOP senators, to present at least some witnesses in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The fierce reaction of GOP senators to what House impeachment managers and Dem senators wanted to do testified to the the advantage Dems had taken hold of.

But just as quickly, House managers and Senate Dems entered into an agreement whereby Trump was willing to stipulate to what Rep. Herrera Beutler’s statement would be. As a result, there will be no witnesses, no documentary evidence, and no real trial.

It’s possible there’s more to this we don’t yet know about. Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler is, of course, the Republican who testified that Kevin McCarthy had described to her the phone call in which McCarthy had begged Trump to stop the riot, and Trump replied that the mob was “more upset about the election than you are.”

There’s also this:

A former Pence staffer tells CNN that on January 6, then-national security adviser Robert O’Brien was traveling. His deputy at the time, Matt Pottinger, and Gen. Keith Kellogg, Pence’s national security adviser, were both at the White House on the day of the rally and riot. Kellogg confirmed to CNN that he was in the Oval Office with Trump and the President’s children as the riot was raging, during which Pence was forced to flee the Senate chamber.
During the riot, Kellogg was in communication with Pence through the vice president’s staff, which was communicating back to the White House and getting that information to Kellogg, who was with Trump.
“Kellogg was Pence’s national security adviser, so of course they knew exactly what the circumstance was,” said the former Pence staffer.

My impression is that Pence and his former staffers were not willing to testify. How pathetic is that? And how pathetic is is that most Republicans are unwilling to stand up even after they might have been killed?

There’s a must-read at Pro Publica, “I Don’t Trust the People Above Me”: Riot Squad Cops Open Up About Disastrous Response to Capitol Insurrection by Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan. The writers interviewed police who defended the Capitol. Do read the whole thing. I want to call out a couple of bits.

The interviews also revealed officers’ concerns about disparities in the way the force prepared for Black Lives Matter demonstrations versus the pro-Trump protests on Jan. 6. Officers said the Capitol Police force usually plans intensively for protests, even if they are deemed unlikely to grow violent. Officers said they spent weeks working 12- or 16-hour days, poised to fight off a riot, after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police — even though intelligence suggested there was not much danger from protesters.

“We had intel that nothing was going to happen — literally nothing,” said one former official with direct knowledge of planning for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “The response was, ‘We don’t trust the intel.’”

By contrast, for much of the force, Jan. 6 began like any other day.

“We normally have pretty good information regarding where these people are and how far they are from the Capitol,” said Keith McFaden, a former Capitol Police officer and union leader who retired from the force following the riot. “We heard nothing that day.”

We know there was intelligence; it just wan’t acted on, or passed on. How much of this was from Trump operatives supressing the intelligence, or how much of it was from the old double standard that says only Black/leftist demonstrations are “mobs” or “rioters,” I do not know. But then there’s this:

On the morning of Jan. 4, members of a civil disturbance unit gathered in a briefing room. A small group of officers were shown a document from Capitol intelligence officials that projected as many as 20,000 people arriving in Washington that week. The crowd would include members of several militia and right-wing extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Bois and the white supremacist Patriot Front. Some were expected to be armed, according to one officer who attended the briefing. The document anticipated that there could be violence.

For some reason, this information didn’t leave the room and was not shared with other officers.

At lot of details like this:

One officer in the middle of the scrum, a combat veteran, thought the rioters were so vicious, so relentless, that they seemed fueled by methamphetamine. To his left, he watched a chunk of steel strike a fellow officer above the eye, setting off a geyser of blood. A pepper ball tore through the air over his shoulder and exploded against the jaw of a man in front of him. The round, filled with chemical irritant, ripped the rioter’s face open. His teeth were now visible through a hole in his cheek. Blood poured out, puddling on the pavement surrounding the building. But the man kept coming.

So now the Senate has effectively given future losing candidates permission to attempt a coup.

Politico is reporting that Lindsey Graham will be meeting with Trump to talk about the future of the GOP. If those two represent the future of the GOP, we’re all in for a buttload of hurt.  I take it Miz Lindsey will be trying to get Trump to be a better team player. Good luck with that.

Unfortunately, the impeachment was not widely watched, according to CNN business. We cannot let this drop. I agree with David Atkins that there must be House investigations of the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s role in it.

There is still so much that we don’t know about the President’s actions in the lead-up to and the events of January 6th. We don’t know exactly what he knew about how violent it would become. We don’t know exactly why he and his appointees refused to allow more help to the Capitol Police both before the insurrection and during the sacking the Capitol. We don’t know the details of what he said on the phone with legislators before, during and afterward. And crucially we don’t know the timeline of exactly what Trump did, hour by hour, in consultation with his closest aides. … The House must initiate investigations, making liberal use of its subpoena power to force witnesses to Trump’s behavior and state of mind to go on the public record.

Trump, and Trumpism, must be destroyed.

Pro-Trump protesters storm into the U.S. Capitol during clashes with police, during a rally to contest the certification of the 2020 U.S. presidential election results by the U.S. Congress, in Washington, U.S, January 6, 2021. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton – RC2P2L9YHHVX

Some Trial

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I didn’t watch any of the Trump lawyers’ presentation, but I’m hearing comments that it was a bad joke. Even so, see this bit in the St. Louis Post Dispatch — Missouri’s Roy Blunt, a juror in the impeachment trial, calls Trump’s lawyers ‘our side’. Grr. But this is about presenting the story of what happened to the people, and for history, more than about expecting Senate Republicans to grow a pair.

Anyway — last night Rachel Maddow mused that there’s nothing stopping a chief prosecutor in the District of Columbia from bringing criminal charges against Trump for the riot in the Capitol. Then there would be a real trial.

Also, if they wish, the House Managers could  still call witnesses. I understand the Trump team claimed that the videos of the violence were manipulated. Let’s call some of the Capitol and District of Columbia police who were there and see what they say.

See Two officers who helped fight the Capitol mob died by suicide. Many more are hurting. by Peter Hermann at WaPo.

What Comes Next

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Following up a bit from yesterday’s post — today Paul Waldman writes that so far the covid relief bill “looks to be one of the most popular pieces of major legislation in U.S. history.”

A new CBS News poll found that 83 percent of Americans would approve “of Congress passing an additional economic relief package that would provide funds to people and businesses impacted by the coronavirus outbreak.” While 40 percent thought the package being discussed is “not enough,” 39 percent said it is “about the right amount” and only 20 percent said it is “too much.”

A Yahoo News/YouGov poll found 74 percent of Americans supporting $2,000 relief checks, and 69 percent supporting increased funding for vaccinations. Those are two of core pieces of the bill.

A Quinnipiac poll found that 68 percent of Americans support the rescue package, in response to a question that explicitly mentioned Biden (which might be expected to turn off Republicans). And 78 percent of Americans supported relief checks.

Given these poll numbers, I don’t see that the Republicans have the policial capital to whine that nobody is compromising with them.

I have been listening to the impeachment trial and checking in with it from time to time. It seems to me the Democrats are giving a devastating presentation. Not that the Republicans will change their minds. But I hope a lot of people are watching this.

See also I’ve Studied Terrorism for Over 40 Years. Let’s Talk About What Comes Next.by Martha Crenshaw at the New York Times.

Looking Forward to Positive Change, for a Change

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I am not watching the impeachment trial. I’m tired of feeling like a raw wound. I’ll catch highlights tonight on cable. Instead, I’d rather focus on something positive and note that Paul Krugman is very, very happy about the Biden covid package.

Krugman begins by citing a column he wrote in January 2009. in which he warned that president-elect Obama’s economic stimulus plan was way too cautious and fell short of what was needed in the wake of the 2008 financial sector meltdown. And while the package did some good, it was widely perceived as a failure. And President Obama didn’t get another opportunity to enact more stimulus.

The good news — and it’s really, really good news — is that Democrats seem to have learned their lesson. Joe Biden may not look like the second coming of F.D.R.; Chuck Schumer, presiding over a razor-thin majority in the Senate, looks even less like a transformational figure; yet all indications are that together they’re about to push through an economic rescue plan that, unlike the Obama stimulus, truly rises to the occasion.

In fact, the plan is aggressive enough that some Democratic-leaning economists worry that it will be too big, risking inflation. However, I’ve argued at length that they’re wrong — or, more precisely, that, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says, the risks of doing too little outweigh any risk of overheating the economy. In fact, a plan that wasn’t big enough to raise some concerns about overheating would have been too small.

“Some Democratic-leaning economists” = Lawrence Summers, I suspect. Summers must be confused about why people aren’t taking him seriously any more. Back to Krugman:

One thing that may be encouraging Democrats, by the way, is the fact that Biden’s policies actually are unifying, if you look at public opinion rather than the actions of politicians. Biden’s Covid-19 relief plan commands overwhelming public approval — far higher than approval for Obama’s 2009 stimulus. If, as seems likely, not a single Republican in Congress votes for the plan, that’s evidence of G.O.P. extremism, not failure on Biden’s part to reach out.

This is an important point. When Biden talks about unifying the country, I believe he means exactly that. Not unifying the Senate or unifying the political parties. It appears so far he’s not even going to try to placate Republicans in Congress; he’s going to do what the people need doing, and if Republicans don’t like it they can go home and explain themselves to their constituents.

From yesterday’s Politico:

Already, there’s talk about midterm attack ads portraying Republicans as willing to slash taxes for the wealthy but too stingy to cut checks for people struggling during the deadly pandemic. And President Joe Biden’s aides and allies are vowing not to make the same mistakes as previous administrations going into the midterms elections. They are pulling together plans to ensure Americans know about every dollar delivered and job kept because of the bill they’re crafting. And there is confidence that the Covid-19 relief package will ultimately emerge not as a liability for Democrats, but as an election year battering ram.

Yes, yes, yes. This is how it’s done, Dems.

Always there are some people who don’t get memos. Some of the “moderate” Dems wanted to be more frugal with the direct payments. But it appears the progressives have defeated this. Cristina Cabrera writes at TPM that “moderate Democrats had proposed lowering the cap to $50,000 for individual filers and $100,000 for couples before the amounts per payment begin to phase out.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT) blasted the proposals to lower the thresholds on Saturday.

“It would be outrageous if we ran on giving more relief and ended up doing the opposite,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

“In other words, working class people who got checks from Trump would not get them from Biden. Brilliant!” Sanders tweeted.

To which some of the “moderates” must have said, oh, yeah. Duh. The former caps remain in place. And yesterday they added a provision that would give millions of families $3,000 per child.

Maybe if Democrats get used to throwing their weight around, next they’ll kill the filibuster. Oh, please ….

Elsewhere — Aaron Blake writes about the sodden mess that is Trump’s impeachment defense.

Watch this video that was shown in the Trump impeachment trial this morning. Just watch it.

Privatizing Public Health

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The Atlantic has an article by Wendy Parmet titled Employers’ Vaccine Mandates Are Representative of America’s Failed Approach to Public Health. As people discuss mandating covid vaccines, the next question is, who will do the mandating? The government or employers? And right now it looks like we’ll be falling back on employers.

Although important legal questions and limits remain—such as whether vaccines that have received only emergency-use authorization, rather than full FDA approval, can be mandated—the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s recent guidance assumes that employers can require, subject to limitations established by the Americans With Disabilities Act and Title VII, that their workers be vaccinated. This comports with the long-standing view that employers, especially in nonunionized workplaces, have broad power to set the terms and conditions of employment, including requirements that their employees be vaccinated. Doing so might be just the trick to overcoming people’s resistance. Although many Americans rebel when the government tells them what to do, they can, for obvious reasons, be quite acquiescent to the dictates of their employers.

Already some employers are offering bonuses to employees to get vaccinated, which I’m fine with. I understand there’s a real problem with nursing home staff refusing to get vaccinated, and IMO state health departments need to mandate vaccines asap.

Keep in mind that a big problem with U.S. nursing homes is that, while there may need to be a Registered Nurse on duty at all times, most of the staff are either Licensed Practical Nurses — high school graduates with one year of nurse’s training — or Certified Nursing Assistants — high school graduates with four months of training. Depending on the state, there may be more CNAs than anything else, and while they may be very good at helping residents with bathing and other functions, they don’t necessarily know science from salsa. So it shouldn’t be a big surprise that staffers are afraid of the vaccine.

Wendy Parmet’s larger point is that the pandemic is showing us how much public health has been privatized in the U.S. And this is not working.

Unquestionably, the private sector has a role to play in public health—just look at the private companies that produced the vaccines and the private hospitals that have cared for the ill. But to rely on it to protect the public’s health is pure folly. As the pandemic has shown only too well, private and public interests do not always align. Before COVID-19, for example, hospitals focused on their bottom line and failed to stock up on personal protective gear or extra ventilators, even though they knew a pandemic could strike. Once one did, competitive pressures also pushed many businesses, such as restaurants and meatpacking plants, to stay open and overlook the health of their employees and communities, even as they became sources of infection. To depend now on the private sector to increase vaccination rates would further underscore America’s tepid commitment to the basic principles of public health.

This goes along with our insane religious faith in “free markets” to provide for everyone’s needs. It doesn’t work, folks. But the other point, IMO, is that people who don’t like being told what to do are just trading one authority for another. If the government doesn’t make them get vaccinated, their employers probably will sooner or later. I believe that eventually covid vaccinations are going to be required before any of us can do much of anything — hold a job, go to school, travel — and if government doesn’t enforce it, the private sector will step in. And the private sector is much less democratic than government.

What else can I say but … go Chiefs.