Say That I Do, Not That I Say

The other day, I put up a skeet complaining about the faction of progressive commentators who were mad at Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear for not just declaring Mitch McConnell dead and calling a special election to replace him. Their complaints generally took on the theme of aggrievement at Democrats who don't "fight" and a concurrent demand that Beshear "do something" rather than just sit around and vegetate while another Republican lie goes unchallenged. Why don't Democrats ever play hardball?

The problem with this hue and cry, I pointed out, is that it completely misreads what the "hardball" play is. As long as Mitch McConnell is missing, he can't cast votes -- functionally losing the GOP one sorely needed seat. If he dies (or we just decide he's dead), and Beshear calls a special election to replace him, that special election will be won by a Republican who can cast votes, giving the Senate GOP its seat back. Calling a special election helps Republicans. Keeping McConnell's seat in purgatory indefinitely helps Democrats. The hardball move isn't for Beshear to just unilaterally declare Mitch McConnell dead; the hardball move is for Beshear to say he'll do nothing until he sees a long form death certificate and then disconnect his phone.

Nonetheless, the amount of traction the "do something" calls against Beshear has gotten is worrisome. For starters, we shouldn't look past the fact that it is at best conspiracy theory adjacent (it is extremely unlikely that McConnell is secretly dead and that fact is being hidden by nefarious GOP operative -- if for no other reason than, again, his death would be good for the GOP as against the alternative of him lingering but incapable of casting votes). But beyond that, it is the apex of a certain type of brainrot which is so mad at supposedly sclerotic Democratic leadership that it fetishizes the appearance of "doing something" above all else. This is itself a gateway to fascism -- a feature of which Umberto Eco identified 30 years ago as including the cult of action for action’s sake. (“Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”) -- but even if it wasn't, it's just stupidity wrapped in an angry self-righteous shell. It's a large part of what gave us Graham Platner, and what made Platner immune to so many normally career-ended scandals until he finally wasn't -- all could be forgiven because "at least he's a fighter."

This is the problem. Too much of our political energy is being channeled exclusively through the lens of "doing something", where that marks out the sole criteria for goodness or badness, in a way that leads to counterproductive or just bizarre contortions. To give a different example, earlier today Nexus issued a statement defending New York City major Zohran Mamdani from allegations of antisemitism leveled by ADL chieftain Jonathan Greenblatt. Someone on BlueSky, while purporting to "applaud" Nexus for calling Greenblatt out, found the statement to be woefully insufficient. The "absence of action is deafening," he wrote. Nexus' "commitment to fight antisemitism rests on what you do, not just what you say/post."

So what is it that Nexus should have "done", as opposed to just "said"? They should have issued a "call for [Greenblatt's] removal from leadership."

Now, maybe that's a good thing for them to do, maybe not. But I could not help but point out that "calling" for Greenblatt's removal is ... a call. It is words. Again, that doesn't make it pointless -- Nexus doesn't sit on the ADL's board, so they can't actually "do" anything. The point is, though, that if there is a divide between "what you say" and "what you do", this falls pretty decisively on the "say" side of the line. And I flag this here because it seems pretty clear that this was an example of someone for whom "doing" is inherently good and "saying" is inherently inadequate, and so they just instinctively decided that their own preferred tactical intervention had to be a "do" even though it was exactly as much of a "say" as the statement whose inaction was so deafening.

To be clear, I'm not urging a return to cautious moderation. Much the opposite, I think Democrats need to be bold, and when they take back power, they need to exercise it. Recall my wishlist for the first week of the next Democratic administration:

By the end of the first week, I'd want to a complete pro-democracy package (including DC statehood) on the president's desk. I want to see prominent Republicans and ICE leaders who've committed crimes frog-marched in handcuffs. I want the corporate executives who approved "settlements" for Trump's frivolous lawsuits indicted for bribery. I want to see public resources and opportunities expressly redirected away from companies and firms who caved to Trump, and towards those who showed backbone, to show that there are penalties to being a quisling. I want the DOJ to announce an anti-corruption task force geared at identifying all the money stolen from the American taxpayer by the Trump family and clawing back as much of it as possible, and I want them to name and shame the Supreme Court as among the primary obstacles to providing accountability for their crimes. I want to uncover the corrupt insiders who bet on the lives of American servicemembers and have their identities blasted across every newspaper in America in advance of their trials. Do it all, do it fast, weather the storm, then consolidate your position.

These are, I hope one would agree, pretty "fight-y" in character. And importantly, I'd defend all of them on the merits of being good policy, not just as short-term political expediency but in terms of long-term political health. Critically, they are not good just because they give a powerful aura of fighting and acting. And by the same token, while many of these good things can be announced quickly, a lot of them to be fully operationalized do require a lot of the "boring" work of planning and organizing and thinking and researching in order to actually accomplish what they set out to do. Doing that sort of thing isn't backsliding, it's part of making action work.

It is absolutely true that a political movement, to be worthwhile, has to do some things. We're not a philosophy club; the point is to translate some ideals into practice. But the thirst for action needs to be tempered -- it cannot be its own justification. When we let ourselves indulge action for actions sake (again, even leaving aside the pipeline to fascism risk), we will continually bash our heads into easily avoidable walls and be mad at those not running full speed along side us. That's what we're seeing with the attacks on Beshear, that's what we saw for too long from those demanding everyone hop aboard the Platner train, and that will ultimately rip the party and the movement to shreds.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Should Rest in Peace. The Rest of Us Have To Gear Up.

 Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has passed away after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

Surprising absolutely nobody, Mitch McConnell has already promised to fill the seat weeks before the election notwithstanding his own months-long obstruction of Merrick Garland's nomination in the last year of Barack Obama's presidency.

It's possible he won't be able to do it. A few Republicans have hinted they won't go along with the move -- Lisa Murkowski being the most vocal, but potentially also Susan Collins and Mitt Romney. I have to assume Martha McSally has already decided she's toast in November and is just deciding to do as much damage as possible in her remaining time in office, because she waited scarcely five minutes to come out in favor of a pre-election vote. The list of Republicans who are going to publicly and unapologetically flip-flop on "filling a SCOTUS seat in an election year" is quite lengthy, but Lindsey Graham stands out for especial brazenness as he has a clip where he specifically states to the camera "I want you to use my words against me" if Republicans try to fill a seat in election year 2020.

Hypocrisy charges likely won't matter. That doesn't mean you don't fight, but it does mean that victory or defeat has little to do with how hard Chuck Schumer fights. There's no magic bullet, no secret parliamentary trick that can defeat a determined GOP majority that wants to slam through Ginsburg's replacement on short notice ahead of the next election.

What we can do is change the personnel after the election.

I've been opposed to court packing for a long time. Even after Garland, where I thought there had to be some retaliation, I thought court packing was a bad idea -- it promises a cycle of retaliation that has no logical stopping point.

I'm having trouble holding that position now, and I can't imagine cleaving to it if the GOP replaces Ginsberg before inauguration day. The Republican has announced that the new rule is that anything that is formally within the rules is permissible, regardless of how many norms it shatters or double-standards it creates. Well, confirming a new Supreme Court Justice just weeks before election day is exactly as within the rules as court packing is.

All that notwithstanding, I think the real necessary move is adding new states. DC is the obvious one, Puerto Rico ranks up there too. My stance on this is well-known. What I like most about adding new states is that, unlike court packing, it is both political hardball and unquestionably correct as a matter of non-partisan political ethics. The idea that certain American territories should be completely and permanently disenfranchised from effective political representation is an anathema to any semblance of democratic legitimacy. And the fact that the Republican argument against statehood is "but we can't win places non-White people live in" does not deserve the dignity of a response.

But all of this depends on Joe Biden winning the Oval Office, and Democrats retaking the Senate. I don't have a ton of spare income, but I sent a few dollars over to Theresa Greenfield in Iowa (it struck me as right at the line of winnable but needing an extra push). Support whoever you can with whatever you can; it doesn't have to be money either. Bear down and get the vote out however you can.

Ginsburg can rest in peace. She's earned it. The rest of us, unfortunately, can't rest at all. It's time to gear up.

First on the Agenda: Statehood for the Colonies

Sometimes, the moral thing to do conflicts with the expedient thing to do. That's a hard position to be in.

Sometimes, though, the moral thing to do is also the expedient thing to do. That's a really easy thing to do.

Statehood for American colonies -- that is, all the places under permanent American jurisdiction that lack full voting rights in Congress (most people think of DC and Puerto Rico, but I'm a hardliner: statehood for Guam!) -- is the latter case. It is clearly and incontestably a moral obligation -- a democracy cannot permanently deprive persons under its dominion of representation -- and it is also likely to result in a bunch more Democrats, particularly in a Senate that is right now geographically-skewed in favor of a population minority. Indeed, Mitch McConnell was "admirably" forthright in admitting that this was pretty much the only reason Republicans oppose statehood -- it'd result in new Democratic Senators.

Of course, that's actually an exaggeration -- Puerto Rico's current non-voting member of Congress is a Republican. So it's entirely plausible that the GOP could compete in Puerto Rico, if they cared to try.

But even if they couldn't -- and there's something embarrassing about the speed at which Republicans race to concede that they think there's no chance they could ever appeal to a non-White voter -- it wouldn't change anything. Democrats struggle to get elected in Wyoming, which is unfortunate, but I admit it never occurred to me that as a consequence we should try to deprive Wyoming of electoral representation. And I'm so old, I remember when the Senate was defended based on the need for "geographic diversity" and "protecting the minority" -- rationales which if anything underscore the necessity of giving Puerto Rico (and Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa....) representation in that august body.

"Oh, We'd Fill It"

Of course, it surprises precisely zero people that Mitch McConnell has absolutely no problem confirming a Supreme Court nominee in an election year if the nominee is a Republican.

The only slightly interesting thing about him coming out and saying so is that he's willing to openly say so even before knowing if the situation would come up, which really hammers home just how little respect he has for even the pretense of principle. There's no tactical advantage to admitting this now, which makes it feel like he's almost playing a game to amuse himself. He's showing off how brazen and shameless he can be, knowing that not only can no one do anything to stop it, but that if push ever does comes to shove the media still almost certainly will credulously report whatever "principled" distinction GOP flacks come up with to explain why this is different from Garland, even though McConnell openly admitted there's nothing more complicated here than "because we can."

The End of Scandal Norms

I haven't been paying super close attention to the story that Russia has some damning info on Trump that it's holding over his head. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. This sort of raw intelligence is always -- at best -- hit or miss. But even if it is true that they've got it, I'm skeptical that it matters.

Let's say that this info is out there. Maybe it's Trump watching Russian prostitutes piss on the bed the Obamas slept in. Or maybe it's something else. Doesn't matter. And let's say it leaks. Here's the sequence of events:

• Media reports on the news breathlessly, insists that Trump's administration can never survive a scandal of this magnitude.
• Democrats seize on the news, demand hearings, resignations, hearings, and more hearings.
• A few Republicans issue murmurs about "inappropriate behavior." More than a few denounce the leak as Russian interference (now it's a problem) and suddenly demand we focus on that.
• Somebody -- probably in the National Review -- writes a "clever" column on how leftists are hypocritical because they oppose revenge porn. Mary Anne Franks gets more citations from conservative columnists than she ever dreamed nightmared.
• Republican congressional leaders do nothing. Media starts asking "are they really going to do nothing?"
• Republican congressional leaders continue to do nothing. Eventually the storm dies down.
• Scene.

This has been the great, terrible discovery of Mitch McConnell and the 21st century GOP: nobody can force them to do anything.

I first noticed this with former Bush AG Alberto Gonzales, who nearly rode out a seemingly-infinite array of scandals. And when he finally did resign, it was impossible to figure out why. There was no legal obligation to do so. Normally, we chalk up that sort of behavior to "norms" -- but the norms had already been shredded. Gonzales already demonstrated that the sorts of "norms" which would "normally" compel a resignation could be ignored more or less indefinitely. For whatever reason, he just didn't ride the train to the end.

It was Mitch McConnell who decided to take that train all the way to the terminus. You can't make a filibuster-proof majority mandatory for every bill? Why not? You can't just refuse to even hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee for a year? Watch him! Other politicians caught on to the act. Remember Scott Desjarlais, the pro-life Republican from Tennessee who, as a doctor, had slept with several patients(!) and was caught on tape pressuring his mistress(!!) to have an abortion(!!!)? Everyone assumed he just had to resign. You know where he is now? Still in Congress.

Turns out, you don't have to do much of anything if you don't want to. There is an extraordinarily narrow range of levers through which one can be compelled to act in Washington: impeachments, being voted out of office, mandatory court orders ... it's not all that large, and it doesn't cover all that much. Much of what we take for granted our government will do is not legally compelled, but is based on politicians following established patterns of political culture. Among those patterns is that a major scandal will lead to an investigation and some measure of accountability. But nobody forces Congress to launch an investigation, and nobody forces administration officials to resign or even acknowledge scandals reported in the media.

If they ignore it long enough, the storm will eventually pass. And that is what will happen if Russia does have something on Trump and it does eventually leak. The media will convince itself that something has to happen. And then nothing will.

Dear Leader

I had no idea that, on his Twitter account, Mitch McConnell goes by "Leader McConnell":

Thank you @BretBaier for the lively discussion on the #SCOTUSnominee. https://t.co/VOWxMu2fZl pic.twitter.com/7baik4UtyP

— Leader McConnell (@SenateMajLdr) March 16, 2016

I have no further comment on this, but that seemed worth noting on its own.

When Did We Suddenly Have To "Pay For" Things?

I feel like there is no greater illustration of the hollow GOP concern for the deficit than this exchange between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and David Gregory:

GREGORY: For a final time, I’ll go back to my question which is, the extension of the tax cuts would cost $3.2 trillion. That’s borrowed money, that adds to the deficit. Do you have a plan to pay for that extension?

MCCONNELL: You’re talking about current tax policy. Why did it all of a sudden become something that we, quote, ‘pay for’?

Senator McConnell may have once again darted across the McConnell Line.

Pre-Banquet Roundup

The Law Review is having a banquet tomorrow. Swanky!

* * *

How to beat back a divestment bill: Get organized! And I think it's a good thing that the Jewish community is actively engaged in politics and political deliberation. The meme that when Jews participate in the political process to try and sway politicians to their preferred position, that this is something suspect or conspiratorial, is deeply unsettling to me. In any event, to my mind this is the way politics is supposed to work: folks organized to try and get politicians to change their minds, spoke their minds regarding what they saw as unrepresentative actions, and got the change they wanted. Congrats.

Are we headed to towards another Jenna Delich situation with the Palestine Telegraph?

I will do everything I can to promote "the McConnell line" as a new part of our political lexicon.

Jon Chait sums up Sue Lowden's bizarre bartering-for-healthcare proposal: "Oh Doctor, isn't there any other way I could pay for this?"

Good NYT piece on Judge Wood.

The Texas AG's office is fighting tooth and nail to prevent a gay couple legally married in Massachusetts from divorcing (because that would recognize the legitimacy of the marriage in the first place). The AG instead suggests "voiding" the marriage. As the bemused attorney for one member of the couple put it: "But for the actions of the attorney general, my client would already be divorced and there would be one less same-sex marriage in Texas."

On guarding the guards of human rights.

Homophobic AFSCME Ad Against McConnell

The AFSCME labor union put up an ad insinuating that Kentucky Senator (and Minority Leader) Mitch McConnell (R) was discharged from the military for being gay (telling him it's time to be "straight" with Kentucky. Subtle). It was followed up by a flier that was even more explicit on the subject (it is unclear if the flier was put out by AFSCME as well). Regardless, it is horrible that a putatively progressive organization would try influence an election by stoking homophobia.

I want to beat McConnell. I don't like him, and the thought of a 60 seat Senate majority makes me giddy. But not like this.

If you want to give AFSCME a holler, here's the link.