The November 15, 2016 Thread

Filed in National by on November 15, 2016

In case you didn’t see. There is a good message at the end.

David Brooks: “I suspect the coming political movements will be identified on two axes: open and closed and individual and social.”

“Those who believe in open believe in open trade, relatively open immigration, an active foreign policy and racial integration. Those who believe in closed believe in protective trade, closed borders, a withdrawn foreign policy and ethnic separatism.”

“Those who favor individual believe in individual initiative, designing programs to incentivize enterprise and removing regulatory barriers. Those who believe in social believe that social mobility happens within rich communities — that people can undertake daring adventures when they have a secure social and emotional base.”

This is always good news to see…

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) “is the leading contender for Donald Trump’s secretary of defense, sources close to the transition say — a choice that would reward the president-elect’s most outspoken congressional loyalist but offer few olive branches to a Trump-wary Republican national security establishment,” Politico reports.

“The two men haven’t seen eye to eye on everything: Session is a budget hawk who favors caps on defense spending, while Trump has called for an arms and troops buildup that could cost $55 billion or more per year. But sources say the three-term Alabama Republican senator has still emerged as the top candidate for Pentagon leader, perhaps the most important post in the upcoming Trump Cabinet.”

And either Rudy Giuliani or John Bolton as Secretary of State. Nightmarish.

Politico: “People close to Priebus say he would not have left the RNC – which he helmed for a record six years – if it risked falling into the hands of someone he opposed, such as former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.”

“Among the names most under discussion for party chairman are David Bossie, who served as Trump’s deputy campaign manager and is an RNC member; Priebus ally Matt Pinnell, the RNC’s liaison to state parties; and Ronna Romney McDaniel, the chair of the Michigan Republican Party and niece of 2012 nominee Mitt Romney.”

John Nichols at The Nation has a roundup of the Democratic responses:

The swift response of watchdog groups, religious activists, and progressives to the Bannon announcement offered a powerful and needed indication that, though they may have been shocked by last week’s election results, the opponents of Trump and Trumpism are up for this fight.

Senate minority leader Harry Reid’s office announced that the Bannon appointment “signals that White Supremacists will be represented at the highest levels in Trump’s White House.” Reid promised to raise the issue on the floor of the Senate.

This closeness of the margin in all the midwest states has lifted my spirits in the past days. It will not be a difficult job to come back with a candidate not as hated as Hillary, rightly or wrongly, was.

Sheelah Kolhatkar talks about Trump’s yuuge conflict of interest problem.

Trump and his offspring had already been treating the Presidential campaign like a world-spanning, high-stakes branding opportunity for Trump-related businesses. […] It turns out that there is no legal requirement that a President divest himself or herself of private business interests or investments while in office. Nor is there a requirement that he place investments or companies he controls in a blind trust, by which an independent third party manages the assets while he serves in government. There are federal ethics rules that prohibit members of Congress and Cabinet members from accepting gifts from anyone who has business before their agency, as well as requiring that they recuse themselves from governmental affairs that affect their financial interests.[…]

“It’s a tremendous problem when it’s completely obvious how someone seeking governmental action from the United States can provide substantial benefit to its chief executive,” Arlo Devlin-Brown, a partner at Covington and Burling, who oversaw the Silver and Skelos prosecutions as the chief of the public-corruption unit at the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, said. A foreign or domestic company could choose to license the Trump name for a real-estate development or for marketing a line of Trump edible-fruit arrangements, to take one simple example; the company would know that it was benefitting the President no matter who was managing the Trump Organization, and President Trump would know it, too. “The problem here is that everything is going to look bad—every single company is trying to get something from the executive branch,” Devlin-Brown said.

I am not sure what this is about:

Donald Trump is reportedly looking for top-secret clearances for his children, a sign that rather than entering the Oval Office with an eye for avoiding conflicts of interest he’s preparing to rush headlong into a minefield of them. […] “This is why we created the nepotism law in the first place. Huge conflicts of interest. You can’t have your kids being advisers. It has to be properly qualified officials who are experts in the fields,” Bradley Moss, a lawyer specializing in security-clearance law, told The Daily Beast. “It’s an issue of comfort for the President-elect because he’s relied on his children so much. But I don’t foresee a viable legal or ethical loophole or exception.” […]

But a former Obama administration official said Trump could simply be asking for them to be cleared so they can have unescorted access to parts of the West Wing. […] CBS, however, reports that Trump wants his kids to be able to see top secret information, defined as information that could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security” if released.

If the Trump children ran the Trump Organization while also serving as high-level, informal advisers, their suggested dual roles would invite an unprecedented conflict of interest.

Eugene Robinson:

If a normal Republican had been elected, I could say the polite and socially acceptable thing, something like “I didn’t support So-and-So, but he will be my president, too, and I wish him success.” But I cannot wish Trump success in rounding up and deporting millions of people or banning Muslims from entering the country or reinstituting torture as an instrument of U.S. policy. In these and other divisive, cruel, unwise initiatives, I wish him failure.

I do hope he succeeds in avoiding some kind of amateurish foreign policy blunder that puts American lives or vital national interests at risk. And let me be clear that I am not questioning his legitimacy as president. When the results are certified and the electoral college casts its votes, Trump will be the nation’s duly chosen leader, ridiculous though that may be.

But he has not earned our trust or hope. Rather, he has earned the demonstrations that have erupted in cities across the country. He has earned relentless scrutiny by journalists, whom he shamelessly made into scapegoats during the campaign, and he has earned the constant vigilance of the public he now must serve.

E.J. Dionne Jr. on Trumpian triumphalism:

To point out Clinton’s popular-vote advantage is not a form of liberal denial. It’s a way of beginning to build a barricade against right-wing triumphalism — and of reminding immigrants, Muslims, African Americans, Latinos and, yes, our daughters that most Americans stood with them on Election Day.

It is also not true that the emerging political coalition that elected President Obama died on Nov. 8. That alliance maintained its national advantage, as the popular vote shows, and came within a whisker in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan of delivering the election to Clinton despite an onslaught of partisan congressional investigations, Russian meddling and the last-minute political intervention of the FBI.

We dare not forget the power that was arrayed behind Trump because it is that power that must be resisted over the next four years.

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  1. puck says:
    November 15, 2016 at 9:27 am

    With absolutely no sense of irony, Laura Ingraham calls criticism of Steve Bannon a “smear campaign.”

    http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/306030-conservative-radio-host-calls-bannon-criticism-a-smear

    That’s as good as Melania’s anti-cyber bullying campaign.

  2. puck says:
    November 15, 2016 at 12:06 pm

    If Republicans win two more state legislatures, they can call constitutional conventions to propose amendments under Article V.

  3. kavips says:
    November 15, 2016 at 12:27 pm

    Get ready for national money to unleash itself into the 10th..

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