Delaware Liberal

The December 9, 2016 Thread

Delaware Dem

“Donald Trump will continue to hold the title of executive producer for the television show ‘The Celebrity Apprentice’ after taking office, foreshadowing an unorthodox presidency in which the commander in chief has a hand in the world of reality TV,” the Washington Post reports.

“Trump’s name will be listed in the credits of the NBC show that he once hosted, according to details of the arrangement confirmed by a representative of the show. Such credits in Hollywood often come with a paycheck, though the representative did not disclose whether Trump will be compensated.”

So NBC will pay a salary to the President. Yeah. No conflict there at all.

David Nir at Daily Kos points out that the Democrats won a victory this week by growing a spine and standing up to the GOP:

Earlier this week, Republicans threatened to throw one of their patented—and very dangerous—tantrums: Allow us to ram through a special amendment to allow retired General James Mattis to serve as Donald Trump’s secretary of defense—or else we’ll shut down the government. But guess what happened? Democrats told Republicans to get bent, and the GOP meekly complied. […]

Led by New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrats said they’d filibuster a special amendment that would let Mattis take the defense secretary job even though he only retired from active duty three years ago. For very good reason, federal law requires that members of the armed forces wait seven years before taking senior defense posts, to ensure firm civilian control over the military—a bedrock foundation of democracy.

Trump and the GOP don’t care about such principles, of course, so they’re raring to pass a special piece of legislation to lift this seven-year restriction for Mattis. But with Democrats set on filibustering the amendment, Republicans then suggested they’d attach it to a must-pass spending bill that would keep the government running past Friday. In other words, give us our way on Mattis, or we’ll shut the federal government down.

The threat proved to be hollow, though. Democrats all but invited Republicans to bring it on, remembering just how poorly things went for the GOP the last time they closed down the government. And guess what? When Republicans released the text of their spending bill, the special amendment for Mattis was nowhere to be found—a victory for the Democrats.

Trump will still push Mattis next year, and he may yet get confirmed. But in order to do so, he’ll need 60 votes, rather than the usual 50 for cabinet appointees.

Speaking on behalf of all white males, if you, as a white male, do not intervene when something like this happens in public, you are endorsing it. I don’t care if you might die in doing so. You intervene. If you die, you go to heaven.

So the TPP is still out there, and Nick Timiraos noticed about his cabinet:

President-elect Donald Trump railed against the Trans-Pacific Partnership on his way to winning the White House and has vowed immediately to withdraw the U.S. from the 12-nation accord. Several of his cabinet picks and other early nominees to top posts, however, have endorsed or spoken favorably about the trade pact, including Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, announced Wednesday as Mr. Trump’s pick for ambassador to China, and retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, Mr. Trump’s pick to head the Department of Defense…

Gen. Mattis joined 16 other retired military leaders and former defense secretaries in a May 2015 letter to congressional leaders that said TPP would help the U.S. maintain a geopolitical advantage in Asia… Another signatory to that letter: David Petraeus, the retired general who ran the Central Intelligence Agency and who has been considered by Mr. Trump for secretary of state. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr., also considered candidates for the secretary of state post, have supported the TPP…

Wilbur Ross Jr., Mr. Trump’s nominee for Commerce secretary, has been extremely critical of the TPP in recent interviews, but he signed a letter in support of the agreement last year to the New York congressional delegation… Vice President-elect Mike Pence also supported the TPP as Indiana governor, but he said he changed his mind on the trade accord, and other multilateral deals, after he discussed the issue with Mr. Trump this past July.

The TPP will survive. Trump will make a change to it and then force a vote on it. And all the idiot Bernie Bros who favored Trump over Clinton will cry, and their tears will be delicious.

Josh Marshall on the consequences of Obamacare repeal:

The total number set to lose their coverage is a bit over 23 million Americans (23,134,000). Of those, 12,311,000 lose their Medicaid expansion-based coverage; 8,963,000 are exchange purchasers who benefit from significant federal subsidies; 1,390,000 are young adults under the age of 26 who are allowed to remain on their parents plans; a final 470,000 are basic health care plan enrollees in Minnesota and New York. […]

And here’s something even more interesting, partial repeal turns out to be worse than full repeal. The Urban Institute has a new study showing something that seems paradoxical, but actually makes sense if you know the way the health insurance industry has integrated with and remade itself to operate with the ACA. Urban Institute’s numbers of people who lose insurance is slightly lower than Gaba’s numbers. They project 22.5 million as opposed to Gaba’s 23.124. But if repeal is partial, they project an additional 7.3 million would lose their coverage. That brings the total to 29.8 million, close to 10 percent of the people in the entire country.

Why would partial repeal hurt more people than full repeal? Well, in this case partial repeal means repealing the money (the incentives) without the regulatory structure. In the words of the Urban Institute study: “The additional 7.3 million people become uninsured because of the near collapse of the nongroup insurance market.” Basically you’re leaving the regulations intact but removing the money that makes them possible. So everything goes haywire and you get a lot of collateral damage. Why would you do that? Simple. The rules of the Senate allow you to do that with 50 votes. It’s politically easier to destroy care for an additional 7 million people.

More Josh Marshall:

As long as the President is making deals or allowing others to make them on his behalf, he has an open channel to accept payoffs from everyone. Domestic ones are just corrupt. Foreign ones may violate the constitution. They’re all the big money. Even for Trump.

The register is open for payoffs from everyone. Everyone. It seems like he wants to get the payoffs. If he doesn’t the only way he can prevent it is stopping the deal making, which obviously means divesting himself of the companies. I think that is the only way for him to stop the payoffs. The President shouldn’t be taking personal payoffs from people who want to buy a piece of the presidency. It’s bad enough we let something like that happen with campaign contributions. But we’ve never allowed Presidents to pocket the money.

Jonathan Chait says Donald Trump has proven liberals and Democrats right about the Tea Party:

Time magazine’s profile of Donald Trump, its Man of the Year, notes, “he has little patience for the organizing principle of the Tea Party: the idea that the federal government must live within its means and lower its debts.” What’s astonishing about this sentence, which appears in a generally fascinating and well-done story, is its casual acceptance of the premise that fiscal discipline is, or was, the tea party’s organizing principle.

When the tea party appeared on the scene in 2009, an intense partisan dispute broke out as to just what this movement represented. Conservatives insisted that what spurred protesters into streets and town halls were the timeless principles of conservative movement thought: advocacy of balanced budgets, adherence to a strict constructionist version of the Constitution, opposition to “crony capitalism,” and skepticism of Keynesian economics. Liberals suggested a different explanation. The tea party was an expression of ethno-nationalist rage centered around a black president and the belief that his coalition stood for redistribution from older, white America to its younger, more diverse supporters. Reports by close students of the phenomenon, like Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, or Stanley Greenberg, revealed that deep-seated fear of demographic change rather than abstract constitutional or economic principles lay at the heart of the revolt against Obama.

President-elect Donald Trump “in the final weeks of the election paid nearly $2.9 million to family-owned companies, according to his latest Federal Election Commission disclosure—a third of the total amount he had previously paid his businesses over the course of the campaign,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The total Mr. Trump spent over the course of the campaign on family-owned companies and reimbursing his children for travel: $12 million.”

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) offers a warning to Republicans in the New York Times:

Despite the fact that your nominee lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes, your leaders have announced their intention to repeal the Affordable Care Act early in the next Congress, with no replacement. This is a dramatic misreading of your mandate. It will lead you into a quagmire that will cause pain for millions of Americans and bedevil you for the next four years.

Repealing Obamacare will take health insurance away from millions of Americans — as many as 30 million, by one recent estimate. It will raise premiums and throw health insurance markets into disarray. Public support for repeal is low, and support for repeal without a replacement is in the basement.

If you continue down this path, you will be letting your reflexive opposition to President Obama’s legacy cloud your judgment. I was in the Senate when President George W. Bush misread his mandate and sought to privatize Social Security. His administration never recovered.

Rick Klein: “In his month as president-elect, Donald Trump has used Tweets to blast protesters upset with his election; threaten a government contract awarded to a company opposing his agenda; falsely claim that he won the popular vote if you only count the votes of legal citizens; and attack a local union head – a private citizen – who went on television to question the accuracy of his claims of saved jobs. This isn’t crossing lines – it’s scribbling over the old ones, and redrawing the boundaries of propriety even before Trump takes office.”

“One question for those who might seek to challenge the president is how they react to this new reality. Trump won’t change – but will efforts to draw him out adjust? When a president reacts to cable news, or online chatter, the spotlight will be on not just the president but on the person or entities under attack.”

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