The December 17, 2016 Thread
Dahlia Lithwick and Daniel S, Cohen say Buck Up, Democrats, and Fight Like Republicans:
On Monday, members of the Electoral College will vote in Donald J. Trump as president. Though he lost the election by nearly three million votes and almost daily generates headlines about new scandals, the Democratic Party is doing little to stop him. If you’ve been asking yourself “Where are the Democrats?” you’re not alone.
Since the election, top Democrats have been almost absent on the national stage. Rather, they have been involved largely in internecine warfare about how much to work with Mr. Trump. The Hillary Clinton campaign, trying to encourage a peaceful transition, has gone almost completely dark, with her most notable appearances coming in selfies with strangers. Nobody deserves downtime more than Mrs. Clinton, but while she is decompressing, the country is moving toward its biggest electoral mistake in history. […]
Contrast the Democrats’ do-nothingness to what we know the Republicans would have done. If Mr. Trump had lost the Electoral College while winning the popular vote, an army of Republican lawyers would have descended on the courts and local election officials. The best of the Republican establishment would have been filing lawsuits and infusing every public statement with a clear pronouncement that Donald Trump was the real winner. And they would have started on the morning of Nov. 9, using the rhetoric of patriotism and courage.
For 5 weeks, @POTUS has strived to be upbeat. Today, the hope candidate's optimistic view started to crack. https://t.co/SnDPL5uPp0
— Juliet Eilperin (@eilperin) December 17, 2016
E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post says the electoral college should think hard before handing Trump the presidency:
Memo to Trump’s Republican critics: Your initial instincts about Trump were right. Remember that catering to this man will bring only pain and humiliation.
Memo to those claiming that everyone should give Trump a chance now that the people have spoken: Actually, “the people” didn’t make Trump president. They preferred Hillary Clinton by at least 2.8 million votes. If Trump takes office, it’s the electoral-college system that will do it. And the post-election Trump has been as abusive and self-involved as he was during the campaign. The opposition’s job is to stand up and prevent or mitigate the damage he could do to our country.
Memo to the electoral college that votes next Monday: Our tradition — for good reason — tells you that your job is to ratify the state-by-state outcome of the election. The question is whether Trump, Vladimir Putin and, perhaps, Clinton’s popular-vote advantage give you sufficient reason to blow up the system. I don’t raise this lightly. The costs of breaking with 188 years of tradition would be very high.
Why Russia hacked the US election: it’s all about climate change economics and the carbon industry bubble: https://t.co/40ZSOVdGT9
— Charlie Stross (@cstross) December 17, 2016
Scott Lemieux at The New Republic says It’s Not Looking Good for Roe v. Wade:
Opponents of abortion rights are “emboldened” by the election of Donald Trump. […] In the short term, the status quo—in which states are given extensive, but not unlimited, leeway to regulate pre-viability abortions—will prevail. But in the longer term, there is a high probability that a Trump administration will spell the end of Roe, with no immediate prospects for recovering a Supreme Court majority willing to protect the reproductive rights of women. […]
The real potential danger lies down the road. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is an 83-year-old cancer survivor, Justice Stephen Breyer is 78, and Kennedy himself is 80. Ginsburg and Breyer will almost certainly stay on the Court as long as they’re physically able to serve, but four years is a long time. And it’s possible that Kennedy could resign to be replaced by a Republican successor, although he might be the kind of nearly extinct moderate Republican who disdains Trump. Democrats will face the odd situation of doing their damnedest to keep Kennedy on the court for four more years.
But if Trump is able to get one more nominee confirmed after replacing Scalia, that will make Chief Justice John Roberts the median vote on the Court. What happens then? At that point, the only question is whether Roe is quickly executed or slowly strangled to death.
The lesson of the last 8 years is that Republicans can do anything, no matter how undemocratic, without ever paying a political price.
— Bruce Bartlett (@BruceBartlett) December 16, 2016
Claire Lampen at News.Mic says Obama just took an important stand for reproductive rights:
Reproductive rights are more imperiled than they have been in over 40 years, which makes President Barack Obama’s move to indefinitely protect Title X funding for Planned Parenthood and its ilk particularly meaningful.
Unfortunately, because nothing the Obama administration does is sacred under Donald Trump, meaningful is about all his action can be.
On Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services finalized regulations to the Title X Project Grants for Family Planning Services, an amendment it had originally proposed in September. The rule will be effective 30 days from its publication in the federal register on Dec. 19, and stipulates that Title X funds cannot be denied to a health care provider “for reasons other than its ability to provide Title X services.”
Nice @bykowicz & @jpaceDC on how Dems believe Mnuchin confirmation fight could help rebuild party's economic message https://t.co/Byq1hmuRfD
— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) December 17, 2016
Moshe Z. Marvit at The Nation on a Lesson on How to Unite Across Race and Class From… the Teamsters:
A few weeks ago, a major election was held in the United States, where working-class whites, in alliance with black and Latino voters, rallied around a progressive populist platform—and won. No, this is neither revisionist history nor some kind of collective blue-state fantasy, in which the Electoral College has been abolished and the popular vote prevailed. Rather, it concerns the largely ignored national election of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters—one of the nation’s largest industrial unions—which in many ways serves as a microcosm of our political environment, and may provide lessons for Democrats as they move forward. Prime among them are that before the Democratic Party abandons populism or gives up on working-class whites as unwinnable, it would do well to look to look at how Teamsters have been able to win Rust Belt voters with a campaign that should be familiar to Democrats. […]
The narrative that most have settled on for why Hillary Clinton lost the election was that working-class whites abandoned her and the Democratic Party for a reactionary populist message. But Ken Paff, a former truck driver from Cleveland, now an organizer for Teamsters for a Democratic Union in Detroit, explains, “The same people lost to Democrats and won over by Trump were won by our movement. But where Trump benefited from blue collar desertion, we were the beneficiary of blue collar militancy.” By campaigning on a progressive populist platform that centered on fighting for workers’ rights, stronger health and pension benefits, and inclusion and diversity, the insurgent group of Teamsters was able to win in the United States.
Conservative Group Wants Trump To ‘Ferret Out’ Pro-LGBT State Department Workers https://t.co/AHOZq6x6Hi
— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) December 16, 2016
FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have backed a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the presidency, the Washington Post reports. “Comey’s support for the CIA’s conclusion suggests that the leaders of the three agencies are in agreement on Russian intentions, contrary to suggestions by some lawmakers that the FBI disagreed with the CIA.”
“Donald Trump’s barnstorming tour across the states that won him the White House continues to feature far more taunts of triumph than notes of healing after a bruising election,” the Chicago Tribune reports.
“Thursday’s rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, found the president-elect calling for the mostly white crowd to cheer for African-Americans who were ‘smart’ to heed his message and therefore ‘didn’t come out to vote’ for his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.”
Said Trump: “That was the big thing, so thank you to the African-American community.”
Yeah thank you. Tons.
First Read: “Out of all of the recent developments in the news about Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race — the CIA’s conclusion that it was done to help Donald Trump, the NBC report that Vladimir Putin was personally involved — the biggest has been Trump’s reaction.”
“First, he criticized the CIA… Second, Trump questioned — falsely — why it took the Obama administration so long to act on the claims of Russian interference…. And this morning, he’s re-litigating the information that came from the WikiLeaks dumps.”
“Does he think it delegitimizes his win? Does he truly have affinity for Russia and Putin? Does he not accept intelligence that’s contrary to his worldview? This Russia story is big news. But the biggest news of all has been the reaction from the president-elect.”
Trump's transition team asked State Dep't to assess how to move embassy to Jerusalem, an official says https://t.co/xB64e2hpiH
— Brad Klapper (@bklapperAP) December 16, 2016
President-elect Donald Trump “made veterans’ issues a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. But selecting a leader for the Department of Veterans Affairs will be one of the final decisions to round out his cabinet,” ABC News reports.
“Transition sources say Trump is still considering a number of different candidates… Contenders for the VA job include former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin; former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown; Pete Hegseth, the former chief executive of the conservative Concerned Veterans for America; and Adm. Michelle Howard, the first African-American woman to command a U.S. Navy ship.”
Brian Stelter has it right. I could not improve on his description. https://t.co/ugCZAMlPJC pic.twitter.com/IZBtsjqBRI
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) December 16, 2016
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: “Mr. Trump is not the first American politician with authoritarian tendencies. (Other notable authoritarians include Gov. Huey Long of Louisiana and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.) But he is the first in modern American history to be elected president. This is not necessarily because Americans have grown more authoritarian (the United States electorate has always had an authoritarian streak). Rather it’s because the institutional filters that we assumed would protect us from extremists, like the party nomination system and the news media, failed.”
“Many Americans are not overly concerned about Mr. Trump’s authoritarian inclinations because they trust our system of constitutional checks and balances to constrain him. Yet the institutional safeguards protecting our democracy may be less effective than we think.”
Putin understood that America's great weakness is blind partisanship. Has won affection of GOP base & PEOTUS simply by being anti-Hillary.
— Ryan Lizza (@RyanLizza) December 16, 2016
St. Louis journalist Sarah Kendzior asks an important question: “If there’s no such thing as facts, why does Trump’s team work so hard to suppress them?”
Trump fosters the idea that he’s flying by the seat of his pants, but that’s another facet of the con-man scam he’s running. He knows what facts are, and his m.o. is to swamp them in a sea of effluvia. He worked this during the campaign and he’s doing it still, knowing the media will chase everything that skims across the surface without ever going beneath the surface.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, but that number appears to be around 40% of the populace. I know that being the reality-based side has backfired on us again and again, but I don’t know of any solution to their intellectual laziness other than hammering home the facts.
@anonymous: I don’t know of any solution to their intellectual laziness other than hammering home the facts.
I can think of one, although I’m not sure it will be any better: we start making testable predictions about the future, like …
When Trump can’t bring back the Rust Belt jobs he will divert attention by having cut off Federal funding to “sanctuary cities,” which will result in increasing chaos in the streets, which will require the troops to be sent in, which will allow Trump to explain that the enemies of “law and order” and “communists” are what’s holding America back, and he will ask the Rust Belt to “make sacrifices” while he puts down the “rebellion.”
Most days I’m fairly sure that statement is hyperbole, but then again…
Steve, I am worried that it isn’t hyperbole.
They will welcome the unrest and protest, framing it as a reason to crack down on dissent. And god forbid if there is a terrorist attack, what laws passed in the wake of a second 9/11 will make the Patriot Act look like the Bill of Rights. All will be done in the name of patriotism and security. (what scares me the most is that they may intentionally let such an attack happen)
The trouble with that approach should be obvious: We can come up with a million such hypotheses and might still miss the one that comes true, just as we saw what the GOP’s “philosophies” were leading up to but missed that it would be an intellectually empty vessel like Trump who would embody it.
I confess that my dismissal of Trump’s chances depended heavily on a mistaken belief — that hatred of Russia was a core value that conservatives would not discard. I have been shocked by how quickly they have accepted the premise that we have always been at war with Eastasia, not Eurasia.
“I have been shocked by how quickly they have accepted the premise that we have always been at war with Eastasia, not Eurasia.”
1984, now more relevant than ever it would seem.
What has happened has all the trappings of dystopian fiction. It might be part of the reason people have been so accepting of it, and part of the reason so many dipshit-Americans actively sought it out. There’s a reason this type of fiction is so popular — everyone imagines himself (disproportionately male fantasy) as someone who, while a nobody in real life, would not only survive an apocalypse but emerge as a leader and hero. Why do you think so many people watch “Walking Dead”? This is the fantasy life of every gun nut come to life. Wait until they find out they still won’t be able to get laid.
I have noticed that most attempted discussion of Trump with acquaintances is met with silence out in public, and not because they voted for him. There’s a fear in the air, and most people have turned inward. The willingness of the populace to submit to the invisible yoke has been, and continues to be, truly shocking to me.
Dystopian fiction as MUST read: Sinclair Lewis, “It Can’t Happen Here”: Michael Kurland, “The Last President”; Stanley Weinbaum and Ralph Milne Farley, “The Revolution of 1950”; Fletcher Knebel, “Seven Days in May”;
@anonymous;;The willingness of the populace to submit to the invisible yoke has been, and continues to be, truly shocking to me. That is why I continue to court ridicule by speaking up, and not shutting up. And it is downright scary to me. The Trump proto-regime is following the exact playbook of historical authoritarian take-overs, and the Democrats are acting exactly like the last political leaders in Weimar and pre-Fascist Italy.
All I know to do as an old fart is NOT SHUT UP, and NOT COMPROMISE on telling the truth every single time.
You can thank Obama for Trump. Obama and his designates have destroyed the Democratic Party as a National Party. And then there is this:
“Obama Makes It Pretty Clear He Doesn’t Want Keith Ellison To Run The DNC”
“Many leading Democrats in Washington are furious with the administration for intervening in a transition of power that they have been attempting to manage for weeks. Obama, they argue, has actively undermined party organization by diverting resources to his own organizations, after appointing a disastrous DNC chair in Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.).
“The White House didn’t just let the DNC whither on the vine, they actively undermined it by steering money, resources, time and staff to [Organizing for Action],” one Senate Democratic aide told HuffPost. “It takes a lot of nerve for the White House, at the 11th hour, to meddle in race to head an organization they thwarted for eight years.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obama-keith-ellison-dnc_us_585460a1e4b0b3ddfd8cd1b5
I don’t care right now who we thank or damn. I care about what’s going to happen next.
There is simply no fight in the Democratic Party. All predictions must incorporate the reality that Trump can do whatever Putin tells him to do.
I think Coons and Carper actually prefer to be in the minority and prefer the company of Republicans. Carper especially was pretty uncomfortable with all those Democratic bills Pelosi was sending him.
There is certainly nothing in either’s recird to suggest that they will rise to meet the demands of the next few years.
@jason I think you underestimate the psychological shock of the election. A week before Election Day, Democrats were not only confidently planning to inaugurate the first female president, but had–in their own minds–taken back the Senate and saw the House as possibly in play. Trump was going to become a laughing stock, and this would generationally become the end of the GOP. It’s tough to imagine a more PTDS-like situation, unless, say, the President of Russia had installed a Manchurian Candidate with instructions to piss off China before Inauguration Day.
Given that, what Democrats are discovering is that they have (had) no party, but a coalition that has more or less shattered under the impact of the election. The GOP is a political party: in the end it came home and supported its nominee, crazy or not. And by doing so it won control of the government based on roughly a 46% showing in the popular vote.
They’ve got an agenda–they can’t possibly grow that 46% very much, and in fact they’ll probably lose some of it. So they’ve got to shrink the pie. They need about 10 million fewer Democrats and third party folks to vote next time around, and since they can’t count on more than 4-5 million more Dems to sit it out next time (and I’m not kidding about that number), they will have to use the mechanisms of government to keep them away from the polls.
This will start happening in the first 100 days. That’s the extreme outside limit for the Democratic Party to decide to be a political party again, and to develop a message of opposition, or risk becoming a footnote in history for “fastest collapse of a major political party.”
I agree. The clock is ticking and if the “leadership” of the Democratic Party fails the test of the 100 days I can’t even see myself sticking around. I’ll need to be with some outfit that looks willing to at least land some blows.
Who is that outfit? I have no idea.
Look to what is happening in North Carolina to get an idea of what might happen nationally.
Look to what happened in Hiroshima to understand what might happen internationally.
Electoral College = Suicide Pact
The Democrats made the decision to get in bed with the corporations. Let the corporations save them.
This is what Bill Clinton, and his wife, never understood. They’ll give you money, but there’s no loyalty there, as Obama (and the rest of the Third Way crew) should have understood when the banks had the nerve to complain because he said mean things about him. No gratitude about the lack of prosecutions, just ingratitude that he said negative things.
That’s the reason a lot of Democrats were OK with letting Trump blow up Washington — they saw little downside in dispensing with a status quo that ignored them.
Anon. The proof of that is that the DJIA and other indexes don’t care who is in. The Dow doesn’t measure the economy, it measures whether rich people are going to be richer.
“The Dow doesn’t measure the economy, it measures whether rich people are going to be richer.”
Actually, it measures what the people who own the stocks think the economy is going to do to or for their company. That’s why Lockheed tanked and Exxon soared last week, making it the wrong week to sell Lockheed or buy Exxon.
Article in the latest New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert on the robot revolution affirms what I’m trying to alert people to — that there is no saving your job or anyone else’s. Our new party needs to grapple with how society will be structured in a jobless future.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/19/our-automated-future