DL Open Thread: Saturday, May 27, 2023
D’s Ignored Yellen, Now Paying Debt Ceiling Ransom. Can’t anybody here play this game?:
In the days after November’s midterm elections, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen was feeling upbeat about the fact that Democrats had performed better than expected and maintained control of the Senate.
But as she traveled to the Group of 20 leaders summit in Indonesia that month, she said Republicans taking control of the House posed a new threat to the U.S. economy.
“I always worry about the debt ceiling,” Ms. Yellen told The New York Times in an interview on her flight from New Delhi to Bali, Indonesia, in which she urged Democrats to use their remaining time in control of Washington to lift the debt limit beyond the 2024 elections. “Any way that Congress can find to get it done, I’m all for.”
Democrats did not heed Ms. Yellen’s advice. Instead, the United States has spent most of this year inching toward the brink of default as Republicans refused to raise or suspend the nation’s $31.4 trillion borrowing limit without capping spending and rolling back parts of President Biden’s agenda.
Texas AG Ken Paxton: ‘Sure I Called For Overturning An Election, But Not My Election.’:
In a statement after the committee’s announcement, Paxton, who was reelected last fall, accused his fellow Republicans of carrying water for liberal Democrats and claimed that the committee was trying “to use their unsubstantiated report to overturn the results of a free and fair election.” It was an “illegitimate attempt to overthrow the will of the people and disenfranchise the voters of our state.”
As the Texas Observer’s Justin Miller noted, Paxton and his team are floating a legal argument that holds that a public official can’t be impeached after an election for actions that were widely established before that election. This idea that all the facts were known, though, would seem to be undercut rather severely by Paxton’s continued insistence that the facts we think we know are wrong, as well as the fact that he was literally trying to get the state legislature to pay the whistleblowers he fired $3.3 million to settle their claims, rather than face a public trial—which is what prompted the legislature’s investigation. It wasn’t as if his reelection slogan was “Yes, I did it.”
Is This How To Reduce Gun Violence? I’m all for it, regardless:
As America’s gun crisis shows no sign of abating, there is some hope for reducing the number of mass shootings and killings. The emerging wave of lawsuits against gun makers echoes previous successes against the car industry, opioid companies and big tobacco.
In New York, California, Delaware and other states, new laws aim to provide ways around a near 20-year immunity provided to gun manufacturers and distributors. In Indiana, a lawsuit brought by victims of the 2021 mass shooting at a FedEx facility aims to hold a gun manufacturer accountable for the horror wrought by one of its weapons.
The arguments are similar to some of those brought against car, opioid, asbestos and tobacco industries in recent decades, which led to companies acknowledging the danger of their products and pushed them toward more responsible practices.
Those lawsuits exposed the true extent to which company executives were aware of the harmfulness of their products. Huge financial penalties were imposed which eventually compelled more responsible behavior.
The door was effectively opened for gun litigation last year, when the families of five adults and four children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting settled with Remington, which manufactured the AR-15 style rifle used in the massacre, for $73m.
Jesse Armstrong On Succession: Would it have had the same impact w/o Trump?
But then it did happen. And across the Atlantic, the Trump campaign was igniting – even if initially his candidacy felt like a slightly amusing, slightly too-vivid flash in the pan. Into early autumn, in fact, all serious people were still explaining to one another that Trump couldn’t happen. Although I suppose, looking back, there was a notable lack of detail in terms of the mechanism by which he would be stopped.
I guess the simple things at the heart of Succession ended up being Brexit and Trump. The way the UK press had primed the EU debate for decades. The way the US media’s conservative outriders prepared the way for Trump, hovered at the brink of support and then dived in. The British press of Rothermere, Maxwell, Murdoch and the Barclay brothers, and the US news environment of Fox and Breitbart.
The Sun doesn’t run the UK, nor does Fox entirely set the media agenda in the US, but it was hard not to feel, at the time the show was coming together, the particular impact of one man, of one family, on the lives of so many. Rightwing populism was on the march across the globe. But in the fine margins of the Brexit vote and Trump’s eventual electoral college victory, one couldn’t help but think about the influence of the years of anti-EU stories and comment in the UK press, the years of Fox dancing with its audience, sometimes leading, sometimes following, as the wine got stronger, the music madder. It was politically alarming and creatively appealing: to imagine the mixture of business imperatives and political instinct that exist within a media operation; to consider what happens when something as important as the flow of information in a democracy hits the reductive brutality of the profit calculation inside such a company. How those elements might rebound emotionally and psychologically inside a family as it considered the question of corporate succession.
What do you want to talk about?
Jesse Armstrong: “The Sun doesn’t run the UK, nor does Fox entirely set the media agenda in the US…”
I have no idea whether the Sun runs the UK, but it’s only by the slenderest of margins that Fox doesn’t entirely set the media agenda in the U.S.