Friday, May 23, 2025

There's too much news. I'd vote for someone who promised less news.

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Democrats doing Democrat things (derogatory)

I've written previously about Congressional Democrats' misguided pursuit of reelection through inaction, about their impressive ability to convince themselves in almost any context that they cannot win and therefore should not try, and about how their inaction teaches the public lessons that are counterproductive to achieving progressive goals. We now have another recent example.

To wit: Shri Thanedar,* a backbench Democrat from Michigan, introduced articles of impeachment accusing Trump of bribery, corruption, obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and usurpation of Congress's appropriation powers. On the merits, it's clear that Trump has engaged in such misconduct and that such misconduct warrants impeachment. Even Republicans admit Trump is acting illegally; they just like what he is doing enough to betray their oaths and abandon the social contract.

Many Congressional Democrats responded to this substantively justified attempt to protect the Constitutional order with a mix of annoyance and fury. Their objection seems to be that the effort won't succeed but will hurt incumbent Democrats. They reason that a vote against impeachment may aid primary challengers and that a vote for impeachment may hurt them in the general election. Accordingly, before they goaded Thanedar into declining to force a vote on the issue, Democratic leadership suggested they hoped for "unity" among Democrats in opposition to the impeachment effort.

Look, I understand that, with the GOP still broadly supporting Trump and holding a majority in both houses of Congress, there's no way Trump will be impeached, and I can see how a vote against impeachment could (and should) hurt an incumbent Dem facing a primary challenge. But is there really a significant group of people who would otherwise vote for their incumbent Democratic Congressperson but will stay home or vote Republican instead because the incumbent voted to impeach Trump well over a year earlier? The notion strikes me as absurd.

What I do believe is that America has never seen a President as corrupt as Trump. Furthermore, I am certain that, when Democrats fail to treat Trump's misconduct as serious and warranting impeachment, they are telling the public that Trump's misconduct is not serious and does not warrant impeachment. And, unlike a long-ago vote in favor of a failed impeachment, I believe that teaching the public that Trump's misconduct is not serious will hurt Dem candidates in the midterms. What is more, if they aren't treating Trump's misconduct as serious and impeachable, it's hard to see how Democrats, should they somehow get the votes to do so in the future, would impeach Trump over his obviously impeachable misconduct that they had not previously treated as impeachable.

So what we have are Democrats refusing to act on principle and choose the substantively correct course of conduct because they are convinced they would lose the vote, which has the effect of undermining public support for the principled and substantively correct course of conduct. And they are doing so to protect incumbents from primary challengers who are upset the incumbents won't act on principle and choose the substantively correct course of conduct. Dems' handling of this impeachment filing isn't the biggest issue in the world, but it's part of a pattern of conduct that is killing the party and the country. I think current Congressional Democratic leadership cannot be removed from their leadership positions soon enough.

Brian Beutler** generally agrees:

[I]t is impossible to dispute that Trump has committed impeachable offenses unless you’re a liar or a coward. Thanedar may not be savvy, or a born leader, but he's a rare Democrat willing to say this obviously true thing, rather than run it through the party’s conflict-avoidance machinery, which turns strong messages into mush. 

What Thanedar’s revealed already is that the party isn’t actually retooling to fight Donald Trump. They’re retooling to generate just enough resistance theater to get angry voters off their backs. He may try in earnest to “rally the support of…Democrats,” but they will not be rallied. Their beef with Thanedar is not that he didn’t persuade them, it’s that they don’t want the word impeachment uttered within earshot of a reporter. If, on this track, Democrats win back the House in 2026, they will not undertake real, concerted accountability efforts. They will, as one anonymous Democrat suggested to Axios, eschew any course of action unless there’s a clear “path to victory." That’s a recipe for letting Trump and his administration veto vigorous oversight. 

And he has a good suggestion:

Rather than force an impeachment vote, only for the vote to fail inconsequentially, Thanedar could use the threat of impeachment votes to get real public commitments from the leadership. Clarity on what the party intends to do differently in 2027 and 2028. If they mean it when they tell voters they’re prepared to fight, but they also think impeachment should be off the table, what will they do instead? How will they use a toehold on power to increase the salience of Trump’s corruption and create consequences for it?

In a subsequent newsletter, Beutler draws a helpful distinction between "views" and "positions" and suggests Dems' elevation of the latter over the former is part of the problem:

This is more or less what I was getting at Monday when I wrote about the sad spectacle of Democrats’ inability or unwillingness to acknowledge that Trump has committed impeachable offenses, and thus deserves to be impeached. 

It’s a simple fact. I know that, under hypnosis, every Democrat in Congress would admit to it. But they pre-empt their own critical thinking by jumping to suppositions about how the public will react if they express this basic truth, and it makes them seem like they don’t believe in anything.

In what way would the party be worse off if House Democrats just said what they believed? Some might say, Trump has committed many impeachable offenses and the Constitution compels us to press the issue of impeachment; others might say Trump has committed many impeachable offenses, everyone in Congress knows it—including Republicans—but because Republicans have majorities, and will protect Trump from accountability, we can’t make headway on a debate about impeachment and will bide our time for now. 

They wouldn’t need struggle sessions or memorized talking points to defend insincere positions if they didn’t presume the public would balk whenever they spoke from the heart, and by speaking from the heart they’d no longer seem like they don’t believe in anything.

* * *

But if you’re a Democrat and you arrive at a position (instead of a view) based on issue polling, you will reek of insincerity. . . . You’ll likely be worse off than if you’d thought through the issue critically. The public will be less apt to support an insincere poll chaser than one who’s willing to own up to a disagreement with the public: “If I were king, I’d do X, but I’m not a king. I’m a representative, and I can’t get this far ahead of my constituents. So in this instance I support Y, but we will continue to engage in good-faith dialogue on the issue.”

Whenever you hear or read that Democrats need to say a particular thing or get distance from this or adopt a more moderate position on that, it’s likely that you are listening to bullshit, and that Democrats as individuals just need to take a beat, decide what they think is right, and go from there.

Separate from the impeachment filing, Congressional Democratic leadership wants to give Republicans new tools to censor progressive online speech:

[Project 2025 organizer] Heritage Foundation explicitly laid out their plans to weaponize [the Kids Online Safety Act] against progressive speech[, including speech about abortion]. [The bill's lead sponsor] Marsha Blackburn openly admitted it’s about censoring LGBTQ content. The Trump administration is systematically implementing every element of Project 2025’s censorship agenda. And the FTC stands ready to enforce it all.

Yet Democratic leadership isn’t just standing idle — they’re actively helping to build the machinery of censorship that will be used against their own constituents. Either Schumer and Blumenthal are catastrophically naive, or they’ve simply decided that appearing “bipartisan” matters more than protecting vulnerable communities from state-sponsored censorship.

FN* - This Dem angered his colleagues by listing some of them as co-sponsors without obtaining their official sign-off, and other Democrats accuse him of pursuing impeachment to fend of a primary challenge of his own. I don't think any of this changes the analysis at all.

FN** - Part of the newsletter at the link is paywalled, but I encourage you to consider subscribing. I think Brian Beutler is among our moment's most astute political observers, and if I could only recommend one newsletter to left-of-center political types, it would be his.

Things in Gaza are still bad, getting worse

The AP reports:

The war in the Gaza Strip has reached one of its darkest periods. Israel cut off all food and supplies to the territory nearly three months ago. The military has launched another major offensive against Hamas, including “extensive” ground operations.

Hundreds of people in the Palestinian territory have been killed in recent days. Experts have warned of a looming famine. Doctors say overwhelmed hospitals are running out of medicine to treat even routine conditions.

Israel's finance minister pretty much says Israel is intentionally trying to starve the population of Gaza:

"The bare minimum will reach the population - simply so the world doesn't stop us and accuse us of war crimes."

"What will enter in the coming days is very little: a few bakeries distributing pita bread to people, and public kitchens providing one daily serving of cooked food."

Civilians, he says, will receive one pita and a plate of food - "that's it".

Israel's conduct in Gaza is unequivocally monstrous, and the United States is complicit.

Immigration horrors

The libertarian Cato Institute investigated and found that dozens of the immigrants that Trump deported trafficked to suffer in inhumane conditions in an El Salvadoran prison "came to the United States with advanced US government permission, were vetted and screened before arrival, [and] violated no US immigration law."

The US appears to have deported trafficked people from places like Vietnam and Cuba to South Sudan, which is on the verge of civil war and whose citizens can get protected status in the US because of insecurity there. The US did so in violation of a court order. These people may never have been to South Sudan and may not speak any local language.

The Department of Homeland may create a reality TV show where immigrants compete to get citizenship applications fast-tracked, which is awfully close to literally being a dystopian Arnold Schwarzenegger movie loosely based on a book by Stephen King.

In the embarrassing diplomatic equivalent of an elderly racist relative telling you about a ridiculous forwarded email they read, Trump confronted the president of South Africa with false claims about systematic killings of white South African farmers. Trump has used these false claims to justify special immigration-related treatment of white South Africans.

Parade of horribles

We're not beating the horrifying dystopia allegations: "A pregnant woman in Georgia who was declared brain dead after a medical emergency has been on life support for three months to let the fetus grow enough to be delivered, a move her family says a hospital told them was required under the state’s strict anti-abortion law."

Cuts to USAID have left about $100M in food rotting in warehouses.

The "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," which contains much of Trump's legislative agenda, passed the House of Representatives. I expect I'll share more on this in the future, including details about the shameful process by which it was passed, but for now know that preliminary estimates indicate it will increase the national debt by $3,800,000,000,000 and take health care from nearly 9,000,000 people. It now heads to the Senate, and the contents of the final bill are yet to be determined.

The Trump administration will pay $5,000,000 to the family of a domestic terrorist who was killed while committing acts of domestic terrorism despite the fact that the family's lawsuit was utterly meritless.