WE WIN WHEN WE SHOW UP: This week started with a surprise victory--and proved that we do have power, even in this Republican age, when we show up and make our voices heard. On Monday (a federal holiday), the Republican caucus in the House voted without warning and in secret (ie, so we don’t know how individual Reps voted) to dismantle the independent Office of Congressional Ethics. This is in keeping with the new era of corruption we are about to see in DC. The proposal would have (1) eliminated the office entirely and move it to the House Ethics Committee, which is controlled by the majority party; (2) barred it from accepting anonymous whistleblower complaints; (3) required it to cease all investigation if the House Committee tells it to; (4) bar it from investigating any conduct earlier than January 2011; (5) barred it from speaking publicly, ever, about its findings (and even from hiring a spokesman); and (6) barred it from referring investigations to law enforcement agencies. This was a big deal, and news of this secret vote ricocheted instantly around the internet. By Tuesday morning, there was an outcry -- and millions of people (that’s YOU!) called their representatives urging them to vote against this. By the end of the day, the Republicans had backed down (for the moment), and eliminated this provision from its larger budget reconciliation bill. This was a HUGE (if temporary) victory, and demonstrates the power of good journalism and dedicated activism. Note: Some news agencies erroneously gave credit to Trump for the GOP cave, after Trump tweeted that, while the Office of Congressional Ethics was basically terrible, its dismantling should not be the GOP’s first priority (it could come later). But multiple representatives made it clear that it was the inundation of phone calls they received that changed the trajectory of this bill, NOT Trump’s errant tweet. As ThinkProgress put it, “The episode embodied Trump’s tried-and-true Twitter strategy: tweet something that sounds good but is inaccurate, lap up the positive coverage, and by the time the media figures out it has been fooled, news consumers have moved on to the next thing.” This pattern really, really needs to stop.
HERE’S WHAT’S COMING ON OBAMACARE: The GOP drive to repeal Obamacare is happening now, and it’s complicated. (Gut check on stakes: This means (among other horribles) kicking 12 million people off of Medicaid, and taking insurance away from 9 million more who can afford coverage only with Obamacare’s subsidies.) The best primer on the GOP’s plan is here (NY Mag’s Ed Kilgore). Here are the basics, as I understand it: The GOP will use the budget reconciliation process to repeal, allowing them to push it through with 50 instead of 60 votes (as long as it is deemed germane to the budget). The Democrats can’t stop it, but they can delay and embarrass, during what’s called a “vote-o-rama” at two separate stages of the process, the budget resolution and then the actual reconciliation bill to be signed by the president. While these cannot be filibustered by Senate Democrats, Democrats can force an unlimited number of amendments. Kilgore: “In general, it’s all about taking an obscure and speedy budget process and creating dozens of lurid, free-frame images of measures that will affect real people in a terrible way.” But now, just days after the GOP made its first move by introducing the resolution, there are signs that they are getting cold feet. The party had been advocating a “repeal and delay” strategy (ie, repeal the law but make the repeal effective some years down the line, presumably to give them time to figure out a replacement). But some conservatives are saying they cannot repeal the law (and case the insurance market into utter chaos in the process) without a replacement ready: Senators Tom Cotton (“I don’t think we can repeal Obamacare and say we'll get the answer two years from now.”), Rand Paul (“It's a huge mistake for Republicans if they do not vote for replacement on the same day as we vote for repeal.”), Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins have all expressed concern about various parts of the repeal effort. (Remember, we only need to pick off 3 GOP senators to defeat this.) Kilgore suggests that the GOP may just pass the resolution and never move onto reconciliation -- ie, the actual bill that does the actual repeal -- and call it a success: “But with both sides describing the votes on the budget resolution as about ‘Obamacare repeal,’ and with a necessary time lapse as committees prepare the reconciliation bill, which is where a lot of the really tough decisions will have to be made (most especially the effective date for the various “repeal” measures that will affect real people in a terrible way), you have to figure there will be a strong temptation to just delay, delay, delay, taking up the reconciliation bill.”
SESSIONS IS THE WORST, AND OTHER CABINET THINGS: So we all know that Trump’s cabinet nominees are a literal parade of horribles, if “horribles” meant super rich white men with no experience. But their awfulness ends of redounding to their benefit: There are so many targets of shock, horror, and opposition that it’s nearly impossible to focus on any one of them sufficiently to sink them (remember when we were really mad about Steve Bannon?). The Trump team is sticking with this genius “look, another shiny thing” strategy by scheduling SIX confirmation hearings for the SAME DAY (next Wednesday) -- which also happens to be the same day as Trump’s first press conference in 6 months. It will also be the second day of hearings for AG nominee Jeff Sessions, whose unique awfulness we will focus on here for a minute. This is a man who was rejected from a federal judgeship in the 80s because he was deemed to be too racist (he routinely called a black assistant prosecutor in his office “boy,” suggested that a lawyer may be a “traitor to his race” for taking a black client, and complained that the NAACP was “trying to force civil rights down the throats of people who were trying to put problems behind them.” But of course now that it is 2016, Sessions and the right are trying to recast him as a civil rights hero, and cast his critics as The Real Racists (Ken Blackwell insisted opposition to Sessions was simply because he is a white man from the South (that downtrodden group), and thus opposition to him is “every bit as racist as as saying a black man from Chicago shouldn’t be president of the United States.”) In his (woefully incomplete) Senate questionnaire, Sessions specifically pointed to multiple civil rights cases he worked on while serving as United States Attorney in Alabama as evidence of his civil rights bona fides. But yesterday, three former prosecutors who worked under Sessions in Alabama published a remarkable op-ed saying that Sessions had no involvement whatsoever in those cases. They write: “Sessions’s attempt to pass himself off as a civil rights hero is particularly brazen given his history with the nominations process. In 1986, as part of his rejected bid to become a federal district court judge, Sessions filled out a similar questionnaire and had to provide the same information about his most important cases. Yet he listed none of the civil rights cases he now touts, even though all of those cases either were in progress or had reached a decision by that time. Instead, he chose to highlight his criminal prosecutions.” As they put it, this questionnaire is “part of a concerted effort to make his abysmal civil rights record look exemplary.” But given our new fact-free existence, I guess this is to be expected!
Apocalypse Watch of the Week: Trump disclosed $315 million in debt during the campaign. Turns out he left off $1.5 billion.
Must Read of the Week: Radley Balko, a writer focused on criminal justice whom you really should be reading, tells us how the Obama administration has betrayed its commitment to criminal justice reform and to science by refusing to act on multiple studies showing that forensic “science” is, essentially, BS.
Fun Read of the Week: Alexandra Petri imagines how the intelligence agencies are adapting to intelligence briefings in the Trump Era.
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