Ed. Note: I am clearly struggling to get this out on any sort of schedule. I’m not sure whether this will be the last edition of 2017 (if so, good riddance to a truly terrible year -- though considerably brightened by the birth of one freakishly adorable kid), and I’m not sure what the schedule will be in 2018, when I return to work. Just a warning!
THE TAX CUTS ARE NOT A DONE DEAL: Folks, the tax cut plan is far from being a sure thing. That’s because the GOP put so little time and thought into their bill that they accidentally saddled it with all sorts of errors, contradictions, and confusions that undercut their primary aim of slashing taxes for rich people and companies. (For example, by reinstating the corporate alternative minimum tax at the last second, the GOP “nullified all of their corporate donors’ favorite deductions.”) The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that some high income earners could even face a 100% marginal rate on some of their income. “As income climbs and those breaks phase out, each dollar of income faces regular tax rates and a hidden marginal rate on top of that, in the form of vanishing tax breaks. That structure, if maintained in a final law, would create some of the disincentives to working and to earning business profit that Republicans have long complained about, while opening lucrative avenues for tax avoidance.” “Some provisions are so vaguely written they leave experts scratching their heads, like a proposal to begin taxing the investment earnings of rich private universities’ endowments. The legislation doesn’t explain what’s considered an endowment, and some colleges have more than 1,000 accounts.” Obviously, most of this crap will remain in the final bill; only the stuff that actively hurts rich people and corporations will be “fixed.” Which is to say that this bill will perform “the opposite function of tax reform,” as Chait puts it. “It is, at best, a messy helicopter drop of cash on corporate America.” But as long as the bill has to go up for a vote in both chambers again, it’s not a done deal -- especially as the promises extracted to get some senators’ votes reveal themselves to be as empty as Mike Pence’s cranium. In particular, Susan Collins said that McConnell promised her that two important health care bills to shore up the individual markets would be passed first, before the final tax bill. This was her price to support a tax bill that will blow up the individual market by repealing the individual mandate, which will cause 13 million people to lose their insurance and will likely cause premiums to skyrocket. But of course, McConnell cannot force the House to pass anything, and Paul Ryan has said he does not support the bills Collins wants passed. And Jeff Flake’s vote was obtained with a promise that DACA Dreamers would be protected. So the question is, as these promises fail to come to fruition, whether those senators will fall into line or hold onto their supposed principles. Maine voters, Arizona voters, and the rest of us -- to the phones!
P.S. The Trump Treasury Department finally admitted today that the tax plan won’t pay for itself (duh): “For months now, top leaders in the Trump administration have been promising to produce a dynamic economic analysis that shows the growth-boosting powers of its tax plan are so impressive that they will negate any revenue loss. But the report — published by an agency overseen by Trump appointees and using methods Republicans say they favor — found that they have to assume large numbers of additional policy changes to get the growth they’ve promised.”
RIGHT WING ASSAULT ON MUELLER: As many of us wait with nervous anticipation for the fruits of Mueller’s investigation (which has already borne some incredible fruit -- more on that below), the other half of the country -- and its leaders and media figures -- are working tirelessly to undercut the investigation. Fox News is in overdrive, parroting a party line that the investigation is “corrupt” and that the entire FBI is tainted. It is truly incredible, and frightening. The Right has latched onto specious claims of bias because a single FBI investigator, who also worked on the Clinton email server investigation and helped edit Comey’s remarks in which he announced there would be no criminal charges, expressed anti-Trump views in private text messages to friends. Mueller removed him from the investigation in August. When the Times reported this last week, the Right wing wasted no time climbing up Bullshit Mountain, expressing shock and outrage that someone with private views was allowed to work in law enforcement. (It seems to me that saying anyone with a private bias is automatically disqualified from law enforcement is a dangerous precedent the Right will have a hard time actually following.) Mainstream Republicans are screaming for an investigation into Mueller and his team. The irony of the GOP’s attacks -- that the FBI and Comey and Mueller are all in some conspiracy against Trump, when it is only because of the FBI and Comey that Trump is even president -- sends me into paroxysms of incredulous rage. ARE THESE PEOPLE EFFING SERIOUS? Regardless, we need to take this line of attack extremely seriously. Paul Waldman argues that this is a massive PR campaign to immunize half of the public against any findings Meuller might make, by convincing them that this is all just a partisan witch-hunt. As Dahlia Lithwick puts it, “[I]t often feels like it wouldn’t be enough for Mueller to hand us a smoking gun and an indictment. What if they threw a conviction and nobody came?” Jonathan Chait argues that the GOP’s response to Roy Moore -- rapid disavowal, followed by silence, followed by newfound partisan acceptance and open endorsement -- shows that Mueller’s investigation is now in “mortal danger”:
This was the dynamic last year, when a tape revealed Trump casually confessing to sexual assault, and it was briefly impossible to imagine that he could continue the campaign. Reince Priebus urged him to quit; Mike Pence reportedly offered his services to the RNC as a substitute. Then the incomprehensible became inevitable. The same thing happened in May when a Republican House candidate, Greg Gianforte, assaulted a reporter and then lied about it. Would Republicans denounce him? Expel him? It turned out they would do nothing. By the time Moore came along, the party’s moral sensibilities had been worn to a nub.
The next step in the sequence is almost insultingly obvious. Trump is preparing to shut down Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian intervention in the 2016 election.
And the GOP won’t do a damn thing about it.
FRANKEN, MOORE, AND THINGS THAT AREN’T THE SAME: So last week, Al Franken announced his impending resignation, and Donald Trump doubled down on his support for Roy Moore. I really hate talking about these men in the same sentence, because what they are accused of (even ignoring every non-sexual terrible thing about Moore) is not even remotely similar. But still, we should discuss them both. First, on Franken: The last time I addressed him here, there was a story of a single incident, from years before he was a senator, in which he took a humiliating and unacceptable “funny” photo pretending to grope a sleeping woman. I said that he should not resign. In the past few weeks, multiple other women have come forward to say that he groped them, often while posing for photos, including while he was a senator. This behavior is insane and gross and pathetic. There is no reason to grab a woman’s ass during a photo except to show her that she is less than, that her humanity is subservient to your prurient gratification. It is a subtle but effective way of demonstrating that a woman’s autonomy need not be respected. So in my mind, the allegations are pretty serious. I am furious and disappointed. And so I think Franken did the right thing in stepping down. It’s inraging because he is a great senator, and because a serial sexual abuser is sitting in the oval office, and because we know there are far worse sexual harassers (men who abuse women who work for them) sitting in Congress today. (One of those men, John Conyers, was thankfully pressured into resigning. The allegations against him are truly gross.) But it was the right thing to do. (What is NOT right and is insanely politically stupid would be for the Democratic governor to appoint a “place-holder” who would not run for election, making the seat wide open in 2018. That’s just dumb. Appoint a good person who will run. Why make our job that much harder in 2018, when we already have to defend Amy Klobuchar’s seat?) For a contrary view, or at least a take that gives me great pause, read Dahlia Lithwick on the Democrats’ unilateral disarmament (and don’t miss her fabulous kicker).
Okay, on to Roy Moore. The idea that Alabama is about to elect this man is so abhorrent and revolting it’s hard to do anything but laugh. What’s so particularly craven is that, since this is a special election, he will only hold the seat until 2020, when he would have to run again. Which means that Republicans would only have to deal with Doug Jones for 2 years before being able to run a sane and normal (or more normal) Republican who would almost certainly handily defeat him in 2020. So when Republicans are choosing party over normal decency, it is only in service of avoiding two years of a Democratic senator. TWO YEARS. Mitch McConnell and the RNC’s caving is particularly egregious, given that McConnell has stated that he believes the women’s allegations against Moore, and the RNC was so disturbed that it pulled its funding from the campaign -- only now, a few weeks later, for McConnell to declare that “the voters should decide” and the RNC to re-enter the race with guns blazing. Thus, these people believe Moore preyed on young girls and are openly supporting him anyway. And again, to beat a dead hore, the allegations of child abuse are really not the worst things about Moore, when it comes to being a senator. Just this weekend, CNN reported that Moore declared a few years ago that nullyfing all the amendments after the 10th Amendment -- including, you know, the 13th (abolishing slavery), the 14th (incorporating the Bill of Rights against the states), the 15th (guaranteeing the right to vote regardless of race), and the 19th (granting women the right to vote) -- “would eliminate many problems.” This is a person who claims to steadfastly support the Constitution. He is a cave-dwelling cretin of the first order.
DEMOCRATS NEED TO WORK THIS SHUT-DOWN: Along with all the other things they are trying to do, the GOP was supposed to fund the government by last Friday. At the last second, they passed a temporary stop-gap, funding the government at current levels through December 22, avoiding a shutdown. But now Congress must pass a full spending bill -- and they need Democratic votes. This is both because they’ll need 60 votes in the Senate and because the far-right flank in the House is likely to oppose the bill because they don’t like spending or whatever. So if the GOP needs the Dems to help, despite their unified control of government, then Democrats need to extract important concessions for that help. The most important would be a DREAM Act, which many Republicans purport to support, and full funding of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (“CHIP”), another bipartisan bill that supposedly everyone is for and yet whose funding the GOP allowed to lapse earlier this fall. Of course, Democrats are struggling to figure out their strategy and stay united behind it. I guess we’ll see what happens.
Endorsements:
- You’ve probably heard about this awful and dispiriting and straight-up bananas Times story about Trump. But you really should read the whole thing.
- I don’t know how I got through all of law school and 5 years into my legal career before hearing that Judge Kozinski, a conservative on the 9th Circuit who is super high-profile and sends a ton of his clerks on to clerk for the Supreme Court, was a shocking creep and harasser. That news broke this week, but it was supposedly another one of those “open secrets,” one that I was just entirely oblivious to. You really need to read this former clerk’s account of the disgusting and downright terrifying harassment she suffered at his hand.
- ...I guess I didn’t read that much great stuff last week. Sorry!
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