Expectations and Reality Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Expectations and Reality
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 3h
I don’t agree with a number of the points TPM Reader RS makes. But I think he hits on a key point on the mismatch between the expectations of at least engaged Democratic partisans and what they’ve seen since the midterm elections. The degree to which congressional Democrats really have it within their power to do more is another question. But the mismatch of expectations and reality is real and a pretty big issue …

We should devote more attention to the mismatch between expectations by those who voted for Democratic House candidates in 2018 and the slow walking approach of House Democrats since January. We think too much about how Trump feeds his base, and not enough on how his blocking of Congressional investigations has a side benefit for Republicans: demonstrating to Democratic voters that they are wasting their time turning out because his side is just plain stronger and tougher.

We would not be having the impeachment debate at such an intense level if the House majority had seen its role as picking up the thread of the Democratic mobilization and acted as a bridge to the presidential election. The last time this happened, right after Trump’s election, congressional Democrats were planning to “work with” Trump until the women’s marches put some energy into them. The equivalent of the protests is the call for impeachment. Democrats would not be facing such a big push for impeachment if they had treated the first half of 2019 as an urgent mission to get information by any legal means necessary.

Part of the problem is that the House committee chairs were not the reason the Democrats won the House. It was the new class of members many of whom are newbies and unlikely to drive the House agenda. The oldsters, used to their comfortable, slow ways, and thinking they have all the time in the world, are making the decisions about witnesses, subpoenas, contempt, and other actions. When they are blocked by the administration, they don’t have a plan 2 of seemingly unorthodox ways to get the information they need; they are used to deference. Long time House members really do have all the time in the world. But in our current crisis, speed kills, and the country doesn’t have all the time in the world before we are consumed by the presidential election. The House majority had a mission handed over by those who voted for them, and it would be sad indeed to send the message that “we tried, but hey the White House was just too tough. I guess the only choice is impeachment or give up.”

It’s not too late, but it’s getting late to squander the middle handoff of this relay race.

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Is Arizona the Real Tipping Point State? Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

Is Arizona the Real Tipping Point State?

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 3h

TPM Reader GH makes a pitch for Arizona rather than Wisconsin as the real tipping point state in 2020. For me I’m still inclined to see Wisconsin as the critical state, not because I disagree with any of the particular arguments, simply we’ve seen Dems win it before in recent history. There’s a proof of concept for lack of a better phrase. But these are still very good points worth considering …

I love the work you do. I was so happy to read about your union, and I’m even more supportive of TPM because of it.

On the criticality of Wisconsin, I do agree that it’s looking more like the critical state in comparison to Michigan and Pennsylvania. But Arizona really looks like it’s ready for purple Prime Time. The two states (WI/AZ) are worth nearly the same amount of electoral votes, making them interchangeable for 2020 purposes. And in the 2018 races, the two big headliners in each state wound up as very close Dem victories. Sinema actually beat McSally by more than Evers beat Walker. (2 points in AZ, 1 point in WI)

The polls were a bit skewed in 2016. Nate Cohn, while he was working to run all those Siena polls in fall 2018, noted something that has stuck with me. The polling error in 2016 might not have been a failure of the polls so much as a rapid late shift that didn’t get picked up by polls that had basically wrapped up by E-Day. Cohn noted that the late undecideds in the Siena polls were disproportionately non-college. He found that when those voters did decide, they tended to gravitate toward where you’d expect them to. White non-college to the GOP. Non-white non-college to the Democrats.

In the industrial Midwest, those late-breakers are mostly white non-college. Very typically Trump-backing and Republican. This is why polls showing Clinton ahead in ’16 were off. And it’s why some of the Dem victories in 2018 in that region were tighter than polls predicted. In an extreme example, the Ohio Gov race turned into a solid GOP win when polls showed a modest Cordray win. But this effect occurred in Iowa and Michigan as well.

But the opposite happens in states with high numbers of non-white non-college voters. This is especially important in Nevada, Arizona, and Texas. In all three big headline races in 2018, the Democrats outperformed polls by decent margins. All of those late breaking California Congressional races should be noted here, too. Especially CA-21, which is possibly the most non-white non-college district in the entire country.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying: I think Arizona may be on par with Wisconsin because of these polling biases. Wisconsin is redder than polling makes it appear, and Arizona is bluer than it appears. If Democrats win MI/PA, they only need one of AZ/WI, and I think it’s a close call as to which will be the tipping point state in 2020.

And not to get too far ahead of myself, but if that same effect continues into 2020, it spells very bad things for Republicans in Texas, where polls already show a close race.

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The Judges Who See Through Trump’s B.S. The New Republic / by Matt Ford

The Judges Who See Through Trump’s B.S.

The New Republic / by Matt Ford / 9d

Rarely does a week pass without a federal judge ruling against President Donald Trump in one case or another. Last week, the president faced defeats on two fronts. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the House could obtain Trump’s records from his longtime accounts. Then a federal judge in California halted his efforts to redirect federal funds to build his border wall without congressional approval.

In each case, the judges spurned Trump’s extreme views of presidential power and his warped depiction of events. This isn’t surprising in and of itself. The lower federal courts have routinely seen past the administration’s smokescreens on cases ranging from the Muslim ban to the Census’ citizenship question. I noted last month that the Supreme Court has often vindicated Trump by embracing his pretextual justifications and alternative histories. The latest slate of rulings shows how the lower federal courts are still capable of seeing through his smokescreens—and, by contrast, highlights the Supreme Court’s inability to do so.

In the D.C. lawsuit, Trump filed a challenge last month to block a House Oversight Committee subpoena for accounting firm Mazars USA. William Consovoy, one of the president’s private attorneys, cast the president as the hapless victim of an “all-out political war” by the “Democrat Party.” He told the court that the subpoena lacked a “legitimate legislative purpose” to inquire into Trump’s finances and that their efforts usurped on the executive branch’s law-enforcement powers.

“Instead of working with the president to pass bipartisan legislation that would actually benefit Americans, House Democrats are singularly obsessed with finding something they can use to damage the president politically,” he argued in the initial complaint in April. He also made the extraordinary argument that Congress could not investigate whether the president (or anyone else, for that matter) had committed a crime because that was the role of the executive and judicial branches. During oral arguments earlier this month, Consovoy told Judge Amit Mehta that Congress’ inquiries into Watergate and Whitewater had been unconstitutional.

The judge took a different view of congressional oversight: “It is simply not fathomable that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a president for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct—past or present—even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry.” Though Consovoy argued the investigations into Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton had violated the separation of powers, Mehta concluded that those sagas supported the House’s case now. “Congress plainly views itself as having sweeping authority to investigate illegal conduct of a president, before and after taking office,” he explained. “This court is not prepared to roll back the tide of history.”

Mehta also dismissed Consovoy’s claims that Trump is the victim of congressional harassment. Consovoy had cited various Democrats’ campaign statements about how they could use oversight powers to rein in the Trump administration, but the judge said drawing any conclusions from those statements would be a “dubious evidentiary proposition given that these individuals do not control the actions of the Oversight Committee, and that they “make no material difference” in his analysis. “In short, as long as there is a facially valid legislative purpose for the investigation, Congress acts within its constitutional authority,” he wrote. “That is the case here.”

The other case involves a legal challenge to Trump’s emergency declaration earlier this year that redirected federal funds to build the border wall after Congress refused to authorize more money for it. The ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Commission in February, arguing that the Trump administration’s fiscal legerdemain violated Congress’ power to appropriate federal money. In his ruling on Friday, Judge Haywood Gilliam sided with the plaintiffs.

The Trump administration had justified the shifting of federal funds in this case under two key provisions. They argued that Section 8005, a provision in the latest defense appropriations bill, allows the Department of Defense to shift its appropriated funds to pay for projects based on “unforeseen military requirements,” so long as Congress hasn’t already rejected the expenditure itself. A second provision in federal law known as Section 284 allows the Department of Defense to fund “counterdrug activities” undertaken by other federal and state agencies.

In February, after Trump declared a national emergency and ended the government shutdown, the Department of Homeland Security requested Section 284 funds to build barriers across “drug-smuggling corridors” on the border. DOD used Section 8005 to transfer $1.5 billion in other military funds to the Section 284 fund to pay for the request—essentially robbing First Lieutenant Peter to pay Border Agent Paul. The Trump administration told the court that the request counted as “unforeseen military requirements” because it wasn’t specifically outlined in the January 2018 budget request, even though everyone knew Trump had taken the unusual step because he was losing a political showdown with Congress over it.

Gilliam rejected Trump’s version of events. He noted that Trump had publicly demanded—and Congress had rejected—more border-wall funding on a regular basis. “[The administration’s] argument that the need for the requested border barrier construction funding was ‘unforeseen’ cannot logically be squared with the Administration’s multiple requests for funding for exactly that purpose dating back to at least early 2018,” he wrote. The judge quoted not only from the White House budget request last January, but also from Trump’s infamous vow to lawmakers last December that “if we don’t get what we want [for the wall], one way or the other ... I will shut down the government.”

The judge also took aim at the administration’s sweeping interpretation of its authority to shuffle around federal funds already allocated by Congress. He posited a hypothetical scenario in which DHS could wait to see if Congress appropriated money to a specific project, then request the necessary funds from the military if they didn’t. “Under this interpretation, DoD could in essence make a de facto appropriation to DHS, evading congressional control entirely,” Gilliam wrote. “The Court finds that this interpretation likely would pose serious problems under the Appropriations Clause, by ceding essentially boundless appropriations judgment to the executive agencies.”

The administration also took an unorthodox view of who controls the federal purse. In theory, only the legislature can appropriate funds for the executive branch to spend, but the administration suggested otherwise. “If Congress had wanted to deny DOD this specific use of that [Section 8005] authority, that’s something it needed to actually do in an explicit way in the appropriations process,” a Justice Department lawyer argued in a hearing earlier this month. “And it didn’t.”

“But it is not Congress’s burden to prohibit the Executive from spending the Nation’s funds: it is the Executive’s burden to show that its desired use of those funds was affirmatively approved by Congress,” Gilliam wrote, quoting James Madison in the Federalist Papers. “To have this any other way would deprive Congress of its absolute control over the power of the purse, ‘one of the most important authorities allocated to Congress in the Constitution’s “necessary partition of power among the several departments.”’”

Trump has already begun the process to appeal both decisions to the respective federal circuit courts of appeal. If he loses again at that stage, his last best hope would be the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative colleagues have tended to favor Trump’s interpretations of the law and the events surrounding each dispute, no matter how pretextual or bad-faith they may seem. They may well do so again in these two cases—and that will be the final legal word on these matters, for now. But the sound rulings by federal judges like Amir Mehta and Haywood Gilliam show that the courts overall are doing their job to check a president who wishes he were king, even if the high court’s obsequious conservative justices are not.

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The Radicalization of Fiona Scott Morton The New Republic / by David Dayen

The Radicalization of Fiona Scott Morton

The New Republic / by David Dayen / 15d

If you attend enough conferences about antitrust policy, and I’ll impress you by saying that I have, you will inevitably hear two familiar words: “chilling” and “humble.” Any effort to prosecute antitrust cases, panelists say, creates a chilling effect on investment, preventing businesses from growing and thriving; and enforcers must be humble about how they interpret and apply the law.

Since the 1970s, conservative theorists from the University of Chicago have spoon-fed the legal theory behind such buzzwords to academics, judges, and regulators, and most have uncritically accepted it. In the Chicago School’s telling, mergers are good, enforcement is bad, and antitrust action is not to be trusted. The mindset is why we’re living in an age of monopoly, where four airlines run most of the routes, two providers serve up nearly all cable television, and two companies produce nearly all of the nation’s corn seeds.

Fiona Scott Morton, an economics professor at the Yale School of Management, is the last person I’d have expected to question this status quo. But in March, during a panel at American University called “The Antitrust Paradigm: Restoring a Competitive Economy,” I watched her tell researchers and academics, “‘Chilling’ means firms are fantastic ... and ‘humble’ means ‘I don’t want to enforce the antitrust laws.’”


Scott Morton didn’t always sound so radical. I’d heard her speak several times before that panel, and assumed that she, like antitrust experts in both parties, was deferential to big business. She’d worked under President Obama in the antitrust division of the Justice Department, which never followed up on a promise Obama made to family farmers to prevent agribusinesses from squeezing their profits and throwing them into financial ruin. The division also approved a spate of airline mergers and a deal between Ticketmaster and Live Nation that created a virtual monopoly in event ticketing.

While she may not have agreed with those decisions at the time, Scott Morton never spoke out against them, calling instead for “more research.” Not so long ago, she told me, she still believed in “incremental reform.”

Since then, however, she has emerged as a strident voice for cracking down on the behemoths that control our economy—a transformation that has played out in public and on her lively Twitter feed. Today, she calls monopoly power “an emergency.” What changed?


Scott Morton didn’t initiate the burgeoning intellectual movement that has sprung up in recent years to challenge the Chicago School. Rather, the movement moved her. Groups like the Open Markets Institute have condemned the ways in which large corporations have hijacked our democracy. And their activism has helped spur bold new strains of questioning, even inside the sober confines of the ivory tower. “I actually have had the same opinion about antitrust enforcement I think for quite a while,” Scott Morton told me. “I was just not as willing to say it as publicly because so few other people seemed to share it.”

When Scott Morton worked in the Obama administration, she told me, the research on rising economic concentration and its effects was not yet clear. Now, however, we know that companies use their dominance to mark up prices, while workers see wages go down. Reporting has shown that concentration brings poorer service, fragile supply chains, regional blight, and degraded democracy.


Armed with such data, Scott Morton has worked to win over Chicago School acolytes like the University of Michigan’s Daniel Crane, who, at American University in March, cited the beer industry as evidence that concentration has not, in fact, permeated every corner of the economy. “In Michigan we have 122 craft breweries! I have a huge variety of choices,” he told the crowd. This may be the case in a college town like Ann Arbor, but nationally, two companies control around 65 percent of the market, and the one that owns Budweiser has bought upnearly a dozen of the “independent” craft brewers Crane cherishes. “You know who drinks craft beer,” Scott Morton thundered, “the people in this room! Regular people do not drink craft beer.... Looking out at the world and saying here are the products I like and there’s more of them, so everything’s fine, is an example of elites looking after themselves.... This is why we have populism in America.”


It’s rare for an academic to marry policy to political reality so adroitly, but this is where Scott Morton excels. She has helped compile essays for The Yale Law Journal that argue for shifts in the way enforcers approach their work. One suggested that they look not only at whether mergers harm customers, but also at whether they hurt sellers, like the small vendors that Amazon has pushed from the market; another essay urged regulators to block “vertical” mergers of businesses that operate at different points along a supply chain—say, if AT&T, which distributes cable TV, buys Time Warner, which makes it.


In that same series, Scott Morton and American University’s Jon Baker published an article pointing out that Amazon and travel booking sites could be violating antitrust law by routinely demanding that their outside sellers not offer a lower price elsewhere on the web—a practice that artificially inflates prices and makes it impossible for a platform competitor to attract customers. Within a year, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut asked the Justice Department to investigate, and Amazon ended the practice. Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, chair of the House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee, has also relied on Scott Morton’s assistance on legislation enabling the Federal Trade Commission to recoup health care profits obtained from stifling competition. (Cicilline calls Scott Morton “an invaluable resource.”)


Historically, leaders have tended only to take on concentrated corporate power when emboldened by bottom-up movements. That type of pressure has already moved Scott Morton to adopt the rhetoric of a radical populist, and is forcing politicians to make antitrust a priority as well. “We need citizens to understand that monopoly power is a problem and ask their representatives to fix it,” she explained. Thurman Arnold, FDR’s head of the antitrust division of the Justice Department, was so popular during and after the Depression that he gave nationwide radio addresses. “That’s how interested people were then,” she said. “That’s where we need to be.”  

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Climate Deniers Are the Hysterical Alarmists The New Republic / by Emily Atkin

Climate Deniers Are the Hysterical Alarmists

The New Republic / by Emily Atkin / 9d

The climate deniers in the Trump administration are at it again. On Monday, TheNew York Times reported that the president is silencing critical government research on climate change and creating a panel to question the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions cause warming. The ultimate goal, one former Trump adviser said, is to stop “silly alarmist predictions about the future.”

So, naturally, the president’s pick to lead the panel is a guy who has likened climate activists to Nazis.

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” William Happer, a 79-year-old physicist and member of Trump’s National Security Council, said in 2014. The quote has not gone unnoticed since then, as many media outlets have cited it over the years. But it has gotten renewed, and perhaps wider, attention since appearing in the Times’ story, as incredulous journalists and others on Twitter couldn’t believe anyone—let alone a political adviser in a presidential administration—would say something so egregious.

In reality, though, Happer’s quote isn’t that much more extreme than a lot of climate-denier rhetoric. They, not climate scientists or activists, are the real alarmists: hyperbolic, fear-mongering, and completely divorced from scientific reality.

Let’s not forget that Trump himself once tweeted:

He may well have been taking his cues from Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the most influential climate denier in the history of Congress, who said on the Senate floor in 2003, “Wake up, America. With all the hysteria, all the fear, all the phony science, could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? I believe it is.”

The climate-denier conspiracy theories continue to this day. Just last week, congressional Republicans invited a man named Marc Morano to testify at a House hearing on the recent United Nations report showing that humans are causing a mass species extinction. Morano called the report a “science con,” accusing the U.N. of putting out “authoritative propaganda” in order to gain “more regulatory control of the economy and people’s lives.” He also accused U.N. officials at the hearing of being in on this alleged scheme, for which he offered no concrete evidence.

Morano is not some random crackpot. Formerly Inhofe’s communications director, he now leads communications for the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow, a conservative think tank partially funded by oil interests, and is executive director of Climate Depot, a sort of Drudge Report for climate deniers. In other words, he’s an influential crackpot.

Climate deniers like Morano and his former boss are nothing if not consistent in their rhetoric: Anyone who calls for urgent action on climate change is a hysterical alarmist, and any action on climate change will kill jobs, tank the economy, and rob Americans of their freedom. “Alarmists are distracting Americans from the pain the Obama administration’s regulations will inflict on our economy while failing to make a significant impact on climate change,” Inhofe wrote in 2015.

Or just look at the recent headlines on CFACT’s website: “Climate hysteria,” “Freedom under assault,” “‘Extinction crisis’ speciously targets free markets,” “Environmental indoctrination in our schools”...

It’s clear who the real alarmists are. Yes, rational people who accept the scientific consensus about climate change are generally “alarmed” by it, just as they’re alarmed that one of the two major parties in America refuses to accept that consensus. But an “alarmist,” by definition, is “someone who is considered to be exaggerating a danger and so causing needless worry or panic.” The facts show that humans have every reason to panic about humanity’s future on this planet. It’s the deniers who are guilty of exaggeration and needless worry. As The Washington Post’s Daniel Drezner wryly tweeted:

It takes a warped mind to believe that the real threat to civilization isn’t climate change, but government action to reduce climate change. And it takes yet another warped mind to consider that person worthy of a powerful position in the federal government.

Be alarmed. Be very alarmed.

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More Muellerology Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

More Muellerology

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 3h

TPM Reader GB isn’t satisfied with the Mueller explanations …

I enjoyed hearing the perspective from the TPM reader who had worked with Mueller and many members of his team, and don’t doubt that he would have much greater insight into the people involved than I do.

But looking from the outside, I wonder if it’s possible that Mueller wasn’t snookered at all (at least in the sense of being surprised) by how Barr handled things, and that maybe people who (for other, often quite valid reasons) want or hope to see evidence supporting impeachment may be projecting onto Mueller their own preferences and biases.

Mueller is widely viewed as a straight-shooter, meticulously fair, and a by-the-book institutionalist. But Barr and Mueller were, according to media reports, good friends (at least prior to him taking the special counsel job).

Maybe this friendship colors how he views Barr’s actions, and Mueller may not think Barr is acting in bad faith, or maybe simply he’s trying to avoid an overt confrontation with his long-time friend. Mueller’s statement did explicitly say he “[does] not question the attorney general’s good faith in that decision”, a phrase literally limited solely to the choice to release the full (redacted) Mueller report all at once, rather than releasing some parts first, as Mueller requested. Does that also imply Mueller thinks Barr is acting in good faith in general, or simply with respect to this one decision? Depending on your view of Barr, you may interpret that quite differently.

Many on the left have elevated Mueller to a savior like figure, as the Trump-slayer who will bring the hammer of justice down to end the madness. But it seems Mueller doesn’t want to, or simply can’t, play that role. He’ll report what he feels he must report, and then would rather get out of the way.

We live in quite a partisan time, and one in which pretty much the whole Republican party has gone Trumpian. At a personal level, it may be hard for Mueller, himself a life-long Republican, to be cast in the role of destroyer of a GOP presidency, even if the facts may point in that direction.

So he writes his report and steps back. The OLC says he can’t indict. Congress may (or may not) choose to impeach, but that’s their political call, not his decision. The report has largely been made public, and if most people can’t be bothered to read it, that’s not his problem.

Robert Mueller is a public servant with a long, distinguished career, but he’s not justice personified. He’s human, and his motivations and preferences may not be the ones we’d like to project onto him.

Maybe, for whatever reason, Mueller actually doesn’t want to see Trump impeached or indicted, in which case the long silences, lack of leaks from his office, and the reluctance to push back publicly about Barr’s characterization of his report make a lot of sense. Maybe Mueller is being snookered because he wants to be.

For my part, I assumed it was always a given that the Mueller as Trump-Slayer dialog was always tongue-in-cheek or silly on its face. I tend to think whatever the explanation is it isn’t to be found in personal friendships or partisanship but temperament.

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Welcome to the People’s Democratic Republic of America by MELISSA CHAN, foreignpolicy.com


Welcome to the People’s Democratic Republic of America
by MELISSA CHAN, foreignpolicy.com
January 11, 2019 10:39 AM
This week, the networks handed free airtime over to U.S. President Donald Trump knowing full well he would lie during his Oval Office speech. No less a giant than Ted Koppel declared, “When the president of the United States asks for airtime, you’ve got to do it.”

American journalists and media institutions seem critically unprepared to cope with the bad faith and corruption coming out of their own government. Repeatedly played by Trump, network executives appear capable of rationalizing any decision. If he came out to announce a coup, they would probably go ahead and broadcast it on the basis of its newsworthiness. It’s a sharp contrast with the skill of American correspondents dealing with hostile administrations abroad.

When I observe how some domestic journalists have tackled the Trump administration, I remember my own confusion when I came back home after almost a decade overseas.

I had spent so much time in China and other closed societies, often navigating sensitive topics with defensive government officials with skeletons to hide, that I no longer had the habit of asking straight, point-blank questions. Instead, I would conduct these circuitous, long-winded conversations, the kind you embark on in order to build trust and warm up a wary interview subject in places where journalists, especially foreign ones, are framed as the enemy of the people.

Except I was talking to a press officer at a state agency in California. When I finally dropped the question I cared most about, which I hoped he wouldn’t flip out over, he happily launched into all the problems at the agency. All on the record.

I was stunned—first at him, and then at myself, when I realized I’d been abroad so long that I had forgotten how a free society functioned. In wondrous America, you could ask whatever questions you wanted, and people are likely to answer them!

Then Donald Trump announced he would run for president. His campaign marked a tonal shift nationally. On the media, he not only labeled any story he disliked “fake news,” but he also questioned the patriotism of reporters. First at rallies and later from the White House, he singled out journalists—a troubling authoritarian strategy I recognized from my years in China.

It is more dangerous to report in the United States now. The public also trusts us less. There has been a rise in misinformation, disinformation, and government hostility to fact-finding.

But a big part of American media has also failed—as almost all of us in the industry and the public acknowledge. Many journalists cannot bring themselves to recognize that their country has changed.

. Let’s call it the Democratic Republic of America, or the DRA for short.

This isn’t entirely new thinking. Within days of Trump’s win in November 2016, Masha Gessen, who had reported from Russia, published her widely read piece on surviving autocracy, writing that “the national press is likely to be among the first institutional victims” and warning reporters they would likely face the possibility of losing access if they pushed officials too hard.

Journalists should embrace Gessen’s imagined future as imminent reality, however unlikely that actually is. I can’t think of a more useful time to do so. You have arrived in the DRA, and the rules are changing.

D.C. reporters now work in a foreign bureau. It might seem like home, but the rules keep changing, and every week there’s a new crisis. The government doesn’t want you there, but it has to tolerate you for appearances’ sake. Officials who would talk to you one month close their mouths the next. And while it might all seem farcical, lives are at stake.

This is the DRA, that exhausting country beat you want your editor to eventually rotate you out of, but it’s also the story of a lifetime, and the stakes are high.

I saw some of this DRA thinking with MSNBC’s decision late last year. The channel had decided not to air a White House press conference. That move attracted a ton of attention, but it shouldn’t have. U.S. cable broadcasters’ habit of pro forma distributing White House briefings should stop. Propaganda from the administration should be given no more credibility or time than American media gives to Nicolás Maduro’s daily rants or Xi Jinping’s patriarchal videos. This doesn’t mean instinctively dismissing them but instead evaluating the government as they would any other country’s rather than instinctively following its every demand.

Reporters should regularly skip out on news conferences altogether. What if they didn’t even wait for the next Jim Acosta credentialing brouhaha but simply boycotted because the White House distributes disinformation?

I know what the Beijing foreign press corps did: We just ignored the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ blather and generally avoided attending the twice-weekly events, choosing to spend our time more productively. I would glance at the transcript once it came out and might even use an excerpt, but I never regretted not attending any of them in person. As media critic Jay Rosen says, send the interns.

And eventually, most reporters in a foreign post move on. Some, of course, become lifers and stay, becoming valuable for their accumulated institutional memory, list of sources, and insider access. They are irreplaceable. But their kind of contribution is only one kind of reporting.

In China, it became kind of a thing for outgoing correspondents to produce their juiciest stories in the final months of their stay, on their way out and when officials had the least leverage to punish them (such as by threatening to revoke their press credentials). Not giving a single solitary fuck can produce some great reporting. When it became clear my own stay in China had an expiration date—officials had indicated they would expel me—I went to town my final month, investigating extralegal detention centers by barging right into facilities and interviewing a rights attorney against the direct wishes of state security.

On a practical level, I understand this is far less possible in the United States, but I wonder how reporting might change if newsrooms encouraged journalists to spend only a few years in D.C. Plenty of journalists already move around, but not nearly enough—and many Washington correspondents have a habit of becoming so obsessed with access that they neglect to critically examine or question their sources.

The more reporters feel they can have those final exit months to burn bridges, the better.

When leaders overseas make ridiculous pronouncements, foreign correspondents often dismiss the statement and move on. They can be pretty irreverent about it, perhaps because the leader is not their leader, and the government not their government. And for D.C. correspondents, that’s where remembering they live in the DRA now might help.

There have already been excellent strands of this, particularly with Joshua Keating’s occasional pieces on U.S. current events under the “If It Happened There” umbrella, written in the manner of American journalists covering stories abroad. But it’s time to move beyond quirky columns and make this kind of thinking mainstream, a powerful way for all media to reorient how we think about reporting on the government.

I propose this on the principle that as reporters, we act as our harshest critics. Some of the best investigative reporting in decades has taken place in the last couple of years. But the media must do better, and as a longtime foreign correspondent, I say we give the DRA as much hell as we’ve given all the other countries we’ve ever covered—and for the same reason: because we care about the people who live there, not the officials that rule them.

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