Why Doesn’t McGahn Fight Back? Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo

Why Doesn’t McGahn Fight Back?
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 7h
Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh arrives for testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee the second day of his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill September 5, 2018 in Washington, DC. Kavanaugh was nominated by President Donald Trump to fill the vacancy on the court left by retiring Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Someone asked me this morning how it is that Don McGahn still refuses to testify to Congress even after Donald Trump is literally accusing him of committing a felony by lying under oath in his testimony to the Special Counsel’s Office. One point to note here: no one thinks that the White House can bind McGahn. The White House can arguably give him a rationale, legal reason to refuse to testify. But he’s definitely free to do what he wants. So why is he still doing Trump’s bidding?

The answer is as clear as it is depressing.

First, everyone knows that Trump is lying. Everyone. So there’s no sense that McGahn needs to vindicate his professional reputation by making clear or insisting that his testimony was truthful. There’s no downside because everyone knows Trump is lying.

Second, McGahn is a professional Republican. He’s not a big time lawyer at a white shoe law firm who often works for Republicans or happened to work for Trump. He’s a professional Republican campaign lawyer at the top of his field. His business and career is working for the Republican party. At some level he probably just doesn’t want to testify because as mad as he may be at Trump he still supports what Trump’s doing politically. But the bigger issue is that he probably fears that if he cooperated with House investigators his career would be over. And he’s probably right.

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Having Zero Credibility Has Costs Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo

Having Zero Credibility Has Costs
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 11min
The current (as yet) low level crisis in the Persian Gulf is a good example of the consequences of extreme, chronic lying on the part of the US government. All government’s lie, as I.F.Stone put it. But they don’t all lie to the same degree or in the same way. The Trump administration lies at almost unprecedented levels even compared to the Bush, Nixon and Johnson administrations. Those three lied about intelligence and international incidents with far greater consequences (so far); but for pure willingness to lie and frequency, it’s just not even close.

With that said, you don’t need to assume irrationality or perfidy on the part of the Iranians for them to be behind this. We had a deal with the Iranians backed by all the global powers. We broke the agreement and are now trying to strangle the Iranian economy with new sanctions. By historical standards those actions are reasonably understood to be acts of war. Low level attacks on commercial shipping just under the level that might trigger direct US retaliation has a clear logic to it.

On the other hand, pretty much every regional adversary has a strong incentive to mount some kind of false flag operation, or rush to blame the Iranians. At least a couple have recent histories of reckless, high-risk gambits to advance their perceived goals. The obvious player here is Saudi Arabia and its de facto ruler Mohammad bin Salman. Others seem possible as well.

I know much less about the internal factions in Iran. But there is at least significant history of different factions not operating with total coordination within Iran.

US claims are further undermined by statements from the owner of the Japanese tanker. The President of the company didn’t dispute or validate the US accusations about who was at fault but contradicted how the US claims the attack happened. The US says it was a mine. The tanker owner said it was a flying object (presumably a missile or projectile of some sort) which had an impact entirely above the ship’s waterline. That doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in the US version of events.

The truth is all the players involved have huge incentives to lie. And a few of them have very recent histories of the most flagrant falsehoods and dirty tricks on an international scale.

One final point goes beyond the question of who did it. The Pentagon seems not to be on the same page as the White House or the State Department, which is to say, with John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. It’s just hints. But official statements in the last two days sound as much like they’re directed at other parts of the US government as against Iran.

Yesterday CENTCOM put out a statement about the tanker incident. The last paragraph:

“We have no interest in engaging in a new conflict in the Middle East. We will defend our interests, but a war with Iran is not in our strategic interest, nor in the best interest of the international community community.”

Who’s that comment aimed at? It doesn’t sound like it’s a message for Iran.

Then today there was this from Acting Defense Secretary Shanahan: “Secretary Pompeo and Ambassador Bolton have been very, very helpful but I think as you can tell, we have an international situation there in the Middle East, it’s not a US situation.”

This sounds oddly explicitly for disagreements within the US government in such a high stakes situation.

It makes sense not to draw too many conclusions. But it certainly seems like the Pentagon is going out of its way to signal that it is not looking for a confrontation with Iran. And that message seems as plausibly directed at other factions within the US government as it does toward Iran or other regional players.

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The Man Behind the State Department’s New “Natural Law” Focus The New Republic / by Kathryn Joyce

The Man Behind the State Department’s New “Natural Law” Focus
The New Republic / by Kathryn Joyce / 12h
The State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, a body of some 15 academics, legal scholars and nonprofit leaders advising Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about human rights, was announced in late May without input from human rights groups or even the department’s existing Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. Its purpose is to “provide fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights,” and, according to its charter, to propose “reforms of human rights discourse.” Human rights advocates immediately worried that the commission wouldn’t help enforce human rights, but rather rein them in.

Natural law, a tradition comprising Ancient Greek philosophy, Catholic medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, and some Enlightenment-era social contract theory, in its classic form argues that humanity has certain inherent “goods,” such as marriage or family, that are objective, universal, and, although inspired by God, also deducible through human reason, and therefore a proper basis for policy.

“According to this theory, God established a rational order to the universe, and the rules he has set are thereby ‘laws’ for all rational beings. Aiming at the natural goods for one’s species is thus commanded by God,” University of Wyoming political theory professor Brent Pickett told me.

But today, Pickett said, natural law theory is mostly used to justify differential treatment of LGBTQ people. In a 2004 critique, Pickett explained that, since the natural law view of sexuality holds that “sex must be related to a human ‘good’—in this case, the possibility of procreation—in order to be just,” its proponents commonly defend anti-LGBTQ policies—from anti-sodomy laws to legal discrimination—as grounded in human reason, rather than faith. The same rationales, he adds, are used to argue against contraception.

As a legal strategy, it’s a better bet than citing scripture. “It’s a way to achieve the same goals of religious conservatives without making clear that that’s what’s going on,” said Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at People for the American Way.

If that seems like unusual subtlety for the Trump administration, you can thank Princeton professor Robert George, who, according to an ABC News source, wrote the concept note for the new commission and is slated to be among its 15 inaugural members.

A former member of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, past chair of the Unites States Commission on International Religious Freedom, and a member of more conservative boards than there’s space here to name, George is omnipresent in religious right advocacy. In 2009, The New York Times Magazine proclaimed him “this country’s most influential conservative Christian thinker.” The Catholic magazine Crisis declared, with more brio, “If there really is a vast right-wing conspiracy, its leaders probably meet in George’s kitchen.” Since the late 1980s, he’s advised Catholic bishops and religious leaders—typically urging them to focus not on issues like poverty or healthcare, where “reasonable and well-informed people of good will” can disagree, but on culture wars, where he believes natural law and the Bible clearly align—and has become a sought-after advisor to Republican politicians as well. He’s written amicus briefs defending anti-sodomy laws for right-wing groups like Focus on the Family; was on the founding board for leading anti-same-sex marriage group National Organization for Marriage; and, after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015, called on public officials to “resist” the ruling as illegitimate.

He helped draft the nearly 5,000-word “Manhattan Declaration” of 2009, wherein 150 Catholic, evangelical and Eastern Orthodox leaders pledged civil disobedience around abortion, same-sex marriage and religious freedom. At the unveiling of the declaration, a Catholic cardinal declared that the document was based not on the Bible but on “principles of right reason and natural law.” This year, in celebration of the document’s 10-year anniversary, George argued that only public policies affirming natural law are just laws that should be obeyed.

George has compared opposing same-sex marriage to fighting slavery or eugenics; has spoken in favor of banning contraception; and authored another book, with the dystopian title Making Men Moral, arguing that it’s valid, even in a pluralistic society, to impose morality laws on the populace.

“Robert George thinks that the state should endorse a specific conception of the good life, and put in place a legal code that pushes people towards that good life,” said Pickett. “But he says this institutes a virtuous cycle that pushes people to be better, so that banning abortion is the first step, and then you ban contraceptives for unmarried persons, then you can ratchet things further and further.”

The corollary to George’s—and the new commission’s—focus on natural law, is the limited notion of natural rights.

In recent years, conservatives have increasingly complained about what George calls the “inflation” of human rights. In 2017, the Heritage Foundation released a report arguing that, in the years since the Declaration of Independence enumerated a “concise triad” of natural rights—“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—the concept of human rights has been stretched beyond recognition: first when Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke, amid the Depression, of freedom from want and fear; second when the United Nations unanimously passed the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which included rights like a decent standard of living and health care; and now, most disturbing to conservatives, with the expansion of rights to protect people from discrimination, particularly on the basis of gender or sexuality. While the original rights rested on the ideal of “self-ownership,” the report argued, “the new rights” rely on “presumptions of human neediness and dependence” that “hold no more moral authority than a barrel of ‘letters to Santa Claus.’”

“Unlike natural rights to freedom, which require only that we be left alone,” a 2018 piece in the National Review likewise argued, “these economic and social rights, if rights at all, are not universalizable. They’re created by legislatures, requiring endless redistributive schemes. And as demand for them grows, governments grow and liberty yields.”

Conservative concern about human rights particularly focuses on international law drafted in places like United Nations, the Organization of American States, and European Union bodies. UN battles over this have become fierce, as conservative activists and countries—now backed by the U.S.—fight both to block language that describes reproductive healthcare, sexuality or gender identity as human rights and, as Montgomery has written, to install a new suite of conservative human rights, like the right of children to have a married mother and father.

These efforts are driven by recognition that international law can affect domestic courts and legislation, here and abroad. In 2011, Robert George helped draft a conservative treatise called the San Jose Articles, declaring that abortion is not an international human right and that any UN assertions to the contrary are false. Another signee, William Saunders, then the senior attorney for Americans United for Life, explained in a 2013 video that the intent was to prepare for the day when Roe v. Wade is overturned, so “we won’t have the Supreme Court saying, ‘There’s no constitutional right to abortion, but there’s some kind of international right.”

This fall, Saunders—George’s former Harvard classmate as well as his godson, since George sponsored Saunders’ conversion to Catholicism—is launching a first-of-its-kind graduate program in human rights “from the uniquely Catholic perspective.” Directed by Saunders as part of a new center at the Catholic University of America, the program will teach natural law and rights, along with papal encyclicals, to ready young conservatives for careers in public work.

George serves on the program’s advisory board, and last fall joined Saunders at an inaugural event for the center, where he argued that human rights “inflation” and an “idolatry of desire” had led people to couch ideological agendas in the rhetoric of human rights. “Whatever they desire, they’ll treat it not as a desire, a want, a feeling, a passion, it will be a human right,” he said. “We lose our sense of the power and importance of the fundamental rights because of the inflation that happens when you conflate whatever it is you desire, whatever is on your agenda, with rights: ‘I have the right to my lifestyle, whatever my lifestyle is.’”

The conception of rights that CUA’s new program would teach, he said, would be different. “In Catholic theory, which will be front and center in this master’s program, what are rights? Rights protect human goods!”

It’s fair to assume that the new commission George inspired and may help lead will feature the same view, informing how—or whether—the U.S. weighs in on human rights abuses abroad. Progressives, including Catholic progressives, say that should terrify much of the American public.

“The Trump Administration’s threats to launch a new panel to offer ‘fresh thinking’ on human rights and ‘natural law’ should put the fear of God into anybody who values freedom, democracy and the separation of religion and politics,” Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice, told me. “Trump, in payback to religious conservatives, looks to be perverting our American democracy into what is looking dangerously like a theocracy of religious and social extremists.”

“It’s one more sign—surprising as it is, given who Trump is—that the Trump administration is really the pinnacle of the religious right taking over the Republican Party,” said Montgomery. “Trump offered these people a deal: put me in the White House and I’ll give you these things.”

George, once a Never-Trumper who wrote a 2016 letter declaring the candidate “manifestly unfit” for office, seems to now be among the many conservative Christians who’ve accepted that bargain. We are now starting to see what he may demand in return.

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Wheeler’s Breathtaking Ignorance of Science, in One Comment by Gretchen Goldman

Wheeler’s Breathtaking Ignorance of Science, in One Comment
Gretchen Goldman, Research Director, Center for Science and Democracy | June 6, 2019, 8:58 am EDT





Blog of Union of Concerned Scientists


UPDATE: Here is the exact quote of Administrator on which this post is based:

“The FDA does this on a regular basis, which is actually why I was a little surprised at the comments tagged in the proposal…this isn’t necessarily new … manners of accessing science in the regulatory process. FDA routinely uses the double-blind scientific studies for their work where they have two teams of researchers replicating the same data, both teams don’t know each other exist and where they are. We don’t do that at the agency, we don’t do that across the entire federal government. I’ve believed for a long time that federal research would be more accepted by the public if you used the double-blind standard for everything. I don’t know if we have the funding to do that for everything but they certainly do that at the FDA. But there are things that we can do … to help the regulatory process by putting the data out there for the public to see that I think would really benefit to make our regulations stronger.”

Yesterday at the EPA’s Science Advisory Board meeting, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler made comments on the agency’s proposed Restricting Science Rule that raised eyebrows for anyone who understands the basics of health studies. In his defense of the rule (which the scientific community agrees will severely hamstring the agency’s ability to rely on the best available science in its decision-making), Wheeler asserted that the EPA should be more like the FDA in its data transparency. The FDA uses double-blind studies and the EPA should be taking that approach, he suggested. Um, what?

To understand exactly how misguided this statement is, let’s take it from the top.
Dear Administrator Wheeler, this is what a double-blind study is

Double-blind studies involve study designs where both researchers and study subjects don’t know which subjects are given the placebo versus the treatment. These studies are a great way that researchers can reduce bias in scientific studies since those involved in reporting and collecting data won’t be influenced by knowledge of a potential effect. These study designs are especially useful in clinical trial research for new drugs, where scientists are interested in the efficacy of a drug, the presence of side effects, and other health outcomes.
The EPA and FDA study fundamentally different things

What would a double-blind study even mean in the EPA context? Your guess is as good as mine.

Here’s the problem: There is a fundamental reason that the EPA is different than the FDA. The EPA is studying environmental contaminants, i.e. pollutants that are out in the world. As a result, we have to rely on observational data of people living their lives in the world, with all the variability in pollution exposure that comes with that. We cannot control who is and isn’t exposed to pollution if we want to study populations. There are of course natural experiments that scientists can learn from but as I explain in a recent piece in Science, it is not possible or ethical for scientists to expose groups of people to harmful levels of pollution—something that would be required if we wanted to attempt a double-blind study. This is very different than the FDA context where researchers in clinical trials have a level of control over which study subjects are provided drugs.
Air pollution studies with Scuba gear?

But let’s entertain Administrator Wheeler’s idea, shall we? If we wanted to design a double-blind study on an EPA issue like air pollution, here’s what that would look like. You would need groups of people who are and aren’t exposed to harmful levels of air pollution. But to make it double-blind, both those people and the researchers conducting the study would need to not know whether they were breathing clean or dirty air (until after the data was collected). To do this, the participants can’t breath the ambient air because we wouldn’t be able to control the pollution level of the environment, i.e. it would mess up the study.

Thus, a double-blind EPA air pollution study would need to involve something like study subjects living their lives in scuba gear, where neither they nor the scientists studying them would know whether their scuba tank contained clean or contaminated air.

It is very easy to see how this is completely unworkable. Does Administrator Wheeler need a crash course in study design?
The FDA is not a poster child for the transparency Wheeler claims to want

Administrator Wheeler had complimentary remarks for FDA disclosure of scientific data in its decision-making. This is a head-scratcher for anyone who follows FDA decision-making.

The FDA is not always forthcoming in disclosing detailed information about its decisions on drug approvals, food additives, and other agency regulatory actions.While the FDA has made many improvements in process, leadership, and transparency, when it comes to drug review and decisions, information disclosure is still lacking. For other products like medical devices, the standard is less rigorous, and primary data is often not publicly available. Also of note, even FDA advisory committee members might only see summary reports from companies and FDA reviews, not the raw data itself. Finally, label changes and safety alerts may or may not be based on publicly available data.

Importantly, the FDA is certainly not following the extreme requirements in the EPA Restricting Science Rule. Like EPA, the FDA handles much confidential business information as well as personally identifying information. It is true that some studies involving this kind of information are released publicly in ways that protect the sensitive information. For example, by statute, large pivotal clinical trials are required for companies seeking approval for new drugs. When drugs are approved, the studies the FDA relied on are released publicly and more information is now becoming available through Clinicaltrials.gov. The FDA is not, however, releasing raw data in the way that the EPA Restricting Science Rule suggests.  This isn’t the model of disclosure that Administrator Wheeler claims to be aspiring toward.
Administrator Wheeler’s comments prove EPA desperately needs science advice

In conclusion, Administrator Wheeler’s comments suggesting that the EPA should mimic FDA’s use of double-blind studies makes zero sense. It’s almost as if he is in need of science advice from experts. The EPA Science Advisory Board could provide such expertise, if only the EPA will let them.

Thankfully, the SAB voted yesterday afternoon to fully consider the EPA Restricting Science Rule in addition to providing individual comments in a near-term consultation. If the administration makes good on its promise to release the final rule by the end of the calendar year, then the SAB advice would come later, but regardless of the timing these are issues where the EPA desperately needs science advice and the SAB must step up.

Posted in: Science and Democracy, Scientific Integrity Tags: EPA, EPA SAB, FDA, restricting science, Transparency, Trump Administration

About The Biden Electability Thing Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

About The Biden Electability Thing
Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 5min

Here’s my other thought on Joe Biden and the broader Democratic primary race.

I’m happy to have the nominee be Joe Biden. I’m happy to have it be one of the other candidates. There are some who are in the race as basically a joke – members of the House unable to crack .5% etc. – but there are lots of good people. What does matter a whole lot to me is that it’s someone who looks like a strong candidate against President Trump. Right now at least polls show Biden is clearly the strongest candidate against Trump. He’s usually several points ahead of Trump nationally and in key states – significantly stronger than the others.

Sanders is consistently a bit weaker than Biden but not a lot. The three other candidates in the top five (Warren, Harris and Buttigieg) generally poll significantly weaker, usually within the margin of error or tied with Trump. These are of course only ranges of a few points. But when a few points show up consistently over time they’re very meaningful.

It is important to understand that perceived electability can create a feedback loop of support in a primary race. It doesn’t do that in general election match-ups. The people up for grabs in a general election are people deciding between the two parties or one of the parties and a third party. By definition they aren’t focused on the most electable candidate from a party they might not even vote for.

Many people say we don’t know that Biden is the most electable. That’s 100% true. But it’s not true that polling gives us no data on that front. These polls can change. There’s a good argument that they may change for those other three as voters get to know them better. (Sanders is, I think, in the same boat as Biden: 100% name recognition.) We also don’t know how Biden holds up over time as a primary candidate. He could run poorly and get weaker. There are lots of unknowns. But those polls aren’t meaningless.

My fear or concern is that these patterns will persist. It’s not a fear exactly. If the margin persists and Biden is nominated and wins the 2020 election, awesome. I’m perfectly happy with that. But I’m not really confident that the others will catch up on the head to heads. If that’s the case then I would want to be sure Biden is the nominee because, to me, the stakes or way to high not to go with a candidate that has a strong shot at winning as opposed one where it’s more a 50/50 proposition. Unfortunately that creates a pretty negative potential dynamic in the primaries – supporters of other candidates will feel their candidate is being pushed to the side because of perceptions of electability they don’t agree with.

Now, don’t say, Josh! These polls are early! Don’t write off these other candidates! Joe sucks! etc. We don’t have to have that argument because I’m not writing off anyone. We won’t have a nominee until next Spring and no one is even going to vote for another six-plus months. We have plenty of time to see these other candidates introduce themselves to the electorate and show they’re strong candidates against Trump. I’m just less certain than I was that that’s going to happen. To me, everything takes a back seat to beating Trump.

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Corruption Is the Tie that Binds for Trump-Era Republicans The New Republic / by Alex Shephard

Corruption Is the Tie that Binds for Trump-Era Republicans
The New Republic / by Alex Shephard / 20min
A strange thing has happened over the past month or so: Senate Republicans have begun to stand up to President Trump. Haltingly, tentatively, perhaps, but on things that matter, a bit of spine has been sighted. What matters? Well, they’ve objected to the controversial appointments of Herman Cain and Stephen Moore to seats on the Federal Reserve—so much so that, when lumped together with an utter lack of qualifications and handful of scandals, both men withdrew their names from consideration. They were primed to stop the confirmation of Ken Cuccinelli—a man who made a career out of attacking GOP senators—as head of Citizenship and Immigration Services (until Trump went and appointed Cuccinelli to an acting role). There’s the vote to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia after the murder of a Washington Post columnist. And they’ve even passed a disaster relief bill that included funding for Puerto Rico but didn’t give a dollar to Trump’s border wall.

The GOP has, in particular, gone into a tizzy over Trump’s seemingly improvised threats to levy tariffs against Mexico. With companies like General Motors—the largest exporter of manufactured goods from Mexico to the United States—feeling the potential pinch, a bloc of Senate Republicans last week threatened to join with Democrats in a veto-proof majority if Trump went ahead with his unilateral trade war. Trump quickly abandoned his threat and, instead, made a half-hearted declaration of victory.

This growing willingness to undercut the president’s policy and personnel decisions has, however, coincided with Republicans growing ever more defensive of Trump, himself. As Democrats slowly investigate the myriad number of scandals enveloping his administration, businesses, and personal life, the GOP has doubled down on their dear leader.

This is no accident. Instead, it reflects a dynamic that will continue to define Washington for the foreseeable future. Republicans have become more willing to buck the president’s wishes when they deviate from GOP orthodoxy. But on the issue of corruption, in particular, they will act as a phalanx. That is, to some extent, a result of the coming election cycle, in which their fates are tied together. But it more importantly points to a party increasingly bound together by an embrace of a corrupt and plutocratic approach to governance.

As Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein perceptively wrote over the weekend, much of this dynamic is explained by Trump’s failure as a chief executive. Many of these decisions—particularly the appointments and the tariffs—appeared to have been largely improvised and were carried out without consultation of relevant leaders and stakeholders.

Similarly, for all Trump’s bluster, those who break from him rarely face consequences for doing so. “Trump has also cultivated a reputation as a paper tiger throughout his presidency,” Bernstein argued. “It’s true that people still talk about the possibility that Trump could turn on Republicans who oppose him and their renominations would suddenly be vulnerable to primary challengers. But in fact, Trump rarely follows up on threats, and his attention to anything is sporadic at best.” There was fear of the bully pulpit at one point, but not any longer.

As Bernstein also noted, we are in something of a Goldilocks period when it comes to members of the incumbent party breaking with the president. With eighteen long months to go until the election, Republicans have little incentive to stay in line—that will change as November 3, 2020 draws nearer. But for the moment they have used this break in the political calendar to punish the president for failing to adequately consult them and, perhaps more importantly, for breaking with them on tariffs. Trump’s trade war with China has been allowed to progress, albeit slowly. But, when tariffs on goods from Mexico produced an outcry from traditional Republican power bases, like the Kochs and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Mitch McConnell and his caucus stepped in on behalf of big business.

But Senate Republicans are more notable for where they haven’t broken with the president. McConnell declared “case closed” on the Mueller report, despite the fact that it revealed over a dozen instances of likely obstruction of justice. There have been no efforts to hold the administration accountable for anything relating to Trump’s conduct in office, really. While House Democrats have a number of targets in their sights, the Senate has acted as a bulwark. There have been no efforts to get to the bottom of the disastrous handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, to investigate how foreign dignitaries are using Trump properties to influence policy, or how members of Trump’s family have used the presidency to enrich themselves. (Monday brought yet another entry in what has become an entire sub-genre of scandal coverage when The Guardian reported that a real estate firm owned by Jared Kushner’s family had received nearly $100 million in foreign funding from an offshore vehicle in the Cayman Islands run by Goldman Sachs.)

This is, to some extent, a reflection of the electoral calculus that has guided the GOP for much of the last two-and-a-half years: Trump must be protected for the sake of the party’s electoral future. But it also reflects the incredible corruption of the Republican Party itself. While there might be growing disagreements on free trade and tariffs, leaders are in lockstep on the idea that it is completely acceptable to use the government for corrupt ends. On Monday, for instance, Politico reported that Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has used her office to steer grants to Kentucky, the state represented by her husband, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell:

The Transportation Department under Secretary Elaine Chao designated a special liaison to help with grant applications and other priorities from her husband Mitch McConnell’s state of Kentucky, paving the way for grants totaling at least $78 million for favored projects as McConnell prepared to campaign for reelection. Chao’s aide Todd Inman, who stated in an email to McConnell’s Senate office that Chao had personally asked him to serve as an intermediary, helped advise the senator and local Kentucky officials on grants with special significance for McConnell—including a highway-improvement project in a McConnell political stronghold that had been twice rejected for previous grant applications.

Chao was also in the news recently for boosting her family’s shipping company, which has deep ties to China.

It is, as The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman noted on Monday, “utterly mundane.” But it’s been repeated again and again during the administration, with both relative newcomers to government and veterans like Chao using their offices to benefit themselves and their families.

To some extent—some—this is how the system has worked for a long time. The Trump administration did not invent graft, influence peddling, or self-dealing, but this era’s excesses have revealed the extent to which this particular type of corruption has come to define the Republican Party and hold it together. Tariffs on GM products are a red line for Senate Republicans, but profiting from government service isn’t. After all, it’s good enough for the president.

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The Impossibility of Impeachment The New Republic / by Michael Kazin

The Impossibility of Impeachment
The New Republic / by Michael Kazin / 1h
Polling outfits routinely ask historians and political scientists to rate the presidents from worst to best. It’s an inherently frustrating exercise. Does “greatness” depend on what a chief executive accomplished or instead on his ability to bend Congress to his will and influence his successors? How should we evaluate a president like Lyndon Johnson, who signed such momentous—and durable—laws as those ensuring civil rights and launching Medicare, but who also sent hundreds of thousands of Americans to kill countless numbers of Vietnamese in a civil war that was none of our business? A scholar’s rating depends, in large part, on a judgment of what a president should have done as well as what he did. Evaluating those choices is a more meaningful enterprise than using political history to dash off a click-happy list of likes and dislikes.

THE IMPEACHERS: THE TRIAL OF ANDREW JOHNSON AND THE DREAM OF A JUST NATION by Brenda WineappleRandom House, 576 pp., $32.00
No occupant of the White House made terrible choices more consistently than Andrew Johnson. A century and a half later, his performance in the White House should appall anyone but a hardened racist. Weeks after Lincoln’s murder in April 1865, the newly inaugurated President Johnson began to treat former leaders of the South as if they were men of honor and standing, rather than traitors who had fought and lost a devastating war to preserve slavery. That spring and summer, Johnson pardoned thousands of former Confederate officers and politicians and appointed three of them to be governors of their states. He flatly refused to consider granting citizenship or the vote to any of the millions of people newly freed from bondage. Johnson’s policy arguably helped incite the white mobs who murdered scores of black men and women in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866. The president’s response to the massacres in Louisiana was to blame whites who supported black suffrage. “Every drop of blood that was shed is upon their skirts,” he snarled, “and they are responsible for it.”

Earlier that winter, a delegation of prominent African Americans, including Frederick Douglass, met with Johnson, whom they already had ample reasons to mistrust. They asked him to reconsider his opposition to giving their people the vote. But Johnson, who was born in a log cabin and learned to read only as an adult, could not tolerate even a politely stated protest from a group of black men better spoken and more erudite than himself. After they left, he reportedly snapped to an aide, “Those damned sons of bitches thought they had me in a trap.” He added that Douglass “would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”

Few of the Republicans who controlled Congress believed in the complete equality of the races. But most were determined that the black people who had made the Old South rich now deserved the same rights their former owners took for granted—rights they knew would require thousands of federal troops to guarantee. In 1867, they rejected the president’s leniency toward the erstwhile rebels and enacted their own plan for reconstruction, which shifted power to a coalition of Southern blacks, their white allies from the region, and “carpetbaggers.” Johnson vetoed every bill intended to achieve that purpose; Congress overrode him every time. He also railed futilely against the Fourteenth Amendment, passed overwhelmingly by both houses the year before, which established a federal right of citizenship and equal protection of the laws that no individual state could repudiate. When, in February 1868, the president violated a new law, the Tenure of Office Act, Republican leaders resolved to impeach and convict him.

Brenda Wineapple, author of books on such nineteenth-century icons as Hawthorne and Dickinson, is a gifted stylist whose knowledge of the politics of Reconstruction is both intimate and vast. In The Impeachers, she tells an elegant story stuffed with alluring character sketches and dramatic moments, both legal and political. It raises two big questions: Why wasn’t Johnson thrown out of office for making those choices, and should he have been? She answers the first with erudition and cogency. The second she essentially leaves open, reminding us that even some of the lawmakers who reviled Johnson hesitated to remove him. Their ambivalence helps explain why no president has ever been convicted of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” or why impeachment, often viewed as a necessity to stop a lawless leader, may prove almost impossible to execute successfully.

Impeachment certainly proved far messier and more difficult than Johnson’s fiercest opponents imagined. The problem began with the nature of the statute Johnson had flouted. The Tenure of Office Act, passed in 1867, prohibited the president from firing an official appointed during his term unless the Senate approved the move. The law was clearly intended to stop Johnson from scrubbing his Cabinet of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Lincoln holdover who happened to be overseeing the Army’s deployment to Dixie, which the president had vetoed in vain. He fired Stanton and claimed the act was an unconstitutional curb on the powers of the executive; Johnson looked forward to challenging it in court. According to Wineapple, even Stanton had “doubted” the act’s “validity.”

Of course, what truly motivated Johnson’s enemies were principles of justice and morality forged in the crucible of civil war. The Tenure of Office Act merely gave them a way to entrap him. “We must see to it that the frightful carnival of blood now raging in the South shall continue no longer,” vowed Ohio Representative (and future president) James Garfield. The abolitionist firebrand Wendell Phillips asserted, “Impeachment is the refuge of the common sense of the nation, which in the moment of difficulty, says to the magistrate, you ought to have known by your common sense, and your moral sense, that this has unfitted you for your office.” Removing Stanton from his post without the Senate’s consent was just one of the eleven articles of impeachment brought against Johnson (all of which Wineapple helpfully reproduces in an appendix). But it was specific, arguably indictable, and the basis of most of the other articles. The overall charge that the president had abused his office depended on it.

In May 1868, following an exhausting eleven-week trial, the Senate acquitted Andrew Johnson—by a single vote. Newly emboldened, he issued a blanket pardon to anyone who had taken part in “the late insurrection” and even restored their property—not including former slaves, of course. But the Democrats, who had stood by him during the ordeal of impeachment, rebuffed his bid to win their presidential nomination. They knew that a rageful Southerner who had barely retained his office would have won few if any Northern states competing against Ulysses Grant, the military hero who had recently become a Republican.

While Wineapple’s sympathies are clearly with the impeachers, she carefully explains the flaws of their strategy as well as how the ambitions of certain powerful, putative friends helped defeat their purpose. Salmon Chase, the chief justice of the Supreme Court who presided over the trial, had once been a champion of abolition and a key member of Lincoln’s Cabinet. But since Lee’s surrender, Chase had increasingly favored treating former top Confederates with leniency, in part, because Democrats supported that policy—and he very badly wanted to be president. In fact, banks were already donating big sums to his campaign in waiting. So Chase turned down motions by the House managers of the trial to raise “questions of fitness, folly, or the autocratic abuse of power.” The chief would permit only evidence about a clear “breach of law.” This allowed any Republican senator who was uneasy about defining contempt for the Tenure of Office Act as a “high crime or misdemeanor” to consider allowing Johnson to keep his job.

With an economy of words, Wineapple captures the look and personality of pivotal characters in the drama. Senator Edmund Ross, the last of the ten Republicans who voted for acquittal to make his intentions clear, “was a political nobody who didn’t look a person in the face, dressed in black, and walked with a slouch.” William Evarts, the president’s lead attorney, was “detached and devious … a diminutive man with mushroom-colored skin.” For Wineapple, clothes always seem to offer a glimpse into one’s soul. Kate Chase Sprague, daughter of the chief justice, attended the first day of the trial sporting “fawn-colored silk, Etruscan earrings, and bangles of frosted gold.” It comes as little surprise to read next that “She had an appetite for the White House even larger than that of her insatiable father.”

What millions of Americans regard as a violation, a roughly equal number view as a strong leader blasting away at his enemies.

Ultimately, the whole impeachment affair had just a modest bearing on the vital question of who would hold power in the South. After his acquittal, Johnson had a mere ten months left in his term. His trial took place a full year after Congress had set up military districts in the former Confederacy, to protect the right of black men to vote and run for office and prevent the kind of bloody attacks that had occurred in Memphis and New Orleans. The Ku Klux Klan, established months after the war ended, tried to strangle the new order with acts of terror at the polls and in African American communities. During his first term, President Grant continued the policies of the Republican Congress and suppressed the Klan, although not the savage desire of Southern whites to exterminate “Negro rule.”

Without economic power, political rights are fragile things. When Congress in 1867 easily defeated a proposal to break up big plantations and distribute the land to black people who desperately needed it, the lawmakers all but ensured, quite unintentionally, a brutally unequal future in Dixie. “No people will ever be republican in spirit and practice where a few own immense manors and the masses are landless,” declared Representative Thaddeus Stevens, the radical congressman from Pennsylvania who sponsored the confiscation plan. The failure to supply former slaves with the resources on which to secure their economic liberty was critical to turning Reconstruction into what Eric Foner, its premier historian, calls “an unfinished revolution.”

Congress’s failure to impeach and convict Andrew Johnson still haunts our politics, particularly at a time when the 45th president appears to have escaped sanctions for his own flagrant misdeeds and has at least an even chance of winning reelection. Impeachment, as every pundit intones, is really a political matter rather than a legal one. What millions of Americans regard, echoing Wendell Phillips, as a violation of the nation’s “common” and “moral sense,” a roughly equal number view as a strong leader blasting away at his enemies. Numerous presidents have violated the spirit of the Constitution, if not always its letter. From Truman onward, they have sent Americans into combat without asking Congress for a declaration of war. From the end of Reconstruction into the 1960s, chief executives rarely took action to faithfully execute the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment when the rights of African Americans and other racial minorities were being violated.

Johnson’s impeachment and trial, as Wineapple narrates so well, spotlighted arguments between lawyers, although everyone knew that what was really at stake was the question of who should govern and for what ends. “That slavery and its effects lay at the heart of Johnson’s impeachment does not suggest that the verdict was unjust or the trial improperly conducted,” she writes. It does, however, show a profound disconnection between what transpired during those long, hot weeks beneath the Capitol dome in 1868 and the ongoing struggle taking place in the fields, streets, and polling stations of the South.

The same can be said about the conflict over the Mueller Report, which, at this writing, is still in spin. Like our current president, “Johnson was a proud, vain, and insecure man who distrusted almost everyone.” But unlike Trump, he had not been elected in his own right and lacked the ability to rally a substantial number of Americans to his side. That support insures that even if Mueller had found the 45th president guilty of breaking the law, he would still be tweeting lies from the White House and preparing to run what might become the most despicable reelection campaign in history.

Convicting Johnson would not have annulled his statements and the policies that encouraged those who had fought for slavery to build a new South that operated much like the old one. And his white supremacist beliefs lived on and prospered, even as commentators agreed that his presidency was an abject failure. One has to crush bad leaders at the polls. But as long as their ideas remain popular, the hope for a just nation will remain a dream deferred.

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