Roy Moore’s Absurdity Knows No Bounds

Esquire

Roy Moore’s Absurdity Knows No Bounds

We could use Mark Twain right now.

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By Charles P. Pierce     November 30, 2017

“I desired that the Senate of Rome might appear before me in one large chamber, and a modern representative, in counterview, in another. The first seemed to be an assembly of heroes and demi-gods; the other, a knot of pedlars, pick-pockets, highwaymen, and bullies.”

—Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels

November 30 happens to be the birthday shared, 150-odd years apart, by Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. If some wealthy and interested soul wants to start a campaign to have November 30 declared an International Day of Righteous Scorn in their honor, I’m willing to chip in a pittance.

(I feel obligated to note that it is also the birthday of Winston Churchill, a prominent politician of the nation most recently pissed off by the president*, who’s suddenly got people wondering if he doesn’t more closely resemble Winston’s father, Randolph, particularly in the latter stages of that worthy’s life. But anyway.)

To celebrate the two masters, let’s take a look at what’s happening in the news on the birthday they share. Oh, look, there’s Marco Rubio. It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to uncrate the famous animated recreation of Rubio’s entire public career but, boy howdy, was he not supposed to say this out loud. From Financial Advisor Magazine:

“I analyze this very differently than most,” Rubio told the crowd. “Many argue that you can’t cut taxes because it will drive up the deficit. But we have to do two things. We have to generate economic growth which generates revenue, while reducing spending. That will mean instituting structural changes to Social Security and Medicare for the future,” the senator said.

Jesus, Marco, get with the program. You’re supposed to sell this Abomination of Desolation as a boon to “the middle class.” Then, when it blows up the deficit, you’re supposed to come sadly before the nation, blame the Democrats for not “compromising,” and mournfully tell millions of the elderly and disabled that it’s time for those lazy moochers to kick in. But Rubio wasn’t finished giving away games.

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Somebody asked him about what might happen if, as appears probable, ol’ Judge Roy Moore gets his’sef elected down in Alabam’. He served up some very tasty waffles in reply, as The Washington Examiner reports:

“This information is before the voters of Alabama,” Rubio told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham. “And if they elect him and then you as a Senate have ethics hearings to remove him from office or something like that, that gets more complicated. That’s a little bit more difficult because voters will have this information before them when they vote for him if, in fact, he is elected.”

No, no, no. You wait until he’s seated before you explain to the nation how you can’t disrespect the votes of the goobers who sent an alleged pedophile to the Senate. You’re not supposed to be this direct in informing the nation that the Republican majority would seat Vlad The Impaler if he were good on tax cuts and shredding the social safety net. Yeah, it’s time to sum up Marco Rubio’s career again in that old, familiar way.

Which reminds me, ol’ Judge Roy seems to be having a high old time. His goons are slugging cameramen—from Fox, no less—and he’s got the rubes higher than kites on that old-time culture war religion. From The Hill:

“When I say they, who are ‘they?'” he asked. “They’re liberals. They don’t hold conservative values. They are the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender who want to change our culture. They are socialists who want to change our way of life and put man above God and the government is our God. They’re the Washington establishment…who don’t want to lose their power.”

Yeee-fcking-haw! That’s the real stuff right there. And it’s not like ol’ Judge Roy hasn’t been dealing it out for years. As ThinkProgress reports, via the invaluable AL.com, ol’ Jedge Roy once taught a course about how important it is to keep the wimmen-folk out of politics.

The study includes a lecture from William O. Einwechter, a teacher elder at Immanuel Free Reformed Church. The lesson, titled “What the Bible Says About Female Magistrates,” contends the Bible forbids women from holding elected office. “She’s not a warrior. She’s not a judge. She’s a woman. Created by God. Glorious in her place and in her conduct and in her role,” Einwechter said. “Nothing is said in scripture that supports the notion that she is qualified or called to be a civil magistrate.”

That’s going to come as something of a bummer to Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, who is a wimmen-folk her own self.

(By the way, one of Ivey’s real triumphs in office was signing a bill restoring voting rights to prisoners who had served their time. Thousands of the people who have benefitted from this true reform have registered to vote in the senatorial election, largely through the efforts of people who have reached out to them. This, naturally, has set the cast of Three Dolts on a Divan into what my mother used to call “high-sterics.” This of course, is because they are useless tools. Good on you, Kay Ivey.)

And, finally, getting back to Washington, there’s promising new Batman villain Steve Mnuchin, who has assured us that he has an analysis showing that the Abomination of Desolation will bring upon us a golden age of jobs. As The New York Times reports, however, there’s one problem with this analysis. It may not exist. Or, as the Times delicately puts it, the analysis “proves elusive.” As does Sasquatch.

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Mr. Mnuchin has promised that Treasury will release its analysis in full. Yet, just one day before the full Senate prepares to vote on a sweeping tax rewrite, the administration has yet to produce the type of economic analysis that it is citing as a reason to pass the tax cut. Those inside Treasury’s Office of Tax Policy, which Mr. Mnuchin has credited with running the models, say they have been largely shut out of the process and are not working on the type of detailed analysis that he has mentioned. An economist at the Office of Tax Analysis, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his job, said Treasury had not released a “dynamic” analysis showing that the tax plan would be paid for with economic growth because one did not exist.

Thus, then, do we celebrate the birthdays of the Dean and the Old Fella. May their spirits walk among us, and may they do so soon, because we’ve all climbed aboard Huck’s raft only to find ourselves beached in the land of the Yahoos.

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The case for normalizing impeachment

Vox

The case for normalizing impeachment

Impeaching an unfit president has consequences. But leaving one in office could be worse.

by Ezra Klein         November 30, 2017

Chris Malbon for Vox

In recent months, I have grown obsessed with a seemingly simple question: Does the American political system have a remedy if we elect the wrong person to be president? There are clear answers if we elect a criminal, or if the president falls into a coma. But what if we just make a hiring mistake, as companies do all the time? What if we elect someone who proves himself or herself unfit for office — impulsive, conspiratorial, undisciplined, destructive, cruel?

My fixation on this question began with President Donald Trump’s tweets to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. This was the president of the United States, the man who controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, launching deranged, unvetted provocations at the most singularly irrational regime in the world:

Donald J. Trump: Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer! Sept 23, 2017

This was not even his official policy. The rest of the Trump administration was trying to ratchet down tensions with North Korea. But the president himself was undermining the effort:

Donald J. Trump: I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man, Oct 1, 2017

Republican Sen. Bob Corker, the widely respected chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, warned that the president was treating his office like “a reality show” and setting the country “on the path to World War III.” In an interview with the New York Times, he said of Trump, “I know for a fact that every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him.” These concerns, Corker told the Times, “were shared by nearly every Senate Republican.”

It’s not just Senate Republicans who worry over the president’s stability. Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, told CNN that his reporting found “a consensus developing in the military, at the highest levels in the intelligence community, among Republicans in Congress, including the leaders in the business community,” that Trump “is unfit to be the president of the United States.” A subsequent poll by the Military Times found only 30 percent of commissioned officers approved of the job Trump was doing.

The fear is shared by members of Trump’s own staff. Axios’s Mike Allen reported that a collection of top White House advisers see themselves as an informal “Committee to Save America,” and they measure their success “mostly in terms of bad decisions prevented, rather than accomplishments chalked up.” The Associated Press reported that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly “agreed in the earliest weeks of Trump’s presidency that one of them should remain in the United States at all times to keep tabs on the orders rapidly emerging from the White House.”

Their concerns echo across the broader public. A September Quinnipiac poll found that 56 percent of voters believe Trump is unfit for office. Despite low unemployment and steady economic growth, Trump’s favorability is stuck below 40 percent — making him, at this point in his term, the most unpopular president since the advent of polling.

Of late, I have been asking Republicans who work either in the White House or closely with it whether Trump is learning on the job — whether he is becoming more judicious, more disciplined, more serious. The answer, unanimously, is that he is not. He is the man he was the day he stepped into the Oval Office, the same man he was on the campaign trail, the same man so many of us feared he would be as president.

1/20/17, Capitol, Washington, D.C.Gabriella Demczuk for Vox

In a November 2 interview on WMAL radio in Washington, Trump lamented his inability to use his power to prosecute his political enemies. “You know the saddest thing, because I’m the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department,” he said. “I am not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.” It is impossible to imagine the hellstorm that would have followed a similar utterance by President Barack Obama or George W. Bush. That Trump’s daily provocations have left us inured and jaded to such authoritarian yearnings is, itself, an injury he has inflicted upon us.

Of late, Trump has taken to suggesting the Access Hollywood tape — where he is clearly shown bragging about sexual assault — is a fraud. These are statements, notably, that Trump can not only be seen making, and heard making, but statements he has admitted making. As is often the case, it is unclear whether Trump is lying to us, or if he is somehow lying to himself, as well. And it is hard to say which would be scarier.

We talk often about running the US government like a business, but businesses — at least public ones — have clear methods for deposing a disastrous executive. The president of the United States controls the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, not to mention the vast resources and powers of the federal government, and so the possible damage of letting the wrong person inhabit the Oval Office stretches all the way to global catastrophe. But is there anything we can do about it?

WHAT IF AMERICA SIMPLY MADE A MISTAKE?

A number of House Democrats have introduced bills that point toward Trump’s removal. Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, introduced articles of impeachment built around Trump’s possible violations of the law. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, also a California Democrat, introduced a resolution calling for Trump to receive medical evaluation to uncover whether he is capable of carrying out the duties of his office — if not, the Cabinet could invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him.

But what if Trump isn’t a criminal or mentally incompetent? What if he’s exactly the man we saw in the election and that man just shouldn’t be president? What if America simply made a mistake?

In that case, even these Democrats are fatalistic.

“I think they’re stuck with the mistake,” says Lofgren.

“We’re more or less a democracy,” says Sherman. “There are 320 million people out there. When they hear the term ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ their reaction is, ‘Show me the crime.’”

Sometimes I imagine this era going catastrophically wrong — a nuclear exchange with North Korea, perhaps, or a genuine crisis in American democracy — and historians writing about it in the future. They will go back and read Trump’s tweets and his words and read what we were saying, and they will wonder what the hell was wrong with us. You knew, they’ll say. You knew everything you needed to know to stop this. And what will we say in response?

Chris Malbon for Vox

What is an impeachable offense?

The first federal official ever removed from office under Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution — the impeachment clause — was Judge John Pickering, in 1803. Pickering was an alcoholic and likely suffered from early-stage dementia. He would rant and rave from the bench. The official charges held that Pickering exhibited “loose morals and intemperate habits,” neither of which sounds like a high crime or misdemeanor to modern ears. He was convicted on all counts and removed from office. But was his removal proper?

The historian Lynn W. Turner has argued that “by confusing insanity with criminal misbehavior,” Pickering’s critics “wiped out the line between good administration and politics and made any word or deed which a political majority might think objectionable the excuse for impeachment and removal from office.”

Another way of looking at Pickering’s removal is that it shows the founding generation defining what the impeachment power was for, and what high crimes and misdemeanors meant. In his 1833 Commentaries, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story concluded that impeachment is “of a political character” and can be triggered by “gross neglect, or usurpation, or habitual disregard of the public interests, in the discharge of the duties of political office.”

The Constitution’s framers considered a few variants of the impeachment power. An early proposal would have restricted it to acts of “treason and bribery” only. That was rejected for being too narrow. A subsequent proposal would have expanded it to acts of “maladministration” as well. That was rejected for being too broad. “High crimes and misdemeanors” was the compromise, but it was never clearly defined.

What is clear is that high crimes and misdemeanors described far more than mere legal infractions. In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton wrote that questions of impeachment will “proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

THERE IS NO ACTUAL DEFINITION OF “HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS”

Asked, for instance, about a president who removed executive officials without good reason, James Madison replied that “the wanton removal of meritorious officers would subject him to impeachment and removal.” Capricious firings are not a crime, but they were, according to the founders, an impeachable offense.

“The grounds for impeachment can be extremely broad and need not involve a crime,” says political scientist Allan Lichtman, author of The Case for Impeachment. “That’s why they put impeachment not in the courts but in a political body. They could have put it in the Supreme Court, but they put it in the Senate.”

As Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein puts it in Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide, “while the voices in the ratification debates were not entirely consistent and often less than precise, they can be fairly summarized in this way: If a president were to engage in some egregious violation of the public trust while in office, he could be impeached, convicted, and removed from office.”

In the course of reporting this piece, I spoke to a slew of legal scholars and impeachment specialists. Here is my conclusion: There is no actual definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” There is wide agreement that it describes more than violations of the criminal code, but very little agreement beyond that. When is the “misconduct of public men” impeachable? When does a tweetstorm rise to the level of “egregious violation of the public trust”?

1/19/17, The Gaylord Hotel, National Harbor, Md.Gabriella Demczuk for Vox

Political elites are scared of removing a president, and for good reason

On May 16, Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist at the New York Times, wrote a searing column arguing for President Trump’s removal from office. “From the perspective of the Republican leadership’s duty to their country, and indeed to the world that our imperium bestrides, leaving a man this witless and unmastered in an office with these powers and responsibilities is an act of gross negligence, which no objective on the near-term political horizon seems remotely significant enough to justify,” he wrote.

Douthat’s preference was to bypass impeachment entirely and invoke the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment, which permits the president’s removal if the vice president and a majority of the Cabinet certify him “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” was ratified in 1967 as a response to President Dwight Eisenhower’s health problems and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It is designed for a president who has fallen comatose or been shot — a president who has become physically incapable of carrying out his duties.

When I spoke to Rep. Lofgren, she argued that the language was open to interpretation. “The 25th Amendment doesn’t mention medical,” she said. “It mentions ‘unable to discharge one’s duties,’ so it’s a judgment call.” But the text of her resolution shows how deeply we associate the power with physical deterioration. It calls on “the vice president and the cabinet to quickly secure the services of medical and psychiatric professionals to examine the president … to determine whether the president suffers from a mental disorder or other injury that impairs his abilities and prevents him from discharging his Constitutional duties.”

It is worth playing out that scenario. Imagine that Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet did compel Trump to undergo psychiatric evaluation. And imagine the psychiatrist did return a diagnosis of some kind, be it early-stage dementia or narcissistic personality disorder (plenty of psychiatrists stand ready to diagnose Trump with all manner of mental ailments, so this is not far-fetched). The vote is taken, and Trump is removed from office.

To many of Trump’s supporters — and perhaps many of his opponents — this would look like nothing less than a coup; the swamp swallowing the man who sought to drain it. Imagine the Breitbart headlines, the Fox News chyrons. And would they truly be wrong? Whatever Trump is today, he was that man when he was elected too. The same speech patterns were in evidence; the same distractibility was present. The tweets, the conspiracy theories, the chaos: It was all there. The American people, mediated by the Electoral College, delivered their verdict; mustn’t it now be respected?

3/23/16, Supreme Court, Washington, D.C.Gabriella Demczuk for Vox

Here is the counterargument: Our political system was designed by men who believed the mass public could make mistakes, and so they set up failsafes, emergency processes by which political elites could act. The Electoral College, which was ironically the key to Trump’s victory, was one of those failsafes — a collection of political actors who would be informed by the popular vote, but not bound by it. Today, however, the ideology of democracy has taken fiercer hold, elites are held in low regard, and those failsafes are themselves failing.

FOR ALL THE DANGERS TRUMP POSES, HIS REMOVAL POSES DANGERS TOO

Perhaps political elites have forgotten the work they are actually here to do — which is not simply to win elections or give blind quotes to Politico. “The case for the 25th Amendment or any other solution is that if a situation is dangerous, elites have a responsibility to risk popular backlash and even appear to be overturning the results of the election,” Douthat told me. In this telling, it is the job of elites to be a bulwark precisely when that job is hardest to carry out.

The question is whether this cure is worse than the disease. For all the dangers Trump poses, his removal poses dangers too. In August, the New Yorker posted a viral piece questioning whether America was barreling toward a new civil war. In it, Yale historian David Blight warned, “We know we are at risk of civil war, or something like it, when an election, an enactment, an event, an action by government or people in high places, becomes utterly unacceptable to a party, a large group, a significant constituency.” Invoking the 25th Amendment seems, to me, like the precise sort of event Blight describes. The bitter political polarization that marks Trump’s America would look gentle compared to America if Trump were removed from office.

But this analysis leaves us in a place that seems absurd when stated clearly: Though we have mechanisms for removing a dangerous president, those mechanisms are too politically explosive to actually invoke. President Trump could order a nuclear holocaust before breakfast, but unless society can agree that he is either criminal or comatose, both America and the world are stuck with him and all the damage he can cause.

Can this really be our system?

Chris Malbon for Vox

This is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned

“We’ve talked ourselves into believing impeachment is some kind of constitutional doomsday device: ‘Break glass in case of existential emergency,’” says Gene Healy, a vice president at the libertarian Cato Institute. “The result is we almost never break the glass.”

In its roughly 240 years of existence, America has had 45 presidents and three serious impeachment proceedings. None of them has led to the removal of a president, though Richard Nixon’s would have if he hadn’t resigned. “It’s very hard to say of 45 presidents in 240 years [that] never, or once if you count Nixon, is the right number of impeachments historically,” Healy continues. “It’s a much easier case to make that we’ve impeached far too infrequently.”

There is a tendency to hold this conversation as a kind of seance with the founders, to try to divine what they meant, precisely, and what they would do in our situation. There are two problems with this approach. The first is that the founders were intentionally imprecise in designing these powers. It would have been simple enough to enumerate the offenses that could lead to impeachment, and some at the Constitutional Convention proposed doing so. Instead, “high crimes and misdemeanors” was the result — a recognition that flexibility would be needed and future generations would need a term they could define for themselves.

The second problem is that the presidency of 2017 is nothing like the presidency of 1776. “The office was constructed not just for a smaller country, but for a different conception of what executive power was,” says Jeremi Suri, a historian at the University of Texas Austin and the author of The Impossible Presidency. The president of 1776 had no nuclear weapons and not much of a military. There was no thought of universal health care systems, or of the management required by the sprawling, post-World War II executive branch. Congress held the sole power to declare war, so there was no consideration of an executive who could launch a world-destroying first strike entirely under his own authority.

But perhaps more importantly, the Founding Fathers envisioned a political system without parties, where the salient political competitions would be between states and between branches rather than between Democrats and Republicans. “There was an assumption that the different branches check each other because they all have different politics,” says Julia Azari, a political scientist at Marquette University.

Instead, parties share the same politics across branches; congressional Republicans today see their fates as intertwined with Trump’s, and so they protect him, because to protect him is to protect themselves. Believing that the American political system would resist parties and then designing our mechanisms of accountability around that assumption was, Azari continues, “the most important constitutional failure.”

1/20/17, Capitol, Washington, D.C.Gabriella Demczuk for Vox

To date, serious impeachment proceedings have only been carried out when Congress is controlled by the opposing party to the White House. “Impeachment is dysfunctional,” Azari says. “It’s proven to be a partisan tool and nothing more.”

THE PRESIDENT IS MORE POWERFUL THAN THE FOUNDERS EVER ENVISIONED

Even a Congress that intended to contain Trump would be limited in its reach. It is hard to overturn a presidential veto, and the expansion of executive authority we’ve seen in recent decades has given the president plenty of power to wield even faced with a hostile legislature.

“Having worked in the modern executive branch, the notion that Congress has plenty of weapons in the case of a very bad president is overstated,” says Sunstein, who ran the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under Obama. “If we really had a terrible president determined to go in directions that were economically terrible or terrible for national security, my view is Congress would have very limited ability to stop it; first because of the difficulty of getting a consensus, but second because even if you got one, there’s much the president can do on his own.”

So here’s where we are now. The president is more powerful than the founders ever envisioned. We have a political system built around parties, which gives the president protection from the massive congressional majorities needed to activate impeachment. We have constructed an electoral system that neither follows the public will nor includes safeguards against demagogues and knaves — elites have lost control of primaries and ceded power over the Electoral College even as 40 percent of presidential elections since 2000 have been won by the loser of the popular vote. And atop all that, our political culture has evolved to see the removal of a president as a historic, perhaps dangerous, affront.

Whatever this is, it is not the system the founders foresaw.

The result of all this is that faced with an erratic and even dangerous president, we try to criminalize or medicalize his actions. Democrats want to see Donald Trump removed from office because they believe he is unfit to hold the job and a danger every day he remains in it, but few believe that is enough to merit impeachment. This is why Rep. Sherman, who introduced articles of impeachment against Trump into Congress, says, “the legal theoreticians will tell you that impeachment just a matter of politics. I’m a politician, and I’m here to tell you that it’s a matter of legal analysis.” This is why Lofgren calls for a medical evaluation.

Even if this is a correct judgment about politics, it is profoundly reckless. We have made the presidency too powerful to leave the holder of the office functionally unaccountable for four years. We have created a political culture in which firing our national executive is viewed as a crisis rather than as a difficult but occasionally necessary act. And we have done this even though we recognize that the consequences of leaving the wrong president in power can include horrors beyond imagination — World War III, as Sen. Corker suggested.

2/25/17, The White House, Washington, D.C.Gabriella Demczuk for Vox

We are too afraid of the impeachment power, and too complacent about leaving an unfit president in office

It is time to reassess. Impeachment, in Donald Trump’s case, would lead to the elevation of Mike Pence — a Republican who is better liked by his party and who, to Democrats’ chagrin, would likely be much more effective at pushing a conservative legislative agenda. But it would mean less danger of an accidental war with North Korea, less daily degradation of democratic norms and civil discourse, an executive who has the attention span to follow briefings and the temperament to stay off Twitter when he’s angry, and the precedent that there is some minimal level of job performance that the American people and their political representatives are willing to demand of their president.

WE HAVE GROWN TOO AFRAID OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF IMPEACHMENT

An objection to this is that it might lead to more common impeachment proceedings in the future. And indeed it might. Other developed countries operate on roughly that basis, with occasional no-confidence votes and snap elections being used to impose midterm accountability, and they get along just fine.

Impeachment under the American political system requires a majority in the House of Representatives and a two-thirds majority in the Senate; it is not easy to use and, as Republicans learned in the aftermath of their attempt to impeach Clinton, can backfire on those who use attempt it frivolously. It seems unlikely that America is at risk of regular or trivial impeachments even as it seems quite likely that the holders of an office as powerful as the American presidency might be well served to believe that impeachment is a real possibility if they perform their duties unacceptably poorly.

A lesson of Trump’s presidency, thus far, is that we have come to see the impeachment power as too sacrosanct, as too limited. While I was writing this piece, Trump embarked on a diplomatic trip to Asia. While there, he sent this tweet:

Donald J. Trump: Why would Kim Jong-un insult me by calling me “old,” when I would NEVER call him “short and fat?” Oh well, I try so hard to be his friend – and maybe someday that will happen! Nov 11, 2017

There are plenty of people who simply should not be president of a nuclear hyperpower, and Trump is one of them. This is a truth known by his staff, known by Republicans in Congress, and known by most of the country. That so few feel able to even suggest doing the obvious thing and replacing him with another Republican who is better suited to the single most important job in the world is bizarre. (It is a particular irony in this case, given that Trump’s entire public persona is based on the idea that well-run organizations need to swiftly and ruthlessly fire poor performers.)

We have grown too afraid of the consequences of impeachment and too complacent about the consequences of leaving an unfit president in office. If the worst happens, and Trump’s presidency results in calamity, we will have no excuse to make, no answer to give. This is an emergency. We should break the glass.

But even if we muddle through Trump’s presidency, it should be a reminder that the presidential elections are as fallible a method of selecting an executive as any other. American government is built so that a president can be removed and a duly elected co-partisan is always present to step in and take his place. Impeachment is not a power we should take lightly; nor is it one we should treat as too explosive to use. There will be presidents who are neither criminals nor mental incompetents but who are wrong for the role, who pose a danger to the country and the world.

It is a principle that sounds radical until you say it, at which point it sounds obvious: Being extremely bad at the job of president of the United States should be enough to get you fired.

7/21/17, The White Housel, Washington, D.C.Gabriella Demczuk for Vox

 

Inheritance Tax – Just Not The Case!

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc.

November 30, 2017.   Jim Goodman’s family has farmed land in Wonewoc, WI since 1889. Small farms like his don’t pay the estate tax, so why do Republicans claim ending the inheritance tax will help family farmers? Because it sounds better than cutting taxes for millionaires. Hear what Jim has to say about this >>

Just Not the Case

Jim Goodman’s family has farmed land in Wonewoc, WI since 1889. Small farms like his don’t pay the estate tax, so why do Republicans claim ending the inheritance tax will help family farmers? Because it sounds better than cutting taxes for millionaires. Hear what Jim has to say about this >>

Posted by Tammy Baldwin on Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Jim Carrey calls for removal of ‘soulless traitors’ in White House and Congress

RawStory

Jim Carrey calls for removal of ‘soulless traitors’ in White House and Congress

Travis Gettys       November 30, 2017

Jim Carrey at the Jane Fonda Hand And Foot Print Ceremony as part of the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival (s_bukley / Shutterstock.com)

Actor Jim Carrey lashed out at congressional Republicans for their “soulless” tax reform scheme.

The actor and comedian tweeted out a call to action Wednesday to remove President Donald Trump and his GOP accomplices from office.

“The GOP and WH have become sinister conclaves of souless (sic) traitors, liars and thieves – a gangrene we must remove so democracy can live,” Carrey tweeted.

View image on Twitter

Jim Carrey, The GOP and WH have become sinister conclaves of souless traitors, liars and thieves – a gangrene we must remove so democracy can live. #killthebill   November 29, 2017

Child Hunger in America

 PBS‘s video to the group: Veterans against the G.O.P.

November 30, 2017

Is this what America has become? The party that calls themselves pro-life, spends 14 trillion per year on our war machines, but cannot feed, house, provide medical care or educate our people??? Child hunger is a REAL issue affecting real children in real life so please STOP claiming free-school meals to children provide an empty soul.

Child Hunger in America

Kaylie’s family can’t afford a refrigerator. Johnny dreams of eating meals somewhere other than a shelter. Here’s a candid look at hunger in America, explained by three kids living in “food-insecure” homes. (From FRONTLINE)

Posted by PBS on Wednesday, November 22, 2017

PBS. Kaylie’s family can’t afford a refrigerator. Johnny dreams of eating meals somewhere other than a shelter. Here’s a candid look at hunger in America, explained by three kids living in “food-insecure” homes. (From FRONTLINE)

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders: We Must Stop the Immoral Republican Tax Bill.

Will County Progressives and Let the Revolution Begin. Peacefully of Course.shared U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders‘s live video.

Pathetic, disgraceful, immoral. How else can I describe the Republican tax plan? It must be stopped.

We Must Stop the Immoral Republican Tax Plan

Pathetic, disgraceful, immoral. How else can I describe the Republican tax plan? It must be stopped.

Posted by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Wednesday, November 29, 2017

GOP Senate Pushes Tax Scam Bill

MoveOn.org

Senator Jeff Merkley: “America should rise up and make sure this bill dies.”

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Sen. Jeff Merkley shreds the Trump tax scam: “This is the art …

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The Latest Republican Tax Proposal Is the Dumbest Yet

The Nation

The Latest Republican Tax Proposal Is the Dumbest Yet

Who are the tax wizards who came up with this one?

By David Dayen      November 29, 2017

McConnell Republican Tax PlanMitch McConnell holds a news conference to talk about the Republican tax plan in Washington, DC, November 28, 2017. (AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite)

The negotiations over the Trump tax overhaul have moved from tragedy to farce. You could let monkeys bang on typewriters for several millennia and not come up with an idea as profoundly stupid as what Senate Republicans added Tuesday to appease one of their own members.

Before we get to that, let’s be clear that this astonishingly dumb notion is being scooped on top of a bill that is already economically illiterate. It’s painstakingly designed to punish people making under $75,000 a year and those who happen to live in states that didn’t vote for Donald Trump. It benefits wealthy investors and wealthy people who incorporate; basically being wealthy or being a member of the Trump family is the prerequisite. CEOs (“the most excited group out there,” according to the bill’s architect, Gary Cohn) have given away the game in earnings calls by admitting that the corporate tax cuts, easily the largest chunk of the bill, would flow out to shareholders in dividends and stock buybacks, rather than used to create jobs or raise wages. The bill is a gift to capital owners at workers’ expense.

But Senator Bob Corker and some of his colleagues, like Oklahoma’s James Lankford, are showing some residual concern about deficits. In response, GOP leaders initially limited the total cost of the tax cuts to $1.5 trillion over 10 years, and under Senate rules the bill could not raise the deficit at all after that. Republican leaders reached that number with a variety of gimmicks, like having the individual tax cuts expire after 2025 (while the corporate bounty lives on), and by assuming absurdly high economic gains from the cuts.

Corker called their bluff. He said that as long as everyone believes the tax cuts will super-charge economic growth, he wants a trigger that would automatically raise taxes if those rosy assumptions don’t come to pass. And because the bill can’t pass without the Corker bloc, Mitch McConnell gave it to him. This was enough to pass the package out of the Senate Budget Committee; Corker voted yes and was the margin of victory. Combined with some concessions to Susan Collins, the prospects for Senate passage look pretty decent.

We don’t have the specific details yet, and probably won’t until tomorrow. But just based on the concept, I can unreservedly say that this provision would make the name “Cut Cut Cut Act” seem like the work of Albert Einstein.

Creating automatic tax increases in the event of slow economic growth defies every macroeconomic impulse of the past century. It’s the kind of thinking that got us into the Great Depression, and more recently got places like Greece into a decade of suffering. When the economy slows down, government needs to serve as the spender of last resort by providing stimulus, either in the form of laying out funds or cutting taxes, or both. Either way, it would increase the deficit during a downturn, cycling that money through the economy to influence a recovery. Corker’s trigger would do the opposite. It would decrease the deficit if the economy didn’t reach certain performance targets. It would institute austerity during a time of slow growth. It would result in a tax cut bill almost certain to raise taxes at the worst possible moment.

And by the way, there are already triggers in the bill: The individual changes expire in 2025, which will raise taxes for much of the population. It’s impossible to forecast where the economy will be when that kicks in, but it’s at least plausible that the 2025 trigger and the Corker trigger will hit at the same time, when the economy is struggling, creating an almost guaranteed recession. The concept is, as Matt Yglesias calls it, an “automatic destabilizer.”

Now, none of this should matter to conservatives, not just because they don’t believe in Keynesian fiscal policy. They think it’s axiomatic that tax cuts pay for themselves with economic growth, so the triggers would never come into play. And that’s where the reaction to the triggers gets interesting. All the major conservative groups—the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, Grover Norquist’s American’s for Tax Reform, the US Chamber of Commerce—have come out sharply against the triggers. If anything has let the slip show about the intellectual bankruptcy of conservative ideas, this is it. They don’t actually believe their own bullshit about tax cuts and economic growth, at least not enough to gamble on it.

The bigger problem for Republicans is that members of the Senate seem as opposed to the triggers as the conservative K Street establishment. Chuck Grassley was sharply negative about the idea yesterday; so was Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey and John Kennedy of Louisiana, until adding later that he was “keeping an open mind.” The banging from the Norquists and Kochs of the world is bound to flip some more votes.

There’s perhaps a solution of a pretend, convoluted trigger designed to never fire, which would somehow satisfy the Corker bloc while reassuring conservative anti-taxers. And to be sure, there’s a ton of momentum to get to yes here. Republicans have organized themselves, almost unilaterally, around tax cuts for the past several decades, and they appear determined not to let details or unpopularity get in the way. And if the deficit is a problem, that’s when they implement phase two: cut social spending to the bone, balancing the budget on the backs of the vulnerable while the rich get a windfall.

So maybe that’s the way out, and the Corker bloc folds with a fake trigger and a promise to eat the poor. But if anything close to the original concept makes it into law, Republicans will have accomplished a signature feat: They’ll have created a kind of economic Hamburger Helper that makes recessions into depressions, instantly.

David Dayen is the author of Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud, which won the Studs and Ida Terkel Prize.

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GOP refuses to learn the lessons of Kansas’ failed tax experiment

MSNBC                                                           

The Rachel Maddow Show / The Maddow Blog

GOP refuses to learn the lessons of Kansas’ failed tax experiment

In this Jan. 12, 2016 file photo, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback speaks to the legislature in Topeka, Kan. (Photo by Orlin Wagner/AP)In this Jan. 12, 2016 file photo, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback speaks to the legislature in Topeka, Kan.    Photo by Orlin Wagner/AP

By Steve Benen    November 29, 2017

Shortly after the 2012 elections, with Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s (R) radical economic experiment already underway, then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said of his former colleague’s plan, “This is exactly the sort of thing we want to do here, in Washington, but can’t, at least for now.”

At the time, McConnell’s ambitions were largely irrelevant. Barack Obama was in the White House, a Democratic majority controlled the Senate, and there was simply no way Democrats would consider “the sort of thing” Brownback created in Kansas.

But five years later, McConnell and his GOP allies have all the power they need to impose a Kansas-style experiment on the nation. Many who saw Kansas’ failures first hand have some advice to Republican policymakers: Stop.

The Kansas City Star published a piece over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend from Steve Rose, who described himself as a “Bob Dole Republican,” and who lamented the fact that Kansas’ failed tax plan and the current GOP tax plan “are twins.”

Republicans at the federal level are claiming, just like Brownback did, that there will not be a resulting massive deficit if taxes are slashed. Most independent, non-partisan researchers predict a $1.5 trillion deficit will be the result of the tax cuts that have been proposed.

Blinded Republicans claim these huge tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy will stimulate the economy enough that overall revenue will grow, not shrink. Revenue growth is supposed to trickle down to the middle-class taxpayers.

Sound familiar? That is exactly what was sold to Kansans, who saw their state’s budget hemorrhage. Nothing trickled down except cuts in services for the middle class.

The Kansas City Star’s editorial board published a related piece this morning, asking Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), “Why take this failed experiment nationwide?”

Moran endorsed his party’s regressive tax plan yesterday. Perhaps he hasn’t paid close enough attention to what happened in his own state this decade.

To be sure, there are some differences between Kansas’ disastrous plan and the proposal Donald Trump is pushing now. The current plan, for example, goes further to hurt working families’ health security.

But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently explained, “[T]he GOP leaders’ federal tax-cut plan closely follows Kansas’ failed experiment. And many of the same salesmen who touted the Kansas plan in 2012 now are making the same type of outsized claims that the proposed federal tax cuts will ignite remarkable economic growth.”

As regular readers probably know, the scope of Kansas’ failed experiment is not in doubt. Brownback working with a GOP-led legislature, cut taxes far beyond what the state could afford, slashed public investments, and waited for prosperity to flourish across every corner of the state.

None of that happened. Not only have Kansas’ job growth and economic growth rates lagged behind neighboring states, but the state’s budget is in shambles, and Kansas’ debt rating has been downgraded multiple times.

The state has since decided to go in a different direction, though local officials realize it will take many years to undo the damage. Willfully ignorant Republicans at the national level seem desperate to repeat the same mistakes.

These Cutting-Edge Farms Are Pioneering Ways To Reduce Their Water

FaSTCoMPANY

These Cutting-Edge Farms Are Pioneering Ways To Reduce Their Water

In Kansas, “water-technology farms” are developing farming methods and technology to help cut water use by massive amounts. But it might not be enough for the local aquifer to recover.

[Photo: Jonathan Brinkhorst/Unsplash]

By Adele Peters       November 29, 2017

When farmers in Kansas began drilling wells to tap into groundwater in the 1940s and 1950s, they initially thought the water–coming from the massive Ogallala Aquifer, which sprawls over 174,000 square miles in eight states–was an inexhaustible source. Now, studies suggest that the aquifer will be 70% depleted in less than 50 years. So some farmers in the area are now testing technology to help preserve water, and agriculture, as long as possible.

“With the Ogallala Aquifer in decline, it’s not a matter of if it’s going to go dry, it’s when,” says Tom Willis, who owns a farm near Garden City in southwestern Kansas, as well as two ethanol plants in the state. “That puts a severe hardship on my company here.”

Willis wants the farm to last well into the future for his son, and the ethanol plants also rely on local crops to be economically viable. So he decided to participate in a three-year pilot project that the state calls water-technology farms. “I had a very much vested interest in saying, are there technologies out there that allow farmers to be just as productive as they have been, and yet reduce the strain on the aquifer?”

On his farm, sensors now measure how quickly water is drawn from wells, and sensors deep in the soil measure moisture. “To the eye, it may seem like you need to water, but the moisture probe will say you don’t need water yet,” he says. That technology is combined with a precision drip irrigation system that can use as much as 50% less water than standard irrigation. A weather system on the farm measures precipitation, humidity, and wind. He is also experimenting with planting different crops with lower water requirements–wheat, for example, uses far less water than corn.

[Photo: Henry Be/Unsplash]The farm also uses traditional low-spray nozzles, so Willis and advisors from Kansas State Extension can study how much the shift in technology helps. Willis’s farm is one of 15 water-technology farms in the state.

Farming is responsible for more than 90% of the water that comes from the aquifer. The water in it accumulated slowly over time, and agriculture has sucked it dry much more quickly. “It accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years,” says Keith Gido, a professor at Kansas State University. “So once we have the technology to pump that water out, once it’s applied to crops and it evaporates, then it’s lost. That pool of water that’s underground becomes depleted. Just normal rainfall is not enough to recharge the system.”

That affects not only agriculture, but ecology. In a recent paper, Gido and coauthors documented that across one part of the region above the aquifer, 346 miles of streams have already gone dry, and fish habitat has disappeared.

The challenge is large: the states that can access the aquifer have no coordinated plan to save it. And even if farmers implement state of the art technology to save water, they’re prolonging the inevitable: Wells will eventually run dry–many already have.

Still, the water-technology farms can help. “We’re seeing some real farmer champions,” says Daniel Devlin, director of the Kansas Water Resources Institute. “I think that’s leading to a wide discussion there in some areas where they’ve either voluntarily reduced their water consumption, or they’re trying to plan on how to do that. So I’m pretty encouraged. I’m really seeing action out there.”

In one county, he says, farmers voted to reduce water use 20% over a five year period. They ended up exceeding their goal, while maintaining profitability. And new technology, including remote sensing from drones, has yet to be implemented.

“There’s a bunch of stuff that’s going to be available,” says Devlin, who has decades of experience in the field. “I’m frankly surprised. I’m much more encouraged today than I would have ever thought I was five years ago, for example. I see many, many irrigators that really see the problem and they’re trying to make changes, trying to make the water last for more generations than we predicted it would.”

Willis is currently analyzing some of the data from the farm, and says that he–and other farmers–want to see proof that the technology works on large-scale farms like his. That’s one reason that more farmers haven’t already switched to systems like drip irrigation. “With margins out there, they can’t afford a crop failure,” he says. “They can’t afford the capital investment without knowing for sure that it works.”

About The Author

Adele Peters is a staff writer at Fast Company who focuses on solutions to some of the world’s largest problems, from climate change to homelessness. Previously, she worked with GOOD, BioLite, and the Sustainable Products and Solutions program at UC Berkeley.

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