Ordinarily one and done is a considered a rare accomplishment (see Ball, Lonzo). But if you’re the POTUS, not so much.
As Kate McKinnon characterized it on SNL last weekend in her portrayal of Robert Mueller, “They didn’t leave us breadcrumbs. They left us whole loaves.”
Here’s a link to the timeline that makes obstruction impossible to defend from a legal standpoint. The end is nigh.
The short summary is, the Hastert Rule:
The Hastert Rule, also known as the “majority of the majority” rule, is an informal governing principle used in the United States by Republican Speakers of the House of Representatives since the mid-1990s to maintain their speakerships and limit the power of the minority party to bring bills up for a vote on the floor of the House. Under the doctrine, the Speaker will not allow a floor vote on a bill unless a majority of the majority party supports the bill
Paul Ryan has a bit of a dilemma on his hands right now. In order for him to resolve the #Trumpshutdown, he’ll need to break that Hastert rule. Something he is loath to do.
With support for a short-term resolution for DACA recipients near 85%, getting a majority of The House to pass protection for DACA workers is simple math. The problem for Ryan is, it would almost certainly have to break the Hastert rule. It would be fairly simple to appease House democrats and persuade a handful of Republican congressmen on a solution to DACA, but the Freedom Caucus would start experiencing convulsions before the vote even hits the floor. Oddly enough, about the only one who recognizes this at the moment is Lindsey Graham. His odds of convincing his peers towards accepting a yes vote and moving on are slim to non-existent.
However if Ryan sticks to the Hastert rule, he’s also screwed because the House is currently filled with ultra conservative wing-nuts. Any legislation they deem acceptable couldn’t possibly assemble 60 votes in the Senate. This even discounts the Stephen Miller effect, who Graham is currently grousing about.
Meanwhile, president Bone Spur is advocating what Mitch McConnell knows to be political suicide – The Nuclear Option. Donald Trump on Twitter:
Great to see how hard Republicans are fighting for our Military and Safety at the Border. The Dems just want illegal immigrants to pour into our nation unchecked. If stalemate continues, Republicans should go to 51% (Nuclear Option) and vote on real, long-term budget, no C.R.’s!
No way does Mitch McConnell want to go down the nuclear path with the mid-terms just 10 months away. If he changes the rules, the republicans get the benefit for 10 months but if they manage to lose the Senate — which is a real possibility — he just handed over all the power to democrats who will only need 51 votes to pass legislation on anything, indefinitely. Based on his own words, I do not see him complying with Trump’s wishes. The only benefit would be a short-term one for Trump and McConnell is too smart to take the bait that.
I do not see an easy way out of this one. Nobody likes egg on their face but someone is going to end up with a face plastered with yokes. Gosh darn-it it’s hard to actually govern.
Gosh it was nice to see senators Collins and Murkowski at work today praising just how hard everyone there was working towards a resolution to the government shut-down. They just seemed so…. optimistic!
And knowing how honorable the Republicans are at keeping their word, I’m sure the talks would have happened anyway, even if Chuck Schumer hadn’t forced the issue.
I have never seem a party transition from obstinate to Kum Ba Yah in such a short period of time. Miraculous, isn’t it?
The U.S. government is going to shut down in an hour and 5 minutes.
While I hate to see the inconvenience this will impose on hundreds of thousands of federal workers and contractors, I applaud Chuck Schumer for taking a principled stand. The republicans have worked themselves into a corner where they have absolutely no credibility with respect to a promissory note to fix important issues later. Schumer and the democrats recognized that it’s now or never.
With the ensuing chaos that will start tomorrow morning where Dick Mulveyney will need to decide what stays open and what closes, there exists a clear inconvenience to republicans to come to the table and negotiate. Trump might have to postpone a golf game or two. The party celebrating the one year anniversary of his inauguration is in jeopardy. It’ll be interesting to see if he holds it. It would be incredibly bad optics.
Schumer played this poker hand pretty well this time. Basically called republicans’ bluff that Dems would take the heat for a shut-down. On the contrary.
If he’s able to negotiate a deal for the Dreamers and get funding for CHIP, he’ll have accomplished two things. One, his principled stand will get looked at as what resolved the Dreamers issue. Two, he will have established credibility that democrats are willing to call McConnell’s bluff if they feel like public opinion is on their side. These are two very important accomplishments that need to happen in order to fix the ‘tude problem on the other side of the aisle.
I’m reminded of a funny story I was told by local musician, producer, singer, songwriter Jim Walker a few years ago. One day we got off on the topic of people who, with no talent of their own, like to sit there and launch criticisms of bands and how they suck or whatever.
So as the story goes, Jim and a friend were at a bar watching a local band and there happened to be an obnoxious guy standing behind him who kept making rude comments about the band and how they sucked. You can only ignore someone like that for so long. Evidently Jim’s friend had had enough of this guy, turned around and asked him “Where’s your song, man?” I guess he got a lot more quiet after that.
I’m reminded of this humorous episode as I watch Republican infighting over the DACA solution. It’s humorous for a couple of reasons. First, Lindsay Graham tries to be Trump’s buddy and get into his inner circle by going golfing with him and flattering him afterwards. Then he makes what I would say is a good faith effort to work with democratic senator Dick Durbin on a bipartisan solution to DACA. Does the President want to hear about it? Sure, c’mon over.
To his surprise, Trump had invited a few of his hardliners to the meeting as well. Graham’s idea got shot down by Cotton and Perdue who have no intention of working in a bipartisan fashion with any democrat, even though 80% of U.S. citizens want to see a solution for Dreamers. So Graham is out there strumming his tune, laying out his proposal and Trump gets indignant about it complete with shithole comments.
But as bad and racist as that was, that’s not the point here. The point is, okay, you don’t like my plan. Where’s yours?
So, Senators Cotton and Perdue. Where’s your song, man?
It’s not what you think.
We have to hope that the procrastination of the Hanford cleanup doesn’t kill us all. Our home values would be the least of our concerns.
It’s really true there’s no free lunch. Yes, the United States beat Russia in the race to develop the first nuclear bomb. There are many books on the subject and The Manhattan Project was one of the most ambitious undertakings in the 240 year history of this country in size and scale.
The downside is, we’ve been trying to clean up the site for over 70 years and are nowhere near complete. Current estimates are $2 billion per year until cleanup is complete in 2050.
There are 53 million gallons of radioactive waste in stored in 177 underground tanks. One third of these tanks are leaking radioactive waste into the soil and groundwater. Aquifers are containing 270 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater. As of 2008, 1 million gallons of radioactive waste was traveling through the groundwater toward the Columbia River.
I don’t know about you, but that makes me lean towards Alaskan Salmon at the seafood counter.
From a recent article comparing the risk of Hanford to what happened in Fukushima, Japan.
On 29 September 1957 a tank containing waste similar to the waste in the Hanford Tank Farms exploded at the Mayak plutonium production site in the former Soviet Union, known as the Kyshtym Disaster. The cooling system for one of the tanks at the Mayak site failed and the temperature inside the tank rose eventually causing a chemical explosion that sent a radioactive cloud for over 350 km downwind and heavily contaminated an area near the plant with catastrophic levels of cesium-137 and strontium-90. This was one of the worst radiological disasters in human history at the time, and remained so, along with the fire three weeks later inside a nuclear reactor core at the Windscale facility (now called Sellafield) in Cumbria in the United Kingdom, until the Chernobyl meltdown and explosion in 1987. The Kyshtym Disaster, which a Soviet study concluded resulted directly in 8,000 deaths (not to mention illnesses) was the consequence of an explosion in one tank. At Hanford there are currently 177 such tanks, each containing similar disastrous potential, and located beside one another.
If you do the math on the population of people downwind, all I can say is we’d better hope those cooling systems continue to work or this place will be uninhabitable for a century. And that’s just one scenario.
I’m anxiously awaiting the Trump administration to roll out its infrastructure plan. Rumor has it a small, private outfit in Montana with connections to Ivanka Trump’s wedding planner will be put in charge of the cleanup. If that happens, I’m moving.
In 2003, a documentary titled The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara was introduced. Here’s a link to a 2 minute trailer on it.
The reason this movie comes to the forefront of my mind these days has to do with the banter going back and forth between the U.S. and North Korea and Iran.
In the movie itself, McNamara was interviewed where he talked about the discussions of the Kennedy administration cabinet, strategizing around the Cuban Missile Crisis. The most revealing aspect of the interview was the fact that much of the strategy conversations had to do with ‘guessing’ at what Russia and Cuba were thinking. What their motives were. They didn’t know for sure so they had to guess.
McNamara’s point was, had they guessed wrong, they could have a nuclear event on their hands that was a result of a big misunderstanding. It was entirely possible for this to happen. He strongly emphasized the need for diplomacy so that any events centered around war were fully understood and not the result of second guessing wrong.
This is perhaps the scariest aspect of the Trump Administration for me. The probability that he will initiate military action based on his impulses without a full understanding seems extraordinarily high. This is why level-headedness matters in the oval office.
It looks to me like the movie is available from Netflix but on DVD only. There may well be other streaming sources. If you get a chance to see it, I found it very enlightening.
Below is a summary of the 11 lessons from McNamara.
This probably won’t happen, and it’s a huge political gamble, but I think the Democrats should shut the government down if they don’t get the deal they want on DACA.
My reasoning is, a shutdown would send shock waves through the world, and when that happens, people start looking at the underlying reasons. In previous years when the Republicans / Tea Party shut the government down, the took the heat big-time. But that was different. The underlying reason had to do with money and greed. The decision to shut down the government over that issue was extremely unpopular.
This is different. This is about sticking up for a group of people who have been marginalized. It would be a principled stand and I actually think the Democrats would not face much backlash for a shutdown. On the contrary. And the timing of the “shithole” comment couldn’t be better. The support for bigotry in the US has not risen to majority levels.
The question is, do they have the intestinal fortitude to take the gamble?
I recently ran across an article on the sad state of the Hudson River tunnels that feed into Penn Station in mid town Manhattan. I felt it was alarming enough to be worthy of a quick review.
Here are some statistics and highlights from the article:
Accounts from the article talk about riding in the caboose slowly through the tunnels observing just how bad the walls have decayed to the point of crumbling concrete. There is visible damage from the aftermath of hurricane Sandy five years ago, where sulfites and chlorides have been eating away at the concrete.
My wife and I have taken Amtrak from New York’s Penn to Boston starting and have seen first hand the volume of people and the bee-hive of activity that place is on any given day. It’s nuts-o. Worse than Chicago’s O’Hare on a busy day in terms of chaos.
As we learned from 9/11, the financial center of the country doesn’t react well to a crisis. Estimates by congress in 2008 projected that any disaster – natural, terrorist or decay of infrastructure that shuts down New York city would impact the U.S. economy by $100 Million per day. The potential impact on the stock market measures in the Trillions. The Amtrak into Penn Station is literally the artery of the U.S. Financial system. A crucial piece of infrastructure that is crumbling as I write this.
There have been a few attempts to do something about Penn Station, but to date all of the efforts have run into unfortunate roadblocks.
In October of 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck the region with 80 mph winds and the water rose higher than at any time in the city’s recorded history. The Hudson River surged over the banks of Manhattan, poured into a submerged rail yard and flooded Penn Station’s tunnels. A few days later, Amtrak pumped out 13 million gallons of seawater.
The electrical systems now malfunction on a fairly regular basis. It’s projected that within 7 years, even with no natural disasters the tunnels will need to be taken out of service for 18 months of repairs. The bridges and ferries have nowhere near the capacity to pick up the slack if a tunnel needs to be taken out of service.
As with many things in the US, we lack the vision it takes to prioritize modern infrastructure like London, Paris and Tokyo do. The Trump administration brushed it off as a local problem. But I wonder if those of us who will see our 401k values tank as the country’s financial center becomes paralyzed will feel the same way. My guess is we’ll be begging for a bailout by the feds. Anything to protect that coveted 401k, but not until I have to.
So far there have only been whispers about what Trump’s infrastructure plans might be, but the whispers have been pretty revealing: privatization. Prisons, roads, bridges, tunnels, air traffic control, you name it. Everything is for sale and it’s all about profit… for someone anyway. Nothing shall get in the way of the almighty dollar. That is of course, until you clog the artery of the thing that is feeding you those almighty dollars.
There’s an ancient proverb that says “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
I’m reminded of this because I’m both encouraged and fascinated by the list of long time republicans coming out as #NeverTrumpers. I’m talking about prominent conservatives who have been publicly supportive of the party for decades who are now openly criticizing the president on all forms of media.
As I read the tweets of Rick Wilson, Bill Kristol, Margaret Hoover, Cheri Jacobus, and Ana Navarro for example, I find myself in complete agreement with much of what they are saying. And these are long time staunch, prominent republicans. It’s inspiring to see people of stature have enough courage to choose country over party.
So what happened? My first thought goes back to how brutal the primaries were and how Trump’s nicknames for his opponents ended up sticking. Little Marco. Low energy Jeb. Lyin’ Ted Cruz. He picked a fight with the establishment from the first debate. This cost him the support of the entire Bush family and many of its loyal followers including Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Tom Ridge and party pundits Cheri Jacobus, Margaret Hoover, and Steve Schmidt. Not long ago, these were frequent guests on Fox News supporting candidates McCain and Romney.
Next was the infamous kerfuffle with Megyn Kelly during the first debate. The fallout from the was a loss of support from strong women like Ana Navarro and Jennifer Rubin.
It’s much easier to come out as a #NeverTrumper when you are personally attacked.
When George W. Bush was president, I wrote plenty on policy differences and the inherent greed of the republican party, but I never once suspected him of being a racist. In fact, just the opposite. He always went out of his way to be inclusive of all Americans. He understood basic decency in addition to the political necessity of having moderate Muslims on your side to win the war on terror. In this regard, he was a good man.
Charlottesville was where I think Trump lost the last vestige of hope he had from the republican establishment. His “both sides” narrative caused several other prominent republican figures to join the #NeverTrump bandwagon.
In the Netflix series “The Crown”, prince Phillip sent Charles to the same boys school he attended as a child – and hated. Predictably, Charles hated it too. It was a clear example of the “strict father” approach. The “my dad made me do things I didn’t like, but it made a man out of me” mindset.
It used to be that you could count on the representatives of the party to be supporting a platform straight from the strict father paradigm, complete with personal responsibility, hard work, love of God and country. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this message. The issue has always been where to set the social safety net. Democrats have pushed more towards socialism. Republicans would like a society where, if you make bad choices, that’s your tough shit. They don’t understand the concept of having been born on third base, and the message about compassion got lost somewhere between the sermon and coffee and donuts.
But recently the party tent has gotten a little too wide for many. It’s as if long time republicans got invited to an upscale Ivy League frat party, got all dressed up and expected an evening of social snobbery and cigars, but then the host let the Nazi’s from down the street in, and started excluding people at the door for their religion and race. And then, late in the evening the jokes about pussy grabbing started. At that point, some started to realize they were living the Animal House experience, felt uncomfortable with the level of raunchy behavior now inside the party tent and decided to check out.
During the 1980 presidential campaign Ronald Reagan was asked why he left the Democratic party. “I didn’t leave the party”, he said. “The party left me.” I’m pretty sure this is example what is happening with the current GOP.
Twitter gave Trump a direct line to the American people and it was an effective tool for him to get his message across, however deceitful. But there’s also a saying about what goes around comes around. The same tool that can prop a guy up to the highest office in the land can also take him down. If you have the chance, I’d encourage you to follow these courageous republicans on Twitter. I’m liking what I am hearing because it gives me hope we can get back to some sense of normalcy.
===== Twitter Handles of Prominent #NeverTrump Republicans =====
@BillKristol, @CheriJacobus, @TheRickWilson, @SteveSchmidtSES, @ananavarro, @GeorgeWill, @nytdavidbrooks, @douthatNYT, @MJGerson, @MargaretHoover, @JRubinBlogger, @benshapiro, @CondoleezzaRice,
View from my PDX Window 