Who's In Charge Around Here?
Rereading 'Invictus' and checking in on Trump's veepstakes.
The House of Representatives is punting FISA reform and skipping town for nearly two weeks of recess with some government funding set to expire at the end of the month. Russia apparently wants new nukes in space—more to come about that, it seems.
Happy Thursday.
Masters of Our Fate?
Not to go all Victorian here, but might we get a little of the spirit of “Invictus” going here in the United States of America of 2024?
Everyone once knew the famous closing lines of William Ernest Henley’s poem, written just about 150 years ago:
“I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.”
Are we no longer interested in that old master-of-my-fate, captain-of-my-soul thing? That was then and this is now?
Oppose Trump? “Yeah, Trump’s awful. I dislike him as much as anyone! But geez, I'm just one lonely GOP billionaire donor, and there’d be real blowback. Can’t quite make it happen.”
Suggest privately to Joe Biden that he not run for re-election? Or, failing in that effort, make the case publicly? “I’m a Democrat. I’ve got friends in the White House—I ate in the White House mess just last week. Shook the president's hand at a fundraiser. The art of the possible, it’s all the art of the possible.”
Sign a discharge petition to get a bill to the floor of the House to help Ukrainians fighting and dying for their country? “The Speaker says he doesn’t want to bring it to the floor, and I’m just a member of Congress. I can’t take on the Speaker. A discharge petition? I’m afraid that’s pretty far out there.”
Behave like a decent human being in public? “Hey, if we MAGA types want to bond at our rallies by wearing tee-shirts with obscenities and screaming at our enemies, we can do what we want. It’s not just a political party. It’s a movement.”
We seem to relish explaining to others, “No can do.” We think the height of wisdom is, “It is what it is.”
In Democracy in America, Tocqueville warned against “the doctrine of fatality,” which “is particularly dangerous in the period we are in” and “has so many attractions . . . in democratic times.”
Tocqueville elaborates:
In reading the historians of aristocratic ages and particularly those of antiquity, it seems that to become master of his fate and to govern those like him, a man has only to know how to subdue himself. In running through the histories written in our time, one would say that man can do nothing either about himself or his surroundings. Historians of antiquity instruct on how to command, those of our day teach hardly anything other than how to obey.
We seem to have learned that lesson all too well.
—William Kristol
They Who Would Be Veep
“From Trump: Please don’t say Rosie O’Donnell,” the fundraising text from the former president’s campaign reads. “Can you please tell me who my VP should be?”
Clicking the link brings up a raft of questions. What issues should Trump’s VP focus on—ending election interference? Securing the border? Eliminating the Deep State? Should they be a government official or a political outsider? Should they be a veteran? A person of faith?
With the Biden/Harris ticket set and Trump all but assured the Republican nomination, only one spot on the presidential tickets remains to be filled. The former president has begun giving the matter plenty of thought.
When Trump picked Mike Pence back in 2016, he did it to shore up a weakness among a specific constituency: evangelical Republicans skittish about his boorishness and personal vice.
Eight years later, with the Republican party remade in Trump’s likeness, it’s unclear he’ll feel the need to make the same tent-broadening play again. After all, when the chips were down, his last pick chose loyalty to the Constitution over loyalty to his boss—and who needs that kind of energy bummering up the West Wing?
“Do I even need a vice president?” Trump recently asked an associate while venting about Pence, according to GOP strategist Ryan Girdusky. “They don’t do anything.”
Although loyalty will be top of mind for Trump, other strategic questions surrounding the pick remain. The most base-pleasing option might be a firebrand like Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene or Arizona’s Kari Lake—politicians who have thrived in the wrathful slash-and-burn politics Trump inaugurated on the right. But someone like Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina might balance all the vengeance-and-retribution talk with a more genial, positive-vibes affect.
Or say that Trump wanted to pick a woman with a certain amount of establishment credibility to pair with her Trump love. Would the better pick be someone like Rep. Elise Stefanik—a member of House leadership with a proven willingness to reinvent herself in Trump’s image and a demonstrated facility for owning the libs—or freshman Sen. Katie Britt, a newer arrival on the national political stage who’s more tabula rasa?
Some of the veepstakes positioning is happening behind the scenes: Stephen Neukam reported last month in the (now-defunct) Messenger that Trump allies had scolded Tim Scott’s team for pitching opposition research around about Stefanik: “We are trying to close down a primary and we have people passing opposition research around about potential VP nominees,” a Trump ally vented to Neukam.
And some is taking place right out in public—most noticeably, by possible picks rushing to assure Trump they wouldn’t knife him like Pence did last time around. “I would not have done what Mike Pence did,” Stefanik told CNN last week. “I don’t think that was the right approach.”
That came just days after similar comments from another possible pick: Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. “If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there,” Vance told ABC News. “That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020.”
Catching up:
Haley Trails Trump by 36 Points in South Carolina, New Poll Shows: New York Times
Conservatives demand ‘significant reforms’ as House eyes path forward on FISA reform: Washington Examiner
Republicans admit it. Kevin McCarthy has never looked so good: Politico
Support for Afghan Allies Sidelined Yet Again Despite Push from Veterans: Military.com
Powerful House GOP chair Mark Green retiring after Mayorkas Impeachment: Axios
Several shot after Chiefs Super Bowl parade in Kansas City: ABC News
The government funding fight is about to flare again: Politico
Quick Hits
1. Dean Phillips in the Hot Seat
Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, the remaining Democratic gadfly challenging Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, just got shellacked in Nevada and South Carolina, with little reason to believe any of the states to come offer a rosier picture. So why’s he still in the race? Phillips dropped by The Bulwark Podcast yesterday for a combative yet civil interview with Tim Miller on what he’s thinking and the current state of presidential politics.
“What more did you want [Biden] to do over the last four years?” Tim asked. “Given the context of the Trump-MAGA Republican party—given that context—did he not exceed all expectations when it comes to bipartisanship? When it comes to actually getting things done? Shouldn’t there be credit given for that?”
“I give the president credit for navigating us out of COVID and through the post-Trump years—yes, a lot,” Phillips replied. “Do I think he can serve until January 2029 in a capacity necessary to lead the free world? No, I don’t. Do I think that he has done an admirable job of trying to heal this country? No, I don’t.”
Listen here, or wherever fine podcasts are sold.
2. The Hur Report and its Distortionists
Will Saletan is owning the Hur report beat at The Bulwark this week. Today, he unpacks the dishonest sleight-of-hand in congressional Republicans’ characterization of Hur’s findings—as Sen. Josh Hawley put it, that Hur “can’t charge him because he can’t stand trial.”
“In its manual for handling criminal cases,” Will writes, “the Justice Department sets forth standards, drawn from federal law, for evaluating criminal competence.” He continues:
Nowhere in his report does Hur assert or suggest that Biden is incompetent under any of these standards. He says nothing about Biden’s rationality or understanding. He doesn’t even offer direct judgments of Biden’s ability to recall events. Instead, he uses careful language—“present,” “appear,” “apparent”—to make clear that he’s talking about how Biden would look to a jury.
If Hur thought Biden was unfit to stand trial, he wouldn’t be talking about a jury at all. You don’t get a jury unless you’re being tried.
“Hur isn’t the first special counsel to see his report cynically represented,” Will goes on: Republicans did the same thing to Robert Mueller once upon a time. “Hur, like Mueller, certainly doesn’t want to get into a political fight over how to interpret his report. And he shouldn’t have to. But he does have to correct the black-and-white lie that he made a specific legal judgment. He said nothing about Biden’s competence to stand trial. And he should make that clear.”
Cheap Shots
Stefanik: “I would not have done what Mike Pence did,” Stefanik told CNN last week. “I don’t think that was the right approach.” You mean follow the Constitution? You're a bloviating idiot.
One could ask the whole "masters of our fate" question about why we continue to allow a billionaire oligarchy to dictate our politics for us. Are we so sheepish as a peoples that we have to beg decadent billionaires to fix things for us rather than demanding that our politicians tax away their wealth and then use it to *actually* fix things ourselves through government policy? Maybe we stopped being "masters of our fate" when we surrendered our economy to the shareholder class back in the Reagan years. It's no wonder that so many in the MAGA base are ready to surrender our democracy to a billionaire autocrat--they've been raised since birth to worship billionaires, give them tax cuts, and then watch them increasingly hoard the nation's wealth over time in order to take control of things through the power of the wealth we allowed them to accrue via low taxation on the decadently rich.
I'd ask ideological conservatives why they became so reliant on giving billionaires tax cuts in order to stimulate the economy for 40+ years if they wanted us all to be "masters of our fate"? If self-actualization was so important to our nature as Americans, then why did we become a nation of billionaire bootlickers under Reaganism and Milton Friedman's supply-side economics? Ideological conservatism is what got us to abandon individual self-actualization because it gave us concentrated power via wealth hoarding that politicians now cater to more than their own mainline voters. "Money talks," and a small handful of decadent billionaires have wayyyy too much power via wealth hoarding, which poisoned both our politics and our meritocracy, so now we're a broken society that's divided by class and those who are at the table versus those who are on the menu.
What we need to remedy this is a political revolution that revolves around taxing away the wealth of the billionaire class so that power doesn't get concentrated, which reduces systemic corruption because there's not nearly as much money held by individuals to corrupt politicians and the heads of institutes with. Put all of the taxes raised off of liquidating the billionaire class's assets toward the national debt and almost all of that debt goes away. If it's true that the "cream rises to the top" all those former billionaires would make that money back over time if they're truly so full of merit right? Make them put their merit where their mouth is then and tax away their hoarded wealth.