The Governmentalist

Late last month, Justice Anthony Kennedy announced that he would be retiring from the Supreme Court at the end of the court’s term. On July 9th, President Trump announced his nominee to replace Kennedy - Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who currently sits on the D.C. circuit court of appeals, which...

...hm. You know what? Let’s back up. We need to talk about the courts.

The Supreme Court Building. Not pictured: Interns in pantsuits and tennis shoes.

After the election, I think it’s safe to say that a lot of us were disillusioned with the political process.

Right? Like, of course we were. The candidate who won the popular vote nevertheless was not elected, and the guy who won was a sexual harasser, a reality TV personality, had the backing of the KKK... I mean, I could go on. In short, we were wrong - everyone was wrong.

It’s been a year and a half since Trump took office, and it kind of feels like election season never ended. The deluge of news continued apace, rocking us with outrageous scandal after outrageous scandal - Muslim bans, the border wall, unpopular tax cuts, repeated attempts to repeal the ACA, a Supreme Court appointee, North Korea, the Mueller investigation, the revolving door of Cabinet appointees and resignations, and endless tweets.

If you retreated into a hole, you could be forgiven. I know I did. I moved to a different city with my roommates, got a new job and a cat, and focused on learning a lot of new recipes. It is, quite simply, too much.

And yet, I’m lucky. Even when I’m struggling, I have the benefit of a college education that, in large part, taught me the ins and outs of how our government is supposed to work, and I flatter myself that I have the ability to communicate that to people relatively clearly.

Would it be neglectful of my duty as an educator to let this site founder? Maybe, though I hope and pray that this isn’t anyone’s sole way of learning about civics and politics. Or maybe it’s most useful as a simple organizational tool - a way to keep things in perspective when the noise of the world outweighs the signal.

Anyway, this is all by way of saying that I’m back, and that I plan to keep writing about these things, with or without questions. Even if nobody reads them, it will be helpful for me - and if they can be helpful for you, too, then so much the better.

Yeah, that question has been on a lot of folks’ minds for the past couple of weeks, especially after last night’s debate. In case you weren’t watching - who could blame you? - Donald Trump was asked by moderator Chris Wallace whether or not he would respect the outcome of the election. His response… you know what? How about I just let you read it?

CHRIS WALLACE: Mr. Trump, I want to ask about one must question in this topic. You have been warning at rallies recently that this election is rigged and that Hillary Clinton is in the process of trying to steal it from you. Your running mate Governor Pence pledged on Sunday that he and you, his words, will absolutely accept the result of this election. Today your daughter Ivanka said the same thing. I want to ask you here on the stage tonight, do you make the same commitment that you will absolutely, sir, that you will absolutely accept the result of the selection?

DONALD TRUMP: I will look at it at the time. I'm not looking anything now I will look at it at the time. What I've seen, what I've seen it so bad. First of all the media is so dishonest and so corrupt and the pile-on is so amazing that the New York Times actually wrote an article about it that they don't even care. It's so dishonest and they poison the minds of the voters but unfortunately for them I think the voters are seeing through it.

CHRIS WALLACE: But, sir.

DONALD TRUMP: I think they’re going to see right through it. We will find out on November eighth but I think they’re going to see through it. Excuse me Chris if you look at your voter rolls you will see millions of people that are registered to vote, millions, this isn't coming for me this is coming from Pew Report and other places millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn't be registered to vote so let me just give you one other thing.

I talk about the corrupt media I talk about the millions of people I’ll tell you one other thing. She shouldn't be allowed to run. It’s -- she's guilty of a very very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run. And just in that respect I say it's rigged because, Chris, she should never have been allowed to run for the presidency based on what she did with e-mails and so many other things.

CHRIS WALLACE: But sir, there is a tradition in this country, in fact one of the prides of this country, is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard fought a campaign is, that at the end of the campaign, that the loser concedes to the winner, not saying that you are necessarily going to be the you loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country, are you saying that you are not prepared now to commit to that principle?

DONALD TRUMP: What I'm saying now is I will tell you at the time. I will keep you in suspense, okay?

Trump vowing to keep us all in suspense has led to some understandable anxiety from a lot of people - myself included.

The good news is that whether or not Donald Trump concedes has no effect whatsoever on the results of the election. The Electoral College will meet on December 19th, they will vote, the results will be tallied and certified, and that will be that. The process has continued uninterrupted for two hundred and fifty or so years, and there’s no reason to think that it will not continue this year as well. The Twelfth Amendment could frankly give a rat’s patoot about whether or not Donald Trump’s near-certain electoral defeat has bruised the man’s fragile ego.

In the short run, Trump’s insistence that the election is “rigged” is a blip on the radar. The narrative will be forgotten by all but his most vocal supporters by Thanksgiving. In the long run, though, it presents us with some troubling and problematic realities.

Moderator Chris Wallace rightly pointed out that, win or lose, respect for the election process itself is a sine qua non for democracies. As citizens, we collectively lend the electoral process legitimacy, first by participating in it by voting and second by accepting the outcome. Additionally, incidents of voter fraud are, in reality, incredibly rare - in the US, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning or attacked by a shark than to commit voter fraud.

Trump’s apparent refusal to accept the outcome of any election that he doesn’t win isn’t actually about who wins or loses. For everything he’s said about the rigging of polls and the lying, biased mainstream media, he knows how to read as well as anyone else, and knows that his chances of winning the election are, charitably, incredibly slim. This isn’t about snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. It’s about Trump the child kicking the ball over the fence when he loses the soccer game. It’s a snide, smug declaration that if he can’t enjoy the fruits of a democratic election, then nobody else can, either.

It will remain to be seen the effect that Trump has on our democracy in the long run. I’ve gotten a number of questions about whether Trump is an anomaly, whether he has “opened a door that can never be closed,” and I don’t know the answer to that question. We’re used to viewing politics on a spectrum from “conservative” to “liberal” but Donald Trump’s attitude - and the willingness of the Republican Party to go along with him - makes me wonder if we should rethink that. The divide under Trump goes deeper than liberalism and conservatism, it calls into question the fundamental legitimacy of the democratic process. That worries me.

Of course, that’s a problem for the future. There are nineteen days until the election. If you haven’t registered to vote, you should do so.

Boy! The GOP is in a pickle.

(Let’s pretend for a moment that Trump is solely the GOP’s problem, and not a symptom of a chronic and potentially fatal sickness at the core of our democracy.)

Donald Trump was already five or six percentage points behind Hillary Clinton last Friday afternoon, when the Washington Post reported that they had obtained a tape of Donald Trump bragging in no uncertain terms about making unwanted sexual advances toward women. The rest of the weekend saw a predictable deluge of political opportunism as a long and growing list of Republican Congresspeople, Governors and party elders decided that this, finally, was the last straw. Trump found himself unendorsed and denounced by dozens of formerly obeisant subjects, including Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), who faces a tough race for her Senate Seat, and Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), who called for Trump to step aside in favor of his running mate, Mike Pence.

On the back of this disastrous weekend, and following a debate performance that might charitably be characterized as “unhinged,” you might, if you were a Republican National Committee strategist, be wondering if the 29 days until the election might be just long enough to replace Trump’s name on the ballot.

So, without further ado: Here’s how the Republican Party can dump Trump!

Step 1: Convince Donald Trump either to step aside or to become deathly ill, bedridden, incapacitated, comatose, or deceased. Trump vowed on Saturday afternoon to stay in the race “one hundred percent” and seems to have a pathological aversion to doing anything that might cause him to lose face or become embarrassed, so this might actually be the hardest part of the job.

Step 2: Invoke Rule 9 of the RNC Charter.  The Republican National Committee has empowered themselves to “fill any and all vacancies which may occur by reason of death, declination or otherwise of the Republican candidate for President of the United States.” These are the ONLY situations in which the RNC is able to fill vacancies. The clause “death, declination or otherwise” seems to imply that there are a whole range of situations in which they can appoint a new candidate, but it’s pretty safe to assume that “because he is losing very, very badly” is not one of them. Of course, the party could amend Rule 9 to include a clause for replacing the candidate for any reason, but such an amendment would require majority approval from the party’s Rules Committee and two-thirds of the party’s delegates. Assembling a convention with less than a month to go isn’t likely, even if the measure were guaranteed to pass - which it isn’t.

Step 3: Appoint a new candidate. Indiana Governor Mike Pence is Donald Trump’s running mate, and actually had a pretty successful debate of his own last week. If it weren’t for his pesky propensity of advocating for public funding of forcible conversion of gay children, he might be an ideal Republican candidate (and, let’s be honest, that wasn’t enough to stop him getting elected in the first place). Other potential frontrunners included second place runner-up Ted Cruz, who in an explosion of good timing withheld his endorsement of Trump until just two weeks ago, and House Speaker Paul Ryan, who announced just this morning that although his strong moral character makes it impossible for him to defend Donald Trump, he’s not unendorsing him. The backbones on these fellas.

Step 4: Try not to think about the thousands of ballots that have already been cast. 39 states offer early voting in one form or another. According to the US Election Project, some 400,000 ballots have already been cast, and while that number is less than 1% of the total number of votes likely to be cast in the election as a whole, it’s still a significant number of votes - especially in swing states like North Carolina or Florida, where the final difference between the two candidates may just be a few thousand votes. Those votes aren’t coming back and can’t be changed - even if the candidate they voted for is no longer running for President.

Step 5: Sue most of the states to convince them to violate their own ballot access deadlines. Each state has its own set of rules concerning ballot access - that is, how they decide who will be on the ballot in November. Deadlines for filing have already passed in many states, including Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia, so to change the names on the ballots in time for election day, you’d have to file lawsuits in two or three dozen states. This is likely to be both expensive and time-consuming.

The other option in this case involves a little-understood provision of the Electoral College called faithless electors. Remember, when you cast your vote, you aren’t actually voting for a candidate, you’re voting for the candidate’s electors in the Electoral College. These electors have agreed to vote for their chosen candidate, but constitutionally speaking, aren’t actually required to do so (except in states like Michigan, Florida and Colorado, which have laws governing that kind of thing - then it gets a great deal more complicated). So a path to victory might look like this: The Republican Party somehow removes Trump from the ballot, nominates a replacement, and then convinces Trump’s electors to vote for the replacement where they are allowed to do so instead of Trump. Of course, considering about half the states in the US do have laws governing faithless electors, it’s difficult to imagine a candidate getting to 270 electoral votes with this strategy.

And remember: Election Day is 29 days away. So all of that would need to be done in a little longer than four weeks.

No problem, right?

Some less optimistic Republicans, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, seem to have already resigned themselves to an inevitable Clinton presidency, and are attempting to make a case to their constituents that the most effective way to check her influence is to keep the Senate and the House of Representatives under Republican control. While it’s very unlikely for the House of Representatives to flip - the Democrats would have to pick up 31 seats - with a big enough Clinton victory, the Senate might slip out of Republican control, which would give Clinton a congressional mandate to, at the very least, appoint whomever she wanted to the Supreme Court (assuming the Senate Republicans don’t filibuster until all of humanity returns to the loam).

Note: The following article contains descriptions of violence, graphic imagery, and some potentially upsetting images.

It feels almost wrong to have a news cycle consumed by an issue that isn’t related either to someone’s email account or someone else’s foot being chronically unable to stay out of their mouth.

This morning, Libertarian candidate for President and former governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson stumbled over an interview question on MSNBC’s Morning Joe about the ongoing conflict in Syria. When Mike Barnicle, one of the show’s regular commentators, asked Johnson what he would do about Aleppo if he were elected President, Johnson asked “...and what is Aleppo?”

And that’s when it occurred to me: If Gary Johnson, who is running for president, doesn’t know what Aleppo is, it’s entirely possible that a lot of people who read this blog don’t know what Aleppo is, too! And that’s unfortunate, because in this day and age, Aleppo - and where it fits into the context of the broader conflict in Syria and the Middle East - is a very important thing to know about.

What is Aleppo?

Aleppo is the largest city in Syria - larger and more populous than even Syria’s capital, Damascus. It’s also incredibly old - folks have been living in Aleppo for about seven thousand years. At the height of the Ottoman Empire, Aleppo was rivaled only by Cairo and Constantinople in size. In 2012, it was home to 2.5 million people, which for context would make it the 4th largest city in the United States, only slightly smaller than Chicago. More than 80% of the city’s population are Sunni Muslims, but Aleppo also houses a huge number of Armenian and Turkmen Orthodox Christians - about 12% of the population.

Of course, you can get all of that from reading an Almanac. It doesn’t tell you why Aleppo is actually important today.

Since 2012, Aleppo has been the site of constant fighting between the Syrian Army and rebel forces who oppose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. While the term “civil war” might be technically correct, the conflict in question has been characterized by acts of horrific violence, largely by the Syrian army, toward civilians, doctors, aid workers, women, and children - creating a refugee crisis that has all but emptied the city. 2.3 million people have fled Aleppo since the beginning of the civil war. Thousands more have been killed.

Today, the city is split in two - one side is held by the Syrian Army loyal to Bashar al-Assad, the other side by rebel groups. What was once a thriving, multicultural metropolis has been turned into a battlefield soaked with the blood of soldiers and civilians alike. The Syrian Army has choked off major supply lines into the city, ostensibly to cut off supplies to the rebels, a side-effect of which is that humanitarian aid, food, water, and medicine for the city’s dwindling civilian population have also largely stopped.

What hasn’t stopped is the indiscriminate bombing of civilian quarters, hospitals, and health clinics by the al-Assad regime. Earlier this year, watchdog groups in Aleppo accused the regime of unleashing a chlorine gas attack in a market square, killing seven and injuring at least forty others, including children. In April, the al-Assad regime bombed Al Quds hospital and killed Dr Muhammed Wassim Mo’az, the last practicing pediatrician in the city.

In short, Aleppo - and indeed, Syria in general - is likely the defining humanitarian crisis of the modern age. Imagine if, in 1994, someone running for office had said “what’s Rwanda?” or if, ten years later, John Kerry had asked “what’s Fallujah?” Gary Johnson either not knowing or not being able to immediately recall the significance of it is indicative, certainly, of a worrying level of ignorance about foreign affairs, considering he’s running for President. 

From the Washington Post about an hour ago: 90 percent of unwavering Sanders supporters plan to vote for Clinton in November.

There’s also some pretty compelling evidence that suggests that, although the Democratic leadership infrastructure is in turmoil, the base remains firmly in Hillary’s camp.

According to the Pew Research Center, 90% of those polled who backed Sanders across surveys taken in December, March and April indicated that they would be supporting Clinton in November. 8% indicated a preference for Donald Trump, and 2% said they would be voting for neither candidate.

From FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver:

And from HuffPost pollster, the polling aggregate site:

First things first: let’s talk about the 538 “nowcast.” Reading that graph can be panic-inducing, so what is it actually saying?

It’s basically saying that if the election were held tomorrow, Trump would have a 57.5% chance of winning, and Clinton would have a 42.5% chance of winning. Or, to look at it another way: If you held a thousand Presidential elections tomorrow, you would expect Trump to win 575 of them and Clinton to win 425.

Trump pulling even in this particular poll is likely indicative of two things.

First, campaigns traditionally received a “convention bump” as the euphoria of their week-long party celebration unites their base. Trump seems to have received a 3% or so bump from the RNC.

Second, it seems the DNC leaks from late last week have preempted any advantage Clinton might have received from nominating a Vice President, affable and steady though Tim Kaine may be. Bitterness over the DNC’s support of Clinton continue to prevent her campaign from winning over a majority of voters nationally. That may change this week as the Democratic Convention commences.

But regardless of how the polling shakes out following the conventions, it’s clear that Donald Trump is uncomfortably close to the White House. That he was ever within a percentage point of being in the lead is a scary possibility for a lot of folks, and I’m sure that plenty of ink will be spilled on the question of how, exactly, things were allowed to get this bad.

Okay, let’s break this down.

Is there a danger that this controversy will split the democrat vote and put Trump closer to winning the campaign?

Sure. There is a danger that embittered progressive Democrats, having had their worst fears confirmed, might bolt the party for this election. It’s an understandable reaction; after all, when Sanders presented the idea that the DNC (an organization which is ostensibly supposed to remain neutral until the primaries are over) was basically working for Clinton, he was more or less called a paranoid kook.

Additionally, Clinton’s lead over Trump in the polls has been consistently narrowing for the past few weeks. The latest polling aggregate suggests that Clinton leads Trump by only three percentage points nationally - 43% to 40%. The Democrats are hoping that Sanders’ endorsement will bring home the progressive left who remain skeptical about Clinton, but it’s entirely possible that the perception of the Democratic Party as a corrupt institution might drive some fence-sitters toward the Green Party or the Libertarian Party, both of which are polling better than ever these days.

Certainly, this could not have come at a worse time for the Clinton campaign or a better time for Trump. The DNC leaks completely eclipsed Clinton tapping Senator Tim Kaine for her Vice Presidential Slot and took a good deal of attention away from Trump’s unconventional convention. Instead of being able to go into the Democratic Convention with a strong, united front, the DNC is going to spend all week putting out fires of “who knew what about what, and when, and oh by the way the head of our party is resigning at the end of the week.” The Democrats were poised to be able to fire back at Trump, but on the eve of their convention, it’s looking like a real mess.

Of course, what Sanders does this week also takes on new significance, especially in light of Senator Ted Cruz’s non-endorsement of Trump onstage at the RNC. Will Sanders stand up in Pittsburgh and tell people to “vote their conscience,” too? Or can he thread a rhetorical needle by endorsing Clinton against Trump while condemning the DNC? And even if he can, will his supporters listen? Or will the revolution move on without him?

It’s hard to keep up with all the news coming out of the conventions. These two weeks seem to go by so quickly, with so much bombast and politicking packed into so little time. Here’s what happened just in the last couple of days:

Several hours before formally accepting the Republican Party’s nomination, a draft copy of Donald Trump’s acceptance speech was leaked to Correct the Record, a pro-Clinton SuperPAC. Both Correct the Record and Politico, who had received the leaked speech from the PAC, declined to comment on their sources, except to say that the leak came from within the Trump campaign itself.

If you didn’t see the speech itself – and who could blame you, it’s a rambling, hour-long affair even with the teleprompter, and I can think of a lot more efficient emetics – you can watch it on Youtube here.  The speech contains multitudes, swinging wildly from ‘soporific’ to ‘panic-inducing’ as Trump declares (in all capital letters on the transcript) “I AM YOUR VOICE.”

The morning after his speech, The Washington Post published an article from their entire Editorial Board with the headline “Donald Trump is a unique threat to American democracy.” From the article:

What the candidate does offer is a series of prejudices and gut feelings, most of them erroneous. Allies are taking advantage of the United States. Immigrants are committing crimes and stealing jobs. Muslims hate America. In fact, Japan and South Korea are major contributors to an alliance that has preserved a peace of enormous benefit to Americans. Immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans and take jobs that no one else will. Muslims are the primary victims of Islamist terrorism, and Muslim Americans, including thousands who have served in the military, are as patriotic as anyone else.

That same day, Wikileaks released some 20,000 emails taken from the Democratic National Committee’s email servers. The leaks reopened a controversy about the DNC’s supposed neutrality in the Democratic primaries, as journalists discovered an email from Brad Marshall, the DNC’s Chief Financial Officer, which appears to be strategizing with the Clinton campaign against Bernie Sanders. The email in question asked “can we get someone to ask [Sanders’] belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage.” Attempts to “out” Sanders as an atheist would surely have made him less appealing to religious Democrats in the South.

Also on Friday, former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke announced that he was running for Senate in Louisiana, citing Trump’s popularity as the reason for his reemergence into political life. “Thousands of special-interest groups stand up for African Americans, Mexican Americans, Jewish Americans, et cetera, et cetera,” Duke said. “The fact is that European Americans need at least one man in the United States Senate — one man in the Congress — who will defend their rights and heritage.”

And finally, last night, Hillary Clinton announced her nominee for Vice President: Tim Kaine, Democratic Senator from Virginia. Kaine was the mayor of Richmond from 1998 to 2001, Lieutenant Governor of Virginia from 2002 to 2005, and Governor for four years after that. As a Virginia Democrat, Kaine’s record is fairly conservative, disappointing some in the party’s progressive wing who had hoped the Vice Presidential choice would reflect Bernie Sanders’ popularity and success in the Democratic primaries. (On a personal note, I grew up and went to high school in Richmond and saw Tim Kaine speak at least once, and I can confirm that he is both genial and somewhat dull. But dullness, it turns out, is at a premium in this election).

Whew.

For Republicans, last night felt like a moment.

If you’ve been watching the RNC so far, you’ll have noticed a pattern in the speakers: even the ones who don’t share a last name with the candidate end up (more or less) enthusiastically endorsing him. Republicans who weren’t willing to take their medicine for the sake of party unity aren’t in Cleveland. Like it or not, the Republican Party for the next 4 months is the Trump show. This is what being a Republican means - at least for now.

But if you haven’t really been paying attention to Republican politics for a while, I think it’s easy to miss how strange Trump being the figurehead of the party actually is. Trump is not a typical Republican. He’s not even in spitting distance of typical.

Since the Clinton years, a big party of the Republican electoral strategy has revolved around the idea of socially conservative wedge issues that drive people to the polls. Issues like gay marriage, trans people in bathrooms, abortion - they rile up the base. They induce moral panic. They’re great fundraisers.

Trump’s wedge issues are different. His conservatism is less social, and more cultural. He doesn’t care about the degradation of America’s moral fabric (indeed, with at least one casino that bears his name, he is contributing materially to it). Instead, the image he paints of the world is one where America is beset on all sides, and the enemy is at the gates. Immigration and Islam are not just a threat to your job or your church, Trump says, they’re a threat to your way of life. The urgency of Trump’s message overshadows the traditional Republican social interests; it almost dismisses them outright. 

In retrospect, we probably should have realized that this difference isn’t something that the Republicans were going to be able to paper over at a 4-day convention. The “party unity” strategy may work long enough to elect Trump in November, but going forward, this is a struggle for the soul and values of the Republican Party. 

Ted Cruz’s refusal to endorse Trump last night - and the subsequent boos from the RNC that followed - were hardly a principled stand. They were a cold, calculating political maneuver. Cruz is essentially gambling. He knows that, for all the talk of party unity now, Trump didn’t win the nomination with a mandate. He knows that the majority of Republicans voted for someone else. He thinks that if Trump loses in November, it might well cut short the Republican Party’s dalliance with cryptofascism and send them back into the warm, open, judgmental arms of the moral majority.

When that happens, Cruz wants to be the remembered as the guy who stood up in the face of the party and kept the faith, even if it means that he gets crucified. He’s betting that in the long term, he’ll be proven right.

Current mood: 

Okay, look, I have to talk about the plagiarism thing. This isn’t going to be news to anyone here, but it’s one of the craziest things to happen in an already crazy election cycle.

It appears that portions of last night’s speech by Melania Trump may have been plagiarized from Michelle Obama’s 2008 DNC speech.

From the linked NYT article:

Woof.

In the ensuing melee, Trump’s message has been derailed somewhat by the campaign’s need to address the alleged similarities between Melania’s and Michelle’s speeches. This morning, Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson gave a Facebook Live interview in which she said “this concept that Michelle Obama invented the English language is absurd,” apparently betting on the notion that most people won’t actually know or care what plagiarism is.

That’s not all, however: The RNC has also fallen prey to a case of norovirus, leading at least a dozen attendees from the California delegation to be quarantined to their hotel rooms. Reports from Cleveland posit that it was probably spread though the indoor water park at the hotel where the California delegation is staying. 

Today’s prime-time schedule for the RNC starts at 5:30, and the theme is “Make America Work Again.” You can expect to see UFC President Dana White attempt to thread a very fine needle in his desire to remain apolitical. We’ll also see Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan kneel in tribute before Trump to have their sins weighed against a feather. After that, they’ll probably give a speech or something.

I think you could make the argument that drawing attention to the RNC rules process is constructive - symbolically, it undermines the legitimacy of the candidate and opens up venues for debate.