Going Courting

I know there’s a fierce competition for the title of “most harmful consequence” of the Trump Administration. There’s so much to choose from: sabotaging the Affordable Care Act, waging war on public education, reviving the racist and ineffective drug war,  ensuring that new environmental regulations aren’t informed by science (and older ones aren’t enforced), drastically diminishing America’s role in world affairs (and making us a laughingstock among sentient people)…well, choosing just one assault on good government seems impossible.

That said, I want to make the case for Trump’s corruption of the federal judiciary.

Assuming Democrats take back (at least) the House in 2018, and further assuming Trump’s presidency won’t last the full four years (an assumption I make, given Muller’s investigation and Trump’s petulance), we can call a halt to most of the administration’s March to Armageddon and begin to repair the considerable damage done by the Confederacy of Dunces who currently hold sway in the Cabinet and White House.

The Courts, however, are another matter. Federal Judges have lifetime appointments, and what is particularly unnerving is the rapidity with which Trump is placing truly horrific nominees in vacancies that a destructive and partisan Congress prevented the Obama Administration from filling.

Readers who follow the news–which is most of those who come to this site–have probably heard about one of Trump’s most recent nominees, who is not only an unqualified whack job, but ethically challenged; he “neglected” to mention that his wife is employed by the Administration as Chief of Staff of the office that selects judicial nominees. As El Jefe reports at the World’s Most Dangerous Beauty Shop, Inc.,

This nominee is a 36 year old young man, 3 years out of law school who has never argued a case in court.  Hell, he’s never even argued a motion in court.  He’s a blogger who writes highly partisan posts, likes to call the last Democratic candidate Hillary Rotten Clinton, and wrote a piece during the last administration about how Barack Obama was destroying the Constitution by introducing legislation for background checks after the Newtown massacre.  He was a speechwriter for Mitt Romney in 2012, and an aide to Luther Strange when he was appointed to be senator after Granny Sessions was named attorney general.

Who is this candidate, and what’s he nominated for?  Why he is Brett Talley, and he’s been nominated to a lifetime position as a federal judge in the Middle District of Alabama.  Oh, and it gets better; after coming to Washington with Luther Strange, he then took a job in the Justice Department in the office that does…wait for it…appointments to federal judgeships.  Can you spell inside track?  And one last little tidbit…he was unanimously rated by the American Bar Association as “not qualified” for this appointment.

Trump’s other nominees are equally horrific: Salon recently reported on some of them in an article titled “Trump’s Judicial nominees are so ludicrous, he may just be trolling us.”The ABA unanimously evaluated nominee Steven Grasz unqualified, explaining that Grasz’ “professional peers” reported that the nominee “puts his right-wing political views ahead of the law — and is “gratuitously rude” to boot.”

It takes a lot to be so noxious that the ABA will confer this kind of rating. For instance, Trump nominee Jeff Mateer, an appalling bully who says trans children are part of “Satan’s plan” and has suggested that same-sex marriage will lead to “people marrying their pets,” still got a “qualified” rating, though some members of the panel expressed reservations.

Two of Trump’s other district judge nominations, Charles Goodwin and Holly Lou Teeter, also received not-qualified ratings. Part of the issue here is that Trump has decided not to submit his picks to ABA review before a formal nomination, something that has only been done before by George W. Bush. It’s a symbol of the tribalism of the right, and conservatives’ increasing hostility to anyone perceived as not belonging to their tribe. Trump promised during the campaign that he would simply let the far-right Federalist Society pick his nominees for him, and that appears to be exactly what he’s doing. Just as conservatives have opted out of mainstream media, turning instead to Fox News and even more truth-hostile outlets like Breitbart, they’re turning away from mainstream professional organizations and other gatekeepers who seek to maintain a level of proficiency and competence that is seen as inherently threatening to the conservative agenda. If anything, Trump’s judges suggest that he’s thumbing his nose at the very idea of fitness and competence, just to show he can.

Of all his assaults on the rule of law, corrupting the federal judiciary by packing the courts with an assortment of (overwhelmingly white and male) partisan hacks is likely to do the most long-term damage.

Unfortunately, a Senate devoid of Republican statesmen is all too willing to confirm these deeply problematic appointments.

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Corporations Will Use Their Windfalls To Create Jobs. NOT.

Part of the mantra obediently recited by advocates of the mis-named “tax reform” bill is their touching (or feigned) belief that corporations will use the funds being repatriated and/or saved from the tax collector to create jobs.

Brings to mind the old adage about the triumph of hope over experience.

Ed Brayton relays the recent, eye-opening response by corporate CEOs to a speech by Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief economic advisor.

Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, took part in an event hosted by the Wall Street Journal that featured an audience full of CEOs, and when a Journal editor asked for a show of hands by those leaders who would invest in new capacity if their taxes were cut, very few hands went up. Cohn seemed shocked.

Cohn really shouldn’t have been shocked. We’ve been here before, and there is no reason to believe that the fundamentals–or the economic incentives– have changed. As Brayton notes, corporate profits are already at record highs, and credit is very cheap and readily available.

If those businesses believed that investing in new factories or equipment that might create more jobs would result in higher profits for them, they would already be doing it. But they’re not. Indeed, while this poll was an informal one, formal surveys of CEOs find the same result.

This summer, Bank of America Merrill Lynch asked 300 companies what they would do if Congress passed a “tax holiday” that allowed them to bring back massive amounts of money being held overseas at a lower tax rate. 65% said they would pay down their debt. Second most popular option? Stock buyback. Neither of those things creates new jobs. Indeed, when George W. Bush did the same thing in 2004, about $300 billion in cash kept in overseas subsidiaries was brought back at a ridiculous 5.25% tax rate. 80% of it was used to buy back stock. Why? Because it makes the shares of CEOs, which are a huge part of their compensation package, much more valuable. So the rich people benefit but no one else does.

I don’t know whether the lawmakers who continue to push this theory have convinced themselves of its credibility through constant repetition, or whether they are knowingly putting the best possible spin on an economic policy that repeated experience tells us is bogus. It probably doesn’t matter whether they are venal or stupid (not that the two categories are mutually exclusive); the outcome is the same: the rich get richer, and their political donations reward the lawmakers who’ve carried their water. Economic inequality and popular resentments continue to grow, along with political cynicism and social distrust.

It’s a prescription for upheaval, for further splintering of our already strained social fabric–and plenty of wealthy people understand that social unrest shrinks, rather than grows, the economy. As the contours of the tax “reform” bill  have become known, more than 400 American millionaires and billionaires have signed a letter to Congress demanding that Republican lawmakers not cut their taxes.

These wealthy Americans argue that reducing taxes on the richest families at a time when the the nation’s debt is high and inequality is at the worst level since the 1920s would be a colossal mistake.

The letter calls on Congress to not to pass any tax bill that adds to the debt and that “further exacerbates inequality.” Instead of cutting taxes of the wealthy, the letter tells Congress to raises taxes on rich people like them.

If money talks, theirs is the money Congress should listen to.
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The Slog of Sustained Opposition

The recent special election votes in Virginia, New Jersey and even more recently, Oklahoma, gave Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans a sorely-needed infusion of hope. A lot can happen in a year, of course, but there are several promising omens for 2018 in the magnitude of the wins and the repudiation of divisive and ugly campaign tactics.

That said, I think the most important lesson–the most significant “takeaway”–has largely been overlooked, probably because it simply reinforces what has been conventional political wisdom for eons.

Elections are all about TURNOUT.

Democrats in Virginia won races for their House of Delegates despite running in massively gerrymandered districts, reminding us that the “art” of gerrymandering relies on previous voting patterns. When large numbers of citizens who haven’t previously voted cast their ballots, so-called “safe” districts are a lot less safe.

In a recent column for the Guardian, Rebecca Sollnit makes an important point. Reviewing the election that gave us Donald Trump, she suggests that his narrow victory was likely attributable to–and vindicated– the GOP’s intense and persistent emphasis on vote suppression tactics.

You can’t count the votes that weren’t cast, and you can make a case that the election was sabotaged without taking them into account. But when you add up the different means of disenfranchisement – voter ID laws and illegitimate enforcement of them, the Crosscheck program, voter roll purges, reduction of polling places, gutting the Voting Rights Act – you see that millions of poor, student and nonwhite voters were denied one of their basic rights as citizens, along with more than six million disenfranchised because of felony convictions.

That is a huge chunk of the electorate, and had half of them voted, it would have given us a wildly different outcome – in fact, it probably would’ve dictated significantly different campaigns and candidates.

Good government groups have brought lawsuits challenging most of these suppression mechanisms, and I am cautiously optimistic that at least some of those suits will succeed. But as helpful as that would be, the 2018 remedy lies elsewhere: in civic activism that vastly increases turnout, including in, but not limited to, the populations that have been the target of these suppression efforts.

Unlike countries like Australia, where there is mandatory voting, in the United States we rely on voluntary exercise of the franchise–and even where intentional efforts to suppress the vote are absent, we haven’t made voting easy or convenient. As a result, those of us who are focused upon ousting the corrupt and illegitimate cabal that is the Trump Administration face a daunting–but not insurmountable–challenge. We must register and turn out hundreds of thousands of previously absent voters.

Large turnouts have almost always favored Democrats. That’s doubly true in the Age of Trump. The big question–what we used to call the 64 Thousand Dollar Question–is whether we can sustain the remarkable increase in political and civic participation triggered by the results of the 2016 Presidential election.

Does the resistance have stamina enough for the long slog? Are volunteers prepared for the tedium of house-to-house registration and GOTV efforts? Will enough of us resist the normalization of the daily eruptions of thuggery and ignorant belligerence, and keep our eyes on the prize–the restoration of competent and ethical government?

A year can seem like an eternity, but a dogged and sustained effort that dislodges and replaces Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and gives us a sane cohort of lawmakers actually interested in the public good would be a wonderful reward for persistence–and the beginning of the end of an incompetent, shameful and destructive administration.

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How Stupid Do They Think We Are?

I really wasn’t going to write any more about the GOP tax plan, at least until we’ve seen whether it is likely to pass in anything like its current form. But I was on the treadmill yesterday morning and, as usual, was watching television to take my mind off the fact that I was exercising. I was absolutely astonished to see a political advertisement touting the tax plan’s benefits to “ordinary middle-class Americans,” who would see an “average” tax saving of over 1,100.

The voice-over went on to reassure listeners about the fairness of the measure, asserting that the tax brackets for the rich weren’t being lowered, and implying–without actually saying it– that the tax liability of the top 1% would not decrease.

The blatant dishonesty of this ad appalled me.

Let’s just examine that bit about the “average middle-class taxpayer.” (Ignore, for the moment, the fact that Congressional Republicans at one point defined an annual income of 450,000 as “middle class”–I don’t know whether the criticism that little item generated has caused them to back off that particular bit of nonsense.) Let’s just talk about averages.

What’s the average of a mouse and an elephant?

More to the point, if my income is “averaged” with the income of Bill Gates, the resulting number is going to be pretty misleading about both of us.

Every analysis I have seen–even those produced by right-leaning think tanks–shows wealthy individuals getting the lion’s share of the tax “relief” under both the House and Senate  versions. According to Politifact,

  • The highest-income 0.1 percent of taxpayers — those who had an income of over $3.7 million in 2015 — would get an average tax cut of more than $1.3 million in 2017.
  • That same group would receive 18 percent of the tax reduction, while the bottom 60 percent of taxpayers would receive 16.4 percent of the reduction.

Credible sources analyzing the plan’s consequences quibble on some of the details, but all of them agree on two points: the cuts disproportionately benefit the rich, and they will add somewhere between 1.5 and 1.7 trillion dollars to the current deficit.

A deficit of that magnitude would be unsustainable, and the result would be savage cuts in social welfare programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. (Those cuts, of course, would come later–In the time-honored practice of politicians everywhere, the bill pushes the most noticeable negative consequences to a future election cycle.)

I was flabbergasted at the out-and-out dishonesty of the television spot. I’ve seen plenty of spin, but this went far beyond that–it took flat-out lying to an entirely new level. The extra adrenaline probably improved my workout, but all I could think of was “how stupid do the people who created this ad think Americans are?”

And then all I could think about was, what if they’re right?

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This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things….

Economists like to talk about “opportunity costs”–if you do X, you’ve lost the opportunity to do Y. I’ve been thinking about what we could do with the taxes we don’t get on the funds rich people hide from the IRS in those tempting tax havens, as disclosed by the Paradise Papers.

A column in the New York Times explained

A treasure trove of documents given the name of the Paradise Papers was unveiled last week, giving us a clearer idea of how rich people and powerful companies keep their money from the prying eyes of the Internal Revenue Service.

It seems that–if you are rich enough to afford the right law firm and tax haven–you can navigate the Internal Revenue Code in such a way as to legally evade lots and lots of taxes. It turns out that sixty-three percent of foreign profits made by American multi-national corporations are squirreled away in those hideouts, out of the sight of those pesky IRS agents.

That disclosure was annoying enough, but what really pissed me off were a couple of estimates of what those evaded taxes might have paid for.

We worry a lot about the cost of social programs in this country, saying we simply can’t afford many things that we know could bring big rewards. But that missing $70 billion from corporate offshore tax avoidance would go a long way. A mere $140 million could replace the lead water pipes poisoning children in Flint, Mich. It would cost just an estimated $22.5 billion to end homelessness by providing all needy families with rental assistance. President Barack Obama asked Congress for $75 billion for his initial universal preschool plan; universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds would cost $98.4 billion over 10 years.

Senator Bernie Sanders’s College for All Act doesn’t even require the federal government to cover the entire $70 billion cost of public college tuition, but it could if this money were available to the government. Divvying up $70 billion a year to each parent in the country would be a huge step toward ending childhood poverty. And the available pot of money, were offshore tax avoidance not an option, would be even larger if rich individuals were taxed at the rates we all face here at home.

According to The Hill, if those writing our tax laws didn’t prefer letting their donors off the hook for their fair share, we could afford pretty much anything. Here are just a few of the things The Hill says we could pay for if we weren’t rushing a $1.5-trillion debt-financed gift to billionaires through the legislative process:

What makes this effort to take from the poor to give to the rich especially galling is the hypocrisy of the GOP “deficit hawks.”

 After spending eight years railing against the evils of deficits, after blocking numerous important investments because we “couldn’t afford it” and after swearing time and again that debt was our No. 1 enemy, most Republican representatives have tossed their anti-deficit positions aside in the blink of an eye. That is galling, yes.

But perhaps even more galling is that, having thrown their fiscal caution to the wind and having decided that now, with a Republican in the White House, debt is no longer a concern, their best idea for spending hundreds of billions of dollars is to give it all to the rich. For that, they should be truly ashamed of themselves.

When you wonder why Americans can’t have universal health care, or great trains that run every 20 minutes on tracks that are smooth and well-maintained, or other public services and amenities that citizens of other developed countries enjoy, just remember: we give  money to our billionaires instead.

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