What with all the shoes that dropped this week, it’s tempting to grin over the growing possibility that Mr. Donald Trump could prove to have the shortest tenure of any president who didn’t die in office. And tempting to see this as an end to the awfulness that Trump has sought to impose by implementing some of the most extreme elements of the Republican agenda, including filling judicial vacancies with people with views that make even the right-wingers at The Federalist Society wince.
Tempting until reality intervenes in the person of Mike Pence. You remember. The guy who is second in line to be in charge in the Oval Office, and is even more extreme than Trump, but without the bombastic vulgarity and flaunted ignorance that distinguish the current so-called leader of the free world.
The brilliantly acid-tongued Charlie P. Pierce Esquire writes—Republicans Must Be Thinking About a President Mike Pence Right Now:
I’m not one of those people who think that the Republicans in Congress don’t want to move on the president* because the FSB has video of them all making the sign of the two-humped lizard with, well, two-humped lizards.
But, at this point, with the president* re-enacting the Tell-Tale Heart in public and all over the electric Twitter machine, you have to wonder. Why not give the president* a laurel and hearty handshake and tell him to go slice fairway woods out of bounds for the rest of his life? Thank him for his great service to the ultimate Republican goal of dismantling the Republic for the benefit of their donor class and show him the door. After all, Mike Pence is waiting in the wings.
Mike Pence has been committed to that goal longer and far more deeply than the current president* has, and his commitment comes with genuine, extra-special Leviticus Jesus that the president* can’t even fake convincingly. He will give them everything they ask for, and he’ll do it without causing them worldwide embarrassment and without occasioning a bloodbath at the polls this coming November. And, make no mistake, he’s just as dim and, therefore, just as pliable as this guy. What are they waiting for?
Makes you wonder. About lizards.
What I wouldn’t give to have Trump’s next reality TV show be three cameras in a cell shared by him and America’s most pitiful propagandist, Sean Hannity. Not that I would watch it. But a certain cohort of people would, I’m certain, be mesmerized by the endless fabrications of this pairing. And it would only be entertainment instead of the real-life shit-show that has pinioned our attention.
Dana Milbank at The Washington Post writes—The bottom drops out for Republicans:
I can see why Ryan is scrambled. The party he leads is on course for a drubbing, and possibly a historic drubbing. Though much could change, Republican incumbents are voting with their feet — House Republicans who aren’t seeking reelection now number in the mid-40s — and the speaker’s announcement, after just
2½ years in the position, sends the unmistakable if unintended message that the bottom has dropped out.
The speaker’s retirement launched a thousand sinking-ship metaphors. But Capt. Ryan’s abandon-ship announcement adds a unique twist to the metaphor: The thing he’s clinging to as a life raft is actually the iceberg.
Shortly after assuming the speakership, Ryan, a promising young leader, made the mother of all miscalculations: He supported Donald Trump for president, reasoning that he could not remain speaker if he opposed Trump. And so Ryan, the highest GOP officeholder in the land and the party’s 2012 vice presidential nominee, delivered the Republican establishment to Trump.
Now, 15 months into Trump’s disastrous presidency, Ryan’s speakership is ending anyway. The free-market, limited-government conservatism he championed has been destroyed. And yet he still binds himself to the man who destroyed it all.
Also at the Post, Karen Tumulty writes—Paul Ryan implodes his party — ahead of schedule:
Republican incumbents were already retiring from the House in numbers far greater than at any time in recent history. Ryan’s decision to join them will no doubt spur others to do the same, rather than be part of a November wipeout.
There is less talk than there was even a month ago of how a vibrant economy might come to the GOP’s rescue. Trump’s erratically protectionist trade pronouncements have put all that in jeopardy. There are, of course, the tax cuts, which are the House Republicans’ only big achievement during the 15 months since their party took control of all the levers of power in Washington. But the president won’t stick to the script when he is sent out to sell them.
Meanwhile, Trump’s legal jeopardy mounts, most recently with the spectacle of the FBI raiding the home and office of a lawyer who represents the president. The prospect that Trump will be impeached is being discussed more openly as a campaign issue — and not just on the fringe left but by Republicans themselves, in hopes that the threat of what might happen under Democratic control will keep their base fired up.
Ryan did not have to wait for the November election to confirm what Trump has done to the speaker’s own reputation for intellectual depth and rectitude. He has been a hapless passenger in the sidecar of this chaotic presidency, not the driver of big policy ideas he once imagined himself to be.
Most of America has no clue about the deluge of scandals EPA chief Scott Pruitt is involved in:
E.J. Dionne Jr. at the Post writes—Paul Ryan is the personification of conservatism’s decline:
Given where Ryan’s passions lie, it is unsurprising that he would prop Trump up as long as the president was willing to embrace a modern-day social Darwinism that married efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act with reductions in government’s impositions on the managers and owners of capital. The retiring speaker really does believe that this is the path to the good society. To pursue it, he’ll take help wherever he can get it.
If Ryan has presidential ambitions, he is certainly wise to walk away now. The House Republican majority and Trump himself may well be wrecked by the president’s unscrupulous impulsiveness. Ryan’s departure will not only give him time with his family — those who know him see the politician’s proverbial excuse for leave-taking as having reality in his case — but also the opportunity to try to cleanse himself of the stain left by a low and dishonest political moment. In 2024, he will be just 54.
Yet he has been propelled to the exits because his sort of conservatism hit a dead end. It’s why we have Trump, and why Ryan was forced to acquiesce to a man whose statements he once condemned as racist and whose personal life is the antithesis of his own. This is the part of Ryan’s legacy he’ll have great difficulty living down.
Matthew Rozca at Salon writes—Is Paul Ryan’s retirement a sign Republicans are giving up?
With the announcement that he will be leaving Congress in 2019, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has guaranteed that his congressional legacy will be that of a cautionary tale — namely, of a once fiercely autonomous and independent-minded legislator who sold his soul in order to appease a corrupt politician, President Donald Trump. And he will be leaving behind a party at a crossroads, on the verge of a very important election.
"This will be interpreted as almost a concession that the Republicans will lose the House," Larry Sabato, founder and director of the Center for Politics, told Salon. "And ask yourself what you would do if you were a vulnerable Republican seeking reelection in the House. Might you not consider not running for reelection? Of course you would! Now most of them will run anyway, but some of them will retire. This is the little additional kick they need to go out the door. And it's bound to demoralize some of the House Republicans."
It will be a loss, no matter how Ryan spins it.
The Editorial Board of The New York Times takes its own poke in—Saving Paul Ryan:
You don’t have to worry anymore about weathering a primary challenger from the far right. You don’t have to truckle before a blast of presidential tweets. You can use your remaining authority and credibility with your colleagues to pass legislation to make it harder for the president to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel, and other officials at the Department of Justice. On your way out the door, on that crucial question, you still have a chance to put yourself on the right side of history.
Unfortunately, the reputation you hoped to build for yourself across your nearly 20 years in Congress, as an earnest policy wonk in anguish over the federal deficit, vanished long ago beneath a flood of red ink. You talked a lot about making government more effective and efficient, but actually pushed a conventional hard-line agenda of huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy and steep cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and other government programs that benefit low-income and middle-class families. The tax law you rammed through last year will blow up the deficit by more than $1.85 trillion over the next decade. All that debt is part of your legacy. Too late to fix that.
Can I just say that I wish the following headline were in The Onion?
Bonnie Docherty at The Guardian writes—We’re running out of time to stop killer robot weapons:
It’s five years this month since the launch of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a global coalition of non-governmental groups calling for a ban on fully autonomous weapons. This month also marks the fifth time that countries have convened at the United Nations in Geneva to address the problems these weapons would pose if they were developed and put into use.
The countries meeting in Geneva this week are party to a major disarmament treaty called the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. While some diplomatic progress has been made under that treaty’s auspices since 2013, the pace needs to pick up dramatically. Countries that recognise the dangers of fully autonomous weapons cannot wait another five years if they are to prevent the weapons from becoming a reality.
Fully autonomous weapons, which would select and engage targets without meaningful human control, do not yet exist, but scientists have warned they soon could. Precursors have already been developed or deployed as autonomy has become increasingly common on the battlefield. Hi-tech military powers, including China, Israel, Russia, South Korea, the UK and the US, have invested heavily in the development of autonomous weapons. So far there is no specific international law to halt this trend.
Experts have sounded the alarm, emphasising that fully autonomous weapons raise a host of concerns. For many people, allowing machines that cannot appreciate the value of human life to make life-and-death decisions crosses a moral red line.
And can I just say I wish headlines like the following could only be found in the archives of the 20th Century?
Lindy West at The New York Times writes—To Save Abortion Rights, We Have to Think Beyond Roe:
Conventional understanding of pro-choice politics tends to fixate on Roe v. Wade as the center of the fight for abortion rights. But though Roe faces genuine peril down the road if the Trump administration gets another Supreme Court appointment, state-level restrictions that aim to shut down abortion clinics are chipping away at the rights of millions of Americans this second. Legality doesn’t mean much without access. If abortion and reproductive health care are important to you, this is your fight.
Six states currently have only one abortion care provider. In five of those states — Kentucky, Mississippi, North Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming — independent abortion care providers (clinics that are not hospitals, private physicians’ offices or national organizations like Planned Parenthood) operate the only clinic available. In four others — Arkansas, Oklahoma, Georgia and Nevada — independent clinics are the only facilities providing surgical abortions. “Without independent providers, abortion access in these four states would be limited to medication abortion within the first 10 weeks of pregnancy,” said Nikki Madsen, executive director of the Abortion Care Network. According to Abortion Care Network data, nearly 30 percent of independent clinics closed between 2012 and 2017.
A pending lawsuit will decide whether Kentucky can shut down its single clinic and become the first state in the nation with no clinics at all. West Virginia’s only clinic is under similar attack from its Legislature.
Emily Atkin at The New Republic writes—Undoing American Climate Diplomacy Trump’s new secretary of state does not improve the situation:
Mike Pompeo, as a Kansas congressman from 2011 to 2017, was one of the largest recipients of oil and gas money in the House of Representatives. He voted against amendments to bills that declared that climate change was real and caused by humans; railed against international climate treaties and greenhouse gas regulations; and in a 2014 speech to the Kansas Independent Oil and Gas Association, called climate science “a religion out there that is advocating on behalf of making sure CO₂ doesn’t escape.” He is now Donald Trump’s pick to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, and if confirmed by the Senate, he’d be the first top American diplomat to publicly reject the realities of climate science. [...]
Fortunately, there’s a structural limit to how much damage Trump and Pompeo can do. The Paris agreement was written to withstand assaults from a hostile administration, said Paul Bodnar, who led the negotiations as Barack Obama’s senior director for energy and climate. “We designed the agreement in a way that was robust to shocks,” he said. “We knew that the U.S. is like the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of climate. When we’re the good Dr. Jekyll, we have to make sure the rest of the world can withstand us when we turn into Mr. Hyde.”
Brianne Gorod, chief counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, previously served as a law clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer and an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. At USAToday, she writes—Mick Mulvaney's assault on consumer finances and the CFPB is illegal as well as wrong:
It’s been over four months since President Trump named Mick Mulvaney as interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. During that time, Mulvaney’s been working hard to derail the bureau's efforts to protect consumers from financial predators. This highly intentional assault on American consumers and their financial well-being is not just wrong — it’s unlawful.
President Trump can nominate whoever he wants to be the permanent head of the CFPB, but until he does that and his nominee is confirmed, he doesn’t get to decide who’s running the CFPB in the interim. The law that created the CFPB makes that clear. And the stakes for consumer protections couldn’t be higher.
Over the last six years, the CFPB lent a hand to Americans facing predatory practices by Wall Street banks, payday lenders, law-breaking debt collectors, abusive mortgage firms and more. The bureau helped secure roughly $12 billion [...] in relief for over 29 million Americans, and importantly worked to secure changes in the bad practices that precipitated the Great Recession and landed families across the country in financial distress.
But in the four months since Mick Mulvaney unlawfully assumed leadership of the CFPB, he has worked to dismantle its accomplishments brick by brick and rule by rule.
Aaron Maté at The Nation writes—The Get-Tough-on-Russia Consensus Is Escalating the Crisis in Syria:
Even before their current standoff over Syria, tensions between the United States and Russia were already at their highest point in years. Now an alleged chemical weapons attack in a country where both are militarily involved has raised the prospect of a “ direct confrontation” between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers.
President Trump’s personal temperament is undoubtedly compounding the current moment’s dangers. On Wednesday, the president threatened Russia that “nice and new and ‘smart!’” missiles would be coming to Syria.
The prevailing mindset of his Democratic opposition and liberal-media critics, however, has also not helped. In the Obama era, Democrats spoke of a “reset” with Russia and even mocked Republicans for espousing Cold Warviews. That stance has been abandoned in the Trump era. It is now standard for Democratic leaders to clamor for the White House to “start toughening up our policies towards Russia and Putin” (Chuck Schumer), and “fight back…to defend against Russian subversion,” so long as “Washington demonstrates the political will to confront the threat” (Joe Biden). According to the New York Times editorial board, the United States’ recent closure of a Russian consulate and expulsion of 60 Russian officials “offers some hope that Trump may finally be forced to deal with the threat that Putin poses to the United States and its Western allies,” though, to be sure, “Mr. Trump will have to go even further to push back effectively against Mr. Putin’s mischief.”
This neoconservative-aligned posture leaves Democrats and other influential liberal voices ill-equipped to oppose the confrontation with Russia that they have otherwise encouraged.
Phyllis Bennis at In These Times writes—We Must Stop John Bolton From Escalating War in Syria:
Trump has suggested that he will hold both Iran and Russia responsible for the alleged Syrian government role in the chemical weapons attack, which gives Bolton an immediate Day One project: to endorse any reckless military move the president might choose, regardless of its deadly consequences. When Bolton first made the outrageous claim nearly 25 years ago that “there is no such thing as the United Nations,” it was shocking. But at that time he was cooling his heels at a right-wing think tank, and he had little power to do anything except talk. That's not true any longer. His op-eds in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal calling for new wars are now the words of the man who has the first and last words to whisper in this president's ear. That's a terrifying reality for Syrians, Iranians, Koreans and many others around the world. It should also be a terrifying reality for us. [...]
Escalating legitimate criticism of Russian election meddling efforts to the level of Cold War-style rhetoric we are hearing today raises the threat of U.S. military action against Russia to increasingly dangerous levels. Now we are seeing what might happen when Trump responds to mounting pressure to prove that he too can be confrontational towards Russia and its allies. And it's very dangerous.
Even “limited” military engagements such as a no-fly zone, which some Syrians facing devastating bombing campaigns by the regime have understandably have called for, never stay limited.