Yearly Archives: 2019

In concert with this thread concerning the South Carolina GOP’s deepening allegiance to President Trump and Senator-elect Romney’s (R-UT) sharply critical op-ed in WaPo, now the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself is considering protecting President Trump from challengers, according to the Washington Examiner:

Mitt Romney’s scorching critique of President Trump in a New Year’s Day op-ed has sparked a call from within the Republican National Committee to change party rules to protect Trump from any long-shot primary challenge in 2020.

The RNC committeeman representing the Virgin Islands late Tuesday emailed fellow elected members of the national party urging them to change the rules when they convene in New Mexico for their annual winter meeting later this month. Republicans are confident that Trump would hold off any primary challenger, but worry the campaign would derail his re-election.

“Look, the political history is clear. No Republican president opposed for re-nomination has ever won re-election,” RNC committeeman Jevon O.A. Williams said in a email obtained by the Washington Examiner. “Unfortunately, loopholes in the rules governing the 2020 re-nomination campaign are enabling these so-called Republicans to flirt with the possibility of contested primaries and caucuses.”

Note the phrase so-called Republicans. Clearly, the RINO meme is still strong and active among the Republicans, compressing everyone into an automatic bow to President Trump – or a hip-check right out of the GOP.

And will the RNC bow to this inevitable logic and never consider the possibility – nay, certainty – that a weak President Trump running for re-election is inferior to a primary challenger who just might beat him? That’ll measure just how far this profound rot has set in to the Republicans. It’s implicit in Williams’ email, an almost holy belief that Trump is their leader who cannot be betrayed, dumped, or even questioned. He must be protected.

Probably because he’s just not tough enough.

Now perhaps Williams and those who end up agreeing with him view this as an investment on their part. They’ve pledged allegiance to Trump, which takes more than a little political coin, and if they lose him then their political careers are down the drain.

But I think there is an equal part a firm belief in Trump’s charisma and success, persistent despite the failures of the last two years. While willingness to put in one’s lot with a leader is not a measure of a person’s worth, moral or otherwise, the willingness to stick with a third-rater like Trump indicates an inability to evaluate the evidence, an intellectual laziness which does, in fact, signal a second-rate or third-rate intellect.

So will the RNC go along with the proposal? I suspect that as soon as Trump realizes how this proposal will safeguard him from a challenge, he’ll demand it be implemented, long-term consequences be damned.

And the nation will be poorer for it.

One of the salient Special Counsel Mueller mysteries is detailed in this Politico piece:

This month’s three-page summary D.C. Circuit decision revealed a fairly dry set of legal issues that just might conceal a juicy core. The dry issues involved matters of jurisdiction and statutory interpretation fathomed only by elite appellate lawyers, but the potentially juicier underlying issues hinted of fascination: Somewhere, a corporation (a bank? a communications firm? an energy company?) owned by a foreign state (Russia? Turkey? Ukraine? United Arab Emirates? Saudi Arabia?) had engaged in transactions that had an impact in the United States and on matters involved in the special counsel’s investigation. …

And then came Roberts’ surprise Sunday decision. He is the “circuit justice” for the D.C. Circuit, meaning he is the justice assigned to receive emergency and other petitions arising from that circuit. Under Supreme Court rules, the circuit justice may act without consulting his or her colleagues to dispose of routine rulings. So, we should not read too much into the fact that it is the chief justice in particular who acted here.

But we can read a good deal into his decision to intervene at all. Although every judge below agreed there was ultimately no merit to the Corporation’s legal claims, Roberts evidently harbors some doubt. Something in the Corporation’s papers caught his attention. So rather than consigning this appeal to the discard pile with thousands of others, he has blocked the lower courts’ decisions until he can receive the government’s briefs defending those decisions. Those papers must be filed no later than New Year’s Eve. Once he receives the full briefing, he can reject the Corporation’s appeal or he can advance the matter to the full court for consideration.

I have no idea what may be going on, but, on its face, it’s very interesting. Will the information go public if SCOTUS actually hears these arguments, or will this be a closed hearing? Probably the latter.

And, behind the scenes, this means that at least Chief Justice Roberts may have non-public information concerning the Mueller investigation. While I hope Roberts is capable of rulings on various matters without regards to secret information, it’s possible that this information may influence his behavior, both officially and unofficially. For example, he may give Trump only minimal respect, like much of the Federal judiciary has done so, because he doesn’t want to hitch his boat to a sinking ocean liner.

He’s already reprimanded President Trump once for behavior unbecoming a President, but I doubt Trump understood that. Roberts’ future behavior could become very interesting.

Postiche:

1. Something false; a sham.
2. A small hairpiece; a toupee. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in Agatha Christie’s Partners In Crime.

I see Mitt Romney (R-UT), Senator-elect of Utah, former governor of Massachusetts, and failed Presidential contender, has decided to be the first to the mat to wrestle control of the Republican Party from President Trump, if his op-ed in WaPo is any clue. Here’s where he reached out to the disaffected:

It is not that all of the president’s policies have been misguided. He was right to align U.S. corporate taxes with those of global competitors, to strip out excessive regulations, to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices, to reform criminal justice and to appoint conservative judges. These are policies mainstream Republicans have promoted for years. But policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency.

These are mostly long-time tenets of the Republican Party, with the exception of reforming criminal justice. He also makes a probably debatable call for fiscal responsibility. Why is it misguided? For the Republicans, it’s a talking point, useful in debates, but nothing they’ve taken seriously.

So can Romney wrest control from Trump? I doubt it. Many of the disaffected have actually left the Party, and the rest have fallen into the unfortunate mode of supporting the President regardless of whether or not his positions make sense.

But it is possible Romney is looking to start a new political party, built from those disaffected conservatives as well as conservative-leaning independents. This is a carefully crafted call to rejecting Trump on the basis of how he’s fallen from conservative ideals as well as simple competency.

Will it work? I doubt it. He does not project any recognition of some of the core problems with the conservative movement of the last forty years, and without a good dig at those cancers with the appropriate scalpel, it’s hard to see how he’ll replace Trump with himself.

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, New Horizons has reached and passed by the Kuiper Belt rock dubbed Ultima Thule sometime in the last 24 hours, and is now in the process of transmitting the data it’s collected. Here’s the latest pic from the latest story on the Johns Hopkins APL web site:

At left is a composite of two images taken by New Horizons’ high-resolution Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which provides the best indication of Ultima Thule’s size and shape so far. Preliminary measurements of this Kuiper Belt object suggest it is approximately 20 miles long by 10 miles wide (32 kilometers by 16 kilometers). An artist’s impression at right illustrates one possible appearance of Ultima Thule, based on the actual image at left. The direction of Ultima’s spin axis is indicated by the arrows. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI; sketch courtesy of James Tuttle Keane

An exciting time for us space exploration junkies. I’m mostly in it for the drama, of course.

Gary Sargent posts on The Plum Line about how Democrats should negotiate the shutdown with President Trump, and one of his points is inadequately developed:

[Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin] McAleenan also said something else on ABC that hints at how Democrats should proceed. He repeatedly stressed that increased economic development aid to the Northern Triangle countries, something the State Department is advocating, would help mitigate the migrant crisis, since many asylum seekers are motivated by desperate poverty at home.

This puts him at odds with Trump’s threats to cut off aid to those countries — and more deeply, is premised on a completely different narrative of the crisis than the falsehood-riddled cartoon version that Trump has adopted as part of his wall push. Getting officials on the record in more detail on these deeper differences would also be useful.

I’ve posted about the short-sightedness of putting up a wall vs investigating why people are abandoning their countries in droves^[1], and it’s good to see that some government agencies have looked into this angle, even if it’s only to send aid.

But it seems to me that Sargent misses a bet here, because he doesn’t suggest that Democrats should incorporate these findings directly into negotiations. That is, I think the next proposal from the Democrats should simply be this:

You get no money for your wall. However, we’ll add $10 billion in aid to the countries from which the immigrants are coming.

And their messaging should emphasize how this will theoretically slow the flow of emigrants.

This will put Trump in a bind, because it’s an eminently sensible, if possibly fruitless, idea that’ll appeal to the left and independents, but the lack of money for the wall will appall President Trump’s handlers at Fox News, as well as his base. If Trump has any ambition for the next two years, not to mention for re-election, he has to appeal to voters beyond his base.

But if he does, his base will hate him.

¹ I cannot think of how to search for those posts at the moment, unfortunately. Bad blogger! The primary point of those posts is that the economic / political activities of the United States, such as subsidizing the export of foodstuffs to those countries, may be ultimately responsible for the movement of these people towards our borders.