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From TPM Reader AT …
I share Josh’s chagrin about my growing respect for Rep. Liz Cheney. Like Josh, I am repulsed by her policy positions – and, perhaps more importantly, by the values and ethics that underlies those positions.
BUT Liz Cheney provides Democrats an important and powerful contrast: Liz Cheney accepts the rule of law, does not sell conspiracy theories because they are politically convenient. Almost every other elected Republican demonstrates through their actions a fundamental opposition to democracy itself. Those same elected Republicans are eager to punish Rep. Cheney for supporting our system of government.
Where Things Stand: McCarthy’s Back On The Couch
Just in case the House minority leader’s sleeping arrangements were keeping you up at night — he told “Fox and Friends” this morning that he will soon be back to sleeping on the couch in his office on the Hill where he, apparently, belongs.
Nature is healing, etc.
But why are Kevin McCarthy’s sleeping arrangements a topic of discussion? Read More
From TPM Reader WB …
There’s a fascinating dynamic at play in the Cheney drama. While Trump’s presence and influence have receded on the national stage, they have only grown within the Republican Party. Since he lost the election Trump has occupied very little of my headspace. I don’t know anyone who still talks about him. It’s amazing in its own right how quickly most of us have learned to ignore him. And yet at the same time fealty to Trump has become the sole organizing principle of the Republican Party. For a while it looked like apostates like Cheney might survive in the party, but now it’s clear they will not.
On the Big Lie
Kevin McCarthy signaled this morning that Liz Cheney may be on the way out as conference chair. She can’t effectively deliver the message, he says.
The truth is he’s right. And that is damning. It confirms that the GOP message is loyalty to Donald Trump, embrace of the Big Lie of a stolen election and – subsidiary to these two points – pretending the insurrection never happened.
The Census Privacy Fight With Huge Voting Rights Implications Hits Major Inflection Point
COVID and the Roots of Reform
When I was 19 I got assigned to a work study job as a research assistant for Daniel Rodgers, a history professor who, fortuitously, turned out to be one of two or three people who taught me how to think. The research I was going to do was for a project that was eventually published a decade later as Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. The book is about the trans-Atlantic connections, borrowings, rivalries between reformers and states during the period in which virtually all North Atlantic states devised some version of what we call welfare states. There were rich well-springs of home grown reformism in the US. But looking to models in Europe was a constant focus. A recurrent theme is that the US so often seemed to be a late arriver to these reforms or resisted them because of beliefs in American exceptionalism or a more general resistance to state action.
Where Things Stand: Flynn Has Been Busy Post-Pardon
In the waning days of his presidency, former President Trump pardoned his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, ending a years-long, messy legal battle in which Flynn pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI only to reverse course, hire Sidney Powell as his lawyer, and seek to reverse his plea.
There’s an article today in the Times which reports that we may never reach ‘herd immunity’ for COVID or at least that we may not do so for a very long time. The article strikes me as needlessly alarmist, in part because the ‘news’ being reported is as much a question of semantics or people being informed about epidemiology as it is some new negative development in the course of the pandemic. The details are probably what you would expect, a mix of vaccine hesitancy, more transmissible viral strains and viral evolution that slowly chips away at vaccine immunity all working together to put ‘herd immunity’ out of reach. But I want to zoom in on the potential role of vaccine hesitancy or politics-driven resistance to vaccines.
The Atlantic has a piece by Ron Brownstein on the 2022 election and whether or not the Democrats can avoid a “wipeout”. It is, typically for Brownstein, quite good.
My worry is not that there will be a wipeout but that Republicans may have a comparatively disappointing midterm and still take control of at least the House. The mix of redistricting, the strong pattern of mid-term losses for first term Presidents and the fact that the margin is already razor thin – these all stack the deck heavily against the Democrats. Most of the article goes over different strategies Democrats are discussing and specifically the general consensus that they are better served going big on their policy agenda than trimming their sails to avoid antagonizing swing voters or Republicans.
Let me share a couple thoughts of my own on this question.