KevinC
3021
There’s also the fact that after 20 years, we haven’t really made any progress. Things have backslid in a lot of ways.
It’s one thing to say don’t put an arbitrary time limit on things, it’s another to spend 20 years, trillions of dollars, and thousands of American lives with little to nothing to show for it and think we should just keep doing what we’re doing.
It’s not working and there is no indication that another 20 years would make a difference. As @Menzo said, you can’t save a country from itself. I get the tragedy and the emotion, I’m just being real here.
At least in the UK, the military bases are royal bases- like RAF Mildenhall, RAF Lakenheath, the Brits own the bases, they just let us use them- at least on paper.
We left when the French wanted us out.
I think everyone would love to be able to bring peace and stability to the region. Part of the issue is that we aren’t dealing with a fairly compliant and homogeneous population like the Japanese, but numerous fragmented tribes very sadly acclimated to decades of inter-necine warfare.
There is no easy fix and committing trillions of dollars to this when the same money could save so many more lives elsewhere, and far less controversially, makes no sense.
wavey
3024
The latest Opening Arguments podcast goes into detail about this, and why it’s not what you might think.
TL;DL - The DoJ has an obligation to defend even laws it disagrees with, as long as they are constitutional. A group of bigots (CCCU) are sceptical the DoJ will put its best efforts into defending this, and want to be added as parties to the case. If admitted they will be able to put forward all kinds of awful arguments during the proceedings, and the DoJ wouldn’t want any of these creating horrible precedent. The DoJ is simply resisting them being added to the case, trying to persuade the court it is capable of defending the law by itself.
Ok thanks. I hadn’t really seen anything on defending this position.
Tangentially, law is offer counter-intuitive, at least to me: As in, “that’s legal, really?” I think some of the stuff exposed by the corrupt trump regime is going to need a legislative remedy. Remains to be seen if anything happens on that front but I’m not holding out much hope.
The Boston Globe has a remarkable six part editorial on fixing this:
Not a promising start though according to this:
“I appreciate the independence. I don’t always agree with the positions,” said Eisen, who would like to see more released by the Justice Department. "They’re going to act with that same independence in defense of what they perceive to be in the long-term interests of the executive branch".
This is the main issue I have w/ DoJ. This keeps happening in each successive administration and the result is an out-of-balance executive branch with no guardrails against it all.
I disagree with Chait far more often then agree with him, but this is spot on (might deserve its own thread, aka “Democrats behaving badly.”
Quoted at length:
Why are Democrats so skittish about Biden’s proposal they’re willing to put his domestic legacy at risk? They — or the rich people lobbying them — cite a mix of political and policy reasons. “You are talking about tax hikes that could hit millions of small businesses across the country and taxes that could kill investment,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce tells Politico, “From a raw political perspective, it would be a really funky decision for these moderates to say they would be willing to put this much of a wet blanket on an economy that is really poised to take off.” A “senior financial services industry lobbyist” adds that if Democrats pass anything more than a watered-down version of Biden’s plan, “Democrats are just going to get killed over it.”
While both these concerns probably sound serious over a comped steak dinner, neither is remotely supported by the data. Start with the politics. Taxing the rich in general is highly popular, and Biden’s specific proposals are, if anything, even more popular. In April, Investors’ Business Daily, a right-wing newspaper that specializes in anti-tax polemics, conducted a poll that I can only assume was expected to confirm strong opposition. Instead, it found that Biden’s plans to both raise the corporate tax rate and to increase taxes on capital gains for couples earning more than a million dollars, enjoyed overwhelming support. The support held up even among a subset of investors. (To its credit, IBD published the results anyway.)
As for the substance, the bulk of academic economic opinion has a very different view than the C-Suite. Biden’s proposals would eliminate preferences in the tax code that distort free-market signals even while benefiting the wealthy. A huge proportion of the American tax-shelter industry is predicated on finding ways to convert ordinary income into capital-gains income. Eliminating that preferential lower rate — as the tax-reform act signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986 did — would shut down that unproductive paper-shuffling and redirect investment into areas where actual market signals dictate. Likewise, Biden’s proposal to close the massive loophole that allows capital gains that are passed on after death to go completely untaxed would eliminate a huge distortion in the tax code that gives older people an incentive to hold on to their stock until they die.
The Tax Policy Center has found no meaningful correlation between capital-gains tax rates and economic growth over the last half century. The Congressional Research Service has reached a similar conclusion. A recent paper by two Princetown economists suggests the revenue-maximizing rate for capital-gains income would be in the low forties, about the level Biden proposes.
Conservatives, obviously, have a darker view. But when John Harwood surveyed conservative economists to find their view of the economic drag of Biden’s tax hikes, they suggested a miniscule effect. Republican economist Doug Holtz-Eakin, after accounting for the benefits of the spending side, came up with an economic hit of 0.2 percent of GDP over the long run — essentially a rounding error. The American Enterprise Institute calculates Biden’s tax hikes alone, without weighing any effect from the spending,would shave off just 0.16 percent from the economy’s size. “I would not say it is a job-killing disaster,” AEI’s Kyle Pomerleau conceded to Harwood.
Ultimately this is our fault for not picking better Dems in primaries and being unwilling to jettison underperforming Dems.
KevinC
3028
Alternatively, maybe the more left-leaning Democrats lose the general and the party loses the slim control it has and Biden has spent the year dealing with a GOP house and senate.
I wanted a more progressive candidate than Biden (Warren) but after seeing how the election went down, I don’t think tacking more towards the center was the wrong call.
Another Biden benefit:
Imagine a President asking for war-making authority to be taken away.
Democrats who lost in the House and Senate were largely centrists; not suggesting progressives would have won those seats but the old axiom that “all politics is local” no longer holds true. Elections are nationalized, but somehow Democratic strategists didn’t get that memo - I mean, they couldn’t find a way to run against a party full of trumps and Gohmerts and McConnells et al? Meanwhile every other GOP ad is attacking Pelosi .
But to your larger point, I don’t know if anything would have been all that different with a hypothetical Warren presidency, aside from maybe a more aggressive pursuit of possible criminal actions by the former corrupt regime. IMO, the problem is and continues to be the Democratic party itself: they remain timid and ineffectual (for as long as I’ve voted. Not that there’s been much of a choice - gotta love a two party FPTP system. Sigh.)
Seems to me so-called moderates are more concerned with maintaining the status quo (which by definition makes them conservative.) Granted, this is largely (entirely) due to failing to secure larger majorities in Congress but essentially nothing is going to change. There is not going to be an accounting of all that transpired previously, “norms” are not going to be codified (with the DoJ actively resisting turning over documents and/or protecting the executive branch), a tax system disproportionately benefiting the wealthy remains in place, etc. et al ad infinitum.
The Biden presidency is a reprieve; welcome, yes, without question but the fundamentals haven’t (and won’t) change. Republicans have suffered no consequences, which of course gives the GOP a green light to do whatever the fuck they want in the future.
I’d like to see these things*:
- Protecting voting rights
- Aggressive climate/environmental justice action.
- Everything written in the Boston Globe op-ed
Maybe (probably) it’s too soon to reach any conclusions, but really I have almost no hope that any of these things will come to pass (although Sanders is the budget chair, and notice how quiet he’s been? That’s possibly a good sign progress is being made on a budget but is outside the public eye.)
(*Criminal justice/policing reform seems to me more a local issue and I don’t know what if anything the federal gov’t can do on that front, but this too.)
Isn’t that true because centralist won mostly purple or red districts where the GOP had an overwhelming advantage?
I don’t know about overwhelming, but otherwise yep. 2018 saw a D+8 turnout nationally, enough to overcome some gerrymandered district whereas 2020 was (I think) D+4. All I’m saying is being moderate isn’t enough by itself to win elections ((essentially many of those Dems ran the same campaign in 2020 that they did in 2018) nor am I saying they should be more liberal, either. I don’t’ know what the solution is, but it’s apparent to me that how Dem’s campaign is problematic.))
It’s hard to point to a Senate race Dems lost in 2020 and say they would have won that one with a more progressive candidate, and the Senate races are all that mattered in terms of what Biden (or Sanders or Warren) could have accomplished.
Except I’m not saying that.
Google Sarah Gideon and how she ran her race. She outspent Collins 2-1 but lost by eight points. No one, or at least I’m not saying she had to turn into AOC to win that race
Sorry, I wasn’t saying you did. I was responding to the broader question of whether we needed more progressive candidates.
Alstein
3036
To me, it’s more what you seem , than what you are.
Someone like a Biden, or a Roy Cooper hits the perfect spot- they’re at least somewhat progressive (the stuff Biden’s doing ideologues like Obama would never have even considered), but they come off as moderates, and they have a good sense of when they lose folks.
AOC gets this, but she’ll always be seen as a radical (being a brown-skinned woman does that)
As for the senate race that would have been won with someone more progressive- NC possibly , but that was because Cal was such a crap candidate, even before the scandal.
Maybe, but Trump won NC, albeit by a smaller margin than Tillis. There isn’t much reason to believe that a more progressive Senate candidate would poll better than Trump did.
If it had been Jeff Jackson, he might. Jackson’s exceptionally talented as a politician. Tillis is unpopular, and he hasn’t been 100% loyal to Trump.
Erika Smith - probably not.
KevinC
3039
There are two things that make me skeptical that more progressive candidates would mean the Dems won more seats.
First, given that Biden won with 7 million more votes, it seems like he outperformed congressional democrats? Were there split-ticket voters who wanted to oust Trump but put limits on Biden? If so, I don’t see a more progressive candidate making them vote straight Dem.
Second, I don’t know any Democrats/progressives who lacked enough motivation to get to the polls in 2020, even the fervent Bernie Bros I know. Sure, they weren’t thrilled with Biden but they weren’t just going to sit out and not toss Trump out. So I’m not seeing the angle of how more progressive candidates would have equaled more seats won.
Big caveat that that’s just my thoughts/feeling and I don’t have data in front of me to back that up. Happy to be shown data that shows I’m wrong!
So, voters loyal to Trump might have voted for a Democrat instead of the incumbent Republican? Color me skeptical.
If there was any opportunity, it would have been in states where Biden won a majority in the state while a Republican won the Senate race. So, Maine? Would a more progressive candidate have beaten Susan Collins? I don’t see it.
