For the Record: Weak

Little Marco. Photo by Greg Nash/Getty via David Frum's impeachment piece from Wednesday in The Atlantic.

One of the things really striking me in the course of the impeachment proceedings was the appalling personal weakness of those tough-guy pro-Liberty Republican senators, which we often don't see because they have so much ability—I won't call it "power"—to make everything worse. It may sound like a paradox, but it's an ability born of failure, and impotence, and inability to rise to an occasion, and it got me ranting:  

Then what the fuck is it good for. Congress should be the branch that guarantees democracy. I don't want soft legislators like you getting pushed around by loony dictators because oh the Constitution didn't give me explicit permission. Jesus Christ you're pathetic.

— Chase Me Ladies I'm on the Calvary (@Yastreblyansky) February 14, 2021

"I'd love to do something about the psychopath who drove a murderous mob to trash my building and kill people who work here but oh my stars I'm not sure if the Constitution wants me to so I'd better play with my fucking phone instead."

How can you be so little and not ashamed?

— Chase Me Ladies I'm on the Calvary (@Yastreblyansky) February 14, 2021

And then there was Mitch McConnell, explaining how he knows Trump is guilty but doesn't think it's proper for him to do anything about it. Of course we know (I think Steve was the first to clarify this for me) what he really means, which is that his political position requires him to say both that Trump is guilty (for the suburbans) and that he's not guilty (for the rustics) and so by God he'll say both regardless of the contradiction, but the logic he used in his remarks showed what a loser he really is, and got me going:

What a Relief

 

Photo by AFP via a website my computer says I shouldn't trust.

My unpopular opinion on the "stimulus" bill is in the first place that it isn't a stimulus, which is a good thing, because that's not what we need, at the moment, economically; the purpose of a stimulus program is to pump up weak demand, and weak demand isn't our problem. Plenty of us have plenty of money, which we could spend to encourage economic activity and create jobs and make everything boom for everybody, and the reason we aren't spending it isn't that we don't want to, it's that we're scared to go out. There's a pandemic on, people!

The problem we have is a pandemic problem, and the way to fix it is to end the pandemic. That's the only stimulus we need, and we're doing what we can, though we could no doubt be doing it better (and will be, after 20 January), and it's going to take about a year, during which things are just not going to be too lively on the economic front no matter how much we try to goose it. What we need in the meantime is a relief bill, to tide us over and keep us alive while we're waiting, and this is in fact what Congress has just produced—an installment, at any rate—lightly disguised as a stimulus. My unpopular opinion is that Speaker Pelosi has just rolled Majority Leader McConnell, once again, the way President Obama did in 2011, and sneaked a pretty good bill past him.

Forget it, Dave

English mezzo-soprano and raconteuse Anna Russell (1911-2006). Via.

Shorter David F. Brooks, "How Biden Could Steer a Divided Government", New York Times, 13 November 2020:

If Joe Biden wants to accomplish something as president, the last thing he should do is follow Senator Elizabeth Warren's advice to issue a bunch of executive orders to fix problems in desperate need of attention, like the Covid-19 pandemic, systemic racism and increasing income and wealth inequality, or the climate crisis. 

Instead he should form gangs with Republicans anxious to cooperate, like Senator Susan Collins, on some attainable goals like an infrastructure bank, or creating more factory jobs in the industrial Midwest to reduce our dependence on China, and persuade Majority Leader McConnell that it's in his own interest to allow the bills on the floor, to help increase his Senate majority in the 2022 elections.

And then, if that doesn't work, he should follow Senator Mitt Romney's advice to issue a bunch of executive orders to fix problems in desperate need of attention.

I'm not making this up, as opera comedian Anna Russell used to say when she was explaining the plot of Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen (when Siegfried, having been drugged by the villainous Hagen into forgetting that he just got married to Brünnhilde, instantly falls in love with Hagen's half-sister Gudrun, Russell would say, "Well! She's the first woman he's ever met who wasn't his aunt!").

Paragraph 5:

Winkin', Blinken, and Nod

Majority Leader Palpatine here. Via TigerDroppings.

So it's clearly at least 290 electoral votes for Biden-Harris where I'm sitting, plausibly 306—with the Republicans filing one stupid lawsuit after another and dueling videos in which they're mobbing election centers in Detroit chanting "Stop the count!" and in Phoenix "Count those votes!" because they can't make any effort at all toward coherence any more. The cable outlets, and the dueling Nates Cohn and Silver, struggle to create some suspense on matters that just aren't suspenseful.

Might as well go visit Axios and learn what "people familiar with the matter" and "a source close to Mitch McConnell" have to say on the subject of what happens starting Monday or so over the next four years, which begins with McConnell asserting his intentions of dictating Biden's cabinet choices:

Republicans' likely hold on the Senate is forcing Joe Biden's transition team to consider limiting its prospective Cabinet nominees to those who Mitch McConnell can live with, according to people familiar with the matter.

Naturally since it's Axios the focus is on where that leaves the celebrities, in particular Democratic senators who ran for president this year (gossip writers have been pushing Warren for treasury secretary and Sanders for labor, in the apparent desire that for the first time in US history anybody would know the names of the treasury and labor secretaries), even though Biden already made it clear he wasn't interested in nominating any Democratic senators, with good reason—it's a really good idea to have some Democratic senators who know what they're doing in the Senate.

That and "radically progressive" nominees who are "controversial with conservatives"—read African American women like Susan Rice (ideal pick for State, among other possibilities), and Stacey Abrams. Instead McConnell is said to be asking for 

Thanks, Mitch

Image via123RF.

Impressed by this observation from Jonathan Chait:

McConnell’s desired process of muscling through a wildly unpopular vote to suppress all evidence, followed by a vote to acquit, would rob the outcome of much of the legitimacy Republicans crave. It is instead widely and accurately seen as a cover-up...

McConnell may have finally made the miscalculation we've been dreaming of, that will shock voters out of their feeling that nothing seriously wrong has been going on, as I keep saying with reference to the Watergate scandal, when public support for impeaching and removing Nixon shot up from around 48% to 57% in a couple of weeks after the Supreme Court ruled 24 July that Nixon had to hand over the original White House tapes to Congress (he'd given them edited transcripts in April and the polling had hovered just below a majority for the three months).

They didn't get the story of how the CREEP and the Mitchell Justice Department and the Casey CIA and mad Nixon and his lieutenants had worked to create a kind of secret government inside the government to punish Nixon's enemies and reward his friends—very many people, maybe most, continued to suppose the "third-rate burglary" of Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate Hotel was the whole of the crime—but they could see there was a coverup. And, as they say, "It's not the crime, it's the coverup," meaning not that the coverup was worse than the crime but that the coverup was the perspicuous index of how bad the crime was, if you couldn't quite follow the latter.

Mitch Switch

Yellow-headed temple turtle with retracted head, via Wildscreen Arkive.

The weirdest thing about Trump's dead-in-the-water proposals (for $5.7 billion he'll free the 800,000 hostages he took over Christmas and ensure a three-year air supply to hundreds of thousands of immigrant hostages he took earlier in the year) is McConnell's evidently positive response: he'd been saying for weeks that he wouldn't allow a budget bill on the Senate floor unless it was something Trump and Democrats had both signed onto, and now he says he's ready to push this one, although it's completely unacceptable to Democrats:

This bill takes a bipartisan approach [his office announces] to re-opening the closed portions of the federal government. It pairs the border security investment that our nation needs with additional immigration measures that both Democrat and Republican members of Congress believe are necessary. Unlike the bills that have come from the House over the past few weeks, this proposal could actually resolve this impasse. It has the full support of the President and could be signed into law to quickly reopen the government.

[Narrator: nobody including McConnell believes the immigration measures on offer are "necessary" or sufficient, for that matter; the DACA recipients are safe for another year at least anyway, since the Supreme Court has turned down the administration's request to hear their their arguments that the program is illegal; and in October the administration's attempt to take away Temporary Protected Status from 300,000 Haitians, Sudanese, Nicaraguans, and Salvadorans was found unconstitutional by Judge Edward Chen in California's Northern District, and another TPS case in New York will be getting through its first round in March, and who knows how long the appeals on these cases will stretch, with the odds better than even that Trump will turn out not to have the power to wreck the programs anyway:

Too Much Leadership

Image from New York Magazine, October 2014.

I'm compelled to give David Brooks ("Washington's New Power Structure") half a pass today: he's written a column that deserved to be written and even contains a little Brooksian witticism that's not entirely unfunny:

Dear Senate Republicans,

I really enjoy spending time with you. You are interesting and excellent company (I really mean that!). When I’m with you, we often enter a magical land in which Donald Trump doesn’t exist. You’re eager to tell me about the issues you’re working on, and sometimes we have these substantive conversations in which we get to ignore the raging dumpster fire on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

In fact, sometimes I think the Senate isn’t a legislative body; it’s the world’s most expensive writer’s colony. Half the senators I meet are writing books.

The point being one that has been made again and again over on our side, that Republican Senators seem to have lost the sense that they have any power. Flake and Corker issuing their style critiques of Trump as if their oath had been sworn to the Constitution of the United Tastes are gone, but Willard Mitt Romney is carrying the work on with the same indignation, surprise, and impotence.

For the Record: Cheap Shots and an argument

William Simpson, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1855), via Wikipedia.

"You cannot count what is not there". God telling Marco to stop worrying about imaginary voter fraud. https://t.co/0RElslpdQp

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) November 14, 2018

Other than that, I just wanted to lay out this argument:

A lot of people giving Mitch a hard time over this because they think it sounds hypocritical, given that he has never in his political career worked with an opposing party and would gladly put partisan politics ahead of his own mother. https://t.co/QX82CJ40TZ

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) November 14, 2018

They said it couldn't be done

Georgetown Prep Moot Court squad.

Yeah, Jonah. Give it up for Mitch, who had faith that he could defeat democracy when nobody thought it was possible! https://t.co/DaXVgystaT

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 6, 2018

It's amazing when you think about it. Back in February of 2016, when old Antonin Scalia's heart choked on its choler and he died, McConnell's reaction, an hour after news of the death came out, seemed whimsical:

The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.

I mean, also without legal foundation, deeply irresponsible, and remarkably ruthless in the wielding of a power to which he had no constitutional entitlement, but also just silly and pointless, as the presidential campaign began to warm up, with the best prepared candidate in history on one side and an unspeakably ridiculous carful of circus clowns on the other.

What could he think he was accomplishing? Just putting the task off for Hillary, whose Supreme Court nomination less than a year away would likely be less friendly to conservatives than Obama's. Maybe she'd just go ahead and name Obama!

But McConnell held firm (and didn't go as far as Cruz and McCain, who said if Clinton won they'd refuse to ever confirm a justice to replace Scalia). And with the help of Vladimir Putin and Alexander Nix a president was put into office representing a reactionary minority, and a reactionary minority reshaped the Supreme Court in its own narrow and selfish image (I can't get over that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh both went to the same repulsive Slytherin prep school, or that the new court will still have not just five reliable conservatives, but all of them once again conservative Catholics, with all the narrowness and nasty-mindedness that implies). Sheer improbability certainly played an essential role in this, but McConnell really did do something.

Brooks: Pay a little attention to us Herrenvolks

The Gunpowder Plot conspirators, not Democrats, via Wikipedia. Guido Fawkes, third from right, looks nothing like that stupid mask—he did not wear a fucking soul patch.

Just in case you think I'm being overoptimistic about the Democrats' exit from the government's weekend shutdown, you're not alone. So does Michelle Goldberg, the New York Times's new Voice of the Left (more relaxed than Krugman, less relaxed than Egan, and almost as fashion-forward if that's possible as Kristof), who's downright enraged ("Schumer Sells Out the Resistance"), vicariously:

It’s hard to overstate how disgusted many progressive leaders are. “It’s Senator Schumer’s job as minority leader to keep his caucus together and stand up for progressive values and he failed to do it,” Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, a left-wing advocacy group modeled on the Tea Party, told me. “He led them off a cliff. They caved.” (An Indivisible chapter is planning a Tuesday evening protest outside Schumer’s Brooklyn apartment.) Representative Luis Gutiérrez, Democrat of Illinois, said in a statement, “This shows me that when it comes to immigrants, Latinos and their families, Democrats are still not willing to go to the mat.”

....Democrats reinforced their reputation for fecklessness. “Make no mistake: Schumer and Dems caved,” tweeted Fox News’s Brit Hume. “What a political fiasco.” It makes me sick to say it, but he’s right.

And it's not just savvy Brit Hume, but world-class concern troll David F. Brooks ("Democrats Go for the Jugular! (Their Own)"), making me suspect that I must have been right in the first place.

Brooks is in his good old Iraq-era snarky mood, too, more cheerful than I've seen him in years, as if he were smelling a real war coming:

So, the shutdown has shut down. Next?

Image via fivethirtyeight.

I don't know. I'd appreciate if people didn't say "Democrats caved". I've been running around saying for three days that it's not the Democrats' shutdown. If we didn't do it, then it stands to reason we didn't give up on it.

But keep telling us it's the Democrats who did it https://t.co/A6AORmr309 via @voxdotcom #TrumpShutdown

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 22, 2018

Here's the Republican messaging: WE RULE! OUR DADDY IS THE BIGGEST!

For the Record: Junior

Image by Instagram via Deadspin.

For those not getting it. To avoid the shutdown you need 60 votes in the Aenate. Republicans only have 51 seats so you need 9 dems. So Schumer either wanted a shutdown putting illegals ahead of Americans or is bad at his job and can’t wrangle 9 votes... or both. #SchumerShutdown

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 22, 2018

Your father and McConnell can't be trusted. They make promises and don't keep them and then insult the people who were deceived. Where's the health care assistance they promised Collins in return for her vote on crappy tax bill?

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 22, 2018

As Republican Lindsey Graham said, Congress has no negotiating partner in the White House, just your father watching TV all day and white nationalist Stephen Miller ordering him what to do. Can't make a deal that way. #TrumpShutdown

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 22, 2018

Republicans turned down McCaskill's bill to fund the military. You had four months to renew CHIP and did nothing until you decided to use it to extort money for the fantasy wall. #TrumpShutdown

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 22, 2018

Will this be the most delicious headline of the Trump era?

Something like all of them, actually. Seems when they were scrambling around looking for ways to plug in the holes in the tax plan left by giving Collins her $10,000 mortgage deduction and Johnson his 23% deduction for pass-through income (instead of the 17-something in the draft) and the like, they grabbed at a passing hunk of driftwood that turned out to be the cancelled alternative minimum corporate tax and clung to it for dear life.

So in the bill as passed by the Senate over the weekend, the corporate tax, as you'll recall, is fixed at 20%, and there's an alternative minimum corporate tax which as it turns out is also fixed at 20%, meaning Mr. Corporation can decide either (a) to take no deductions and pay that basic 20% rate or (b) take all the deductions he can, but not so as to pay less than the alternative minimum 20% rate.

In short, all your corporate tax deductions will now be imaginary.

Donald Trump's October Revolution

Feast of the Supreme Being, France 1794, via AlphaHistory.

Or, Ten Days That Snooked the World. Or, in David Brooks's own headline formulation, "The Week Trump Won". Trump is apparently Lenin, Bannon is Trotsky, Mitch McConnell is the hapless Kerensky of the defeated Mensheviks, and I guess the Democrats must be the bewildered nobility, not yet regrouped, or fleeing to France and Germany with our diamonds sewn into the lining of our immense fur coats:

One hundred years ago on Friday, John Reed was in St. Petersburg watching Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolsheviks take over Russia. It was interesting to read his account, “Ten Days That Shook the World,” this week — the week when Donald Trump and Steve Bannon solidified their grip on the Republican Party and America’s national government.

No, I'm really not seeing that. I'd say it's ten days in which, if anything, Mitch McConnell won some signal victories against the forces of what he regards as Bannonite chaos and darkness, from the calls Trump made last week to Senators on Stephen Bannon's kill list, John Barrasso of Wyoming, Deb Fischer of Nebraska and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, promising them endorsements, to the House's 216-212 vote to approve the Senate-passed budget resolution yesterday morning, and let's just say nobody's talking about Bannon's proposal for a 44% marginal income tax rate (his Breitbart home page headlines don't include any mention of the budget or tax proposals at all: it leads with praise for Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate Trump unsuccessfully opposed, and attacks on Obamacare, immigrants, and Jared Kushner).

Stinkeroo

Nancy: "He can't use chopsticks, can he?" Chuck: "He can't use judgment." Via New York Daily News.

I can't really stand to write about the congressional health care agita unless I can see a glimmer of hope somewhere, and it's obviously been looking very bleak for the last week or two over there and getting bleaker, reaching a kind of climax of awfulness yesterday, when Lamar Alexander of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee announced he was giving up on the bipartisan bill he and Patty Murray had been working on to keep the Obamacare marketplace going through another year, just as it had started to sound like a negotiating breakthrough, and the project of saving the PPACA that had seemed so hopeful a week or two ago was dead.

Then there was something weird about that: according to the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin (yes, in this brave new world I can be reduced from time to time to quoting Jennifer Rubin, and retweeting David Frum too), it wasn't an inability to bridge that partisan divide that had killed the Alexander-Murray bill, it was Majority Leader McConnell:

Sometimes it rhymes

Trump really said that in June, "I'm talking about a plan with heart!"

So I was working on my weekly listen-folks-they-can't-pass-that-GOP-health-bill post when things got noisy around the old demesne and the TV went on and what do you know? I'm too late! Senators Jerry Moran (Wet-KS) and Mike Lee (Stegosaur-UT) announced that they're not voting for the bill, effectively taking it off the able and throwing it onto the compost heap, and we're now starting all over.

I've long thought this was bound to happen sooner or later, because voters all over the country are starting to realize what the Republicans have been trying to do to them, especially over the Medicaid, but McCain's health emergency seems to me to have been the immediate as opposed to proximate cause. His recovery from inside-the-skull surgery was going to delay the vote by a couple of weeks at least, likely more, which was going to allow the public to spend more time digesting the bill.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office delayed its report on the bill, which was supposed to be out on Monday, meaning they would be have time to score the unspeakable Cruz-Lee  "Consumer Freedom Option", a double-whammy device to destroy the individual health insurance market in the United States, for reasons best known to Senators Cruz and Lee (they must think health insurance is immoral because it involves sharing), by dividing it into two tiers, a low-premium one that will never pay a claim for healthy people and an astronomical-premium one for those who are already sick (like Senator McCain, though of course he's old enough for Medicare if he retires and has enough money to buy a fabulous Advantage supplemental), so that only the very rich will be able to buy it at all until it dies of those death spirals we keep hearing about.

Repeal and repine

Updated early afternoon.

Drawing by Daryl Cagle via Juven Jacob.

Last week McConnell was in Kentucky telling the troops he might fail to put that health bill past his whole caucus—

“I’m in the position of a guy with a Rubik’s cube – trying to twist the dial in such a way to get at least 50 members of my conference who can agree to a version of repealing and replacing Obamacare,” McConnell told Kentucky voters at a town hall-style event on Thursday, according to NBC. “That is a very timely subject that I’m grappling with as we speak.”...

“If my side is unable to agree on an adequate replacement, then some kind of action with regard to the private health insurance market must occur,” McConnell told constituents at a Rotary Club lunch on Thursday, according to the Associated Press.

“No action is not an alternative,” he added. “We’ve got the insurance markets imploding all over the country, including in this state.”

—which sounded to me like he'd already failed. And what he was offering as the next step, stabilizing "the insurance markets", sounded a lot like doing some of the things that need to be done to repair the ACA, to clean up some of the damage from Republican sabotage that has caused premiums in the individual marketplace to go up for the government that subsidizes them, and for those buyers who are too well off to receive subsidies. With no tax cuts, but no Medicaid devastation either. For which he would certainly be able to assemble a bipartisan majority in the Senate, even though he'd lose a serious number of Republicans.

It also sounded that way to Juliet Eilperin and Amy Goldstein at the Washington Post, and, as they noticed:

Legislative Leaping

Desperados of Richardson High School in the Texas State Capitol. From The Statesman.

So Majority Leader McConnell had to abandon his bill, as I expected he would, and send the troops off to their recess, while he and his elves theoretically work to rewrite the thing into a form that can pass after Independence Day, and the pandits aren't expressing much doubt that it can be done, referring to McConnell's "slush fund" of something over $300 billion in money that the bill theoretically saves the government, according to the CBO score, which could be used to pay for the traditional Christmas tree lights and ornaments with which legislation like this is festooned to get votes from the recalcitrant legislators.

I'm not changing my mind, mainly because I think Medicaid expansion is a much bigger deal than is widely understood—according to Times reporting picked up this morning by BooMan, it wasn't those prima donna dramatically wavering Republican Senators like Heller and Collins who really stopped the vote this week, it was Republican governors working a plan they'd been devising since February to preserve Obama's new Medicaid, and there's more to it than this week's defeat; in theory, a plan for some "moderate" group to work out a bipartisan proposal. Yeah, I'll believe that when I see it, but I don't see in the meantime how McConnell comes up with anything that overcomes these obstacles. (In Kansas in April, the utterly Republican legislature almost passed Medicaid expansion over the governor's veto—they were just three votes short of the two thirds they needed.)

The other day, lawrence090469 commented on my predictions of death for the bill:

How Not To Do It

At center, Lord Tite Barnacle of the Office of Circumlocution, from Little Dorrit, via Better Living Through Beowulf.

Credit where credit is due—this is what the kool kidz refer to as a smart take from Jennifer Steinhauer at The Times, suggesting that Senator McConnell's heart won't be broken if the Senate's version of the tax cut health care bill fails and he could even be planning it that way:

In his 2016 memoir, “The Long Game,” he noted that, as minority leader, he went out of his way to make sure that one party owned the health care issue. “I wanted a clear line of demarcation — they were for this, and we were against it,” he said. Perhaps he is not excited to let that one party now be his own.

Another thing is that everybody knows how cunning and ruthless McConnell is, and they keep talking about how he hates to bring up a bill if he's not sure he's going to win it as if winning a vote were the only thing he could possibly care about, but if you look at his history as leader of the Republican caucus, since 2007 some time, you can see he's really not that anxious to make his case for immortality by passing a load of bills. He doesn't have a lot of surface vanity, and he's a true conservative, and he devoted a lot of energy through the Obama administration to not passing bills, ever, no matter how much Jon Stewart laughed and did his sleepy-turtle voice, because he is radically opposed to any change (other than relaxing life for the very wealthy through the reactionary changes of tax cuts and deregulation, obviously), and he's been following the same pattern through the Trump administration so far.

McConnell is a black-belt master of what that great political scientist Charles Dickens referred to as the whole science of government, the secrets of HOW NOT TO DO IT. I'm sure he doesn't love the Affordable Care Act at all, but he'll choose a method of killing it that won't get his fingerprints on it, or those of the Republican Senators running for reelection in 2018 and 2020, if he can help it.

Obviously I'm saying this to some extent because I've been saying for a while that the Senate's not going to do it, whatever McConnell says, and I like being right, but it would explain a lot—why the bill is so shoddy, why there are no hearings or normal committee markups, why the scheduling is so squeezed: not because he wants to make it a law while nobody's watching, fat chance, and this is a dreadful bill whose consequences would be remembered for a very long time if it were ever implemented, but because he wants people to forgot how it failed as quickly as possible.

The American People

Via Kevin Drum, November 2014, on reports that "Mr. McConnell indicated that Senate Republicans will turn their attention to peeling back 'pieces of it that are deeply, deeply unpopular with the American people.' He cited the law’s tax on medical devices, its requirement that big employers provide insurance to all workers clocking 30 hours a week or more or pay a fee, and its mandate that most Americans carry insurance or pay a fee." You know what's "deeply, deeply unpopular with the American people"?

Collected by Garry Trudeau:

"One of my proudest moments was when I told Obama, 'You will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy.'"

-- Sen. Mitch McConnell, 2016

"Apparently there's a new standard now, which is to not confirm a Supreme Court nominee at all. I think that's something the American people simply will not tolerate."

-- McConnell, 2017

You already knew that, but you have to admit it packs a punch laid out like this. I think I've noticed before how whenever Mitch McConnell adverts to the views of "the American people" it's a sign he's telling a lie so outrageous you'd expect his tongue to fall out. (Check it out.)

I've been sympathetic to the idea as expressed now and again by Senators Schumer and Sanders and others that Democrats ought to be open to working with the situation as it is and participate in the government, trying to mitigate the harm Republicans are doing wherever they can. Yes, I understand that Tea Party nihilism "worked", but I just don't think that's a reason to emulate it. Toddlers in the terrible-twos year also get a lot of what they want, wearing you down with their crazed desires and inexplicable rages, but adults can't, unless of course they're psychopaths like you-know-who. Government needs to go on—people's lives are at stake.

But in the case of the Supreme Court nomination, I'm ready to say fuck it. An eight-member court isn't ideal, but we can live with it. "The American people", as opposed to the Electoral College, asked for Hillary Clinton to nominate Antonin Scalia's replacement. I'm willing to wait.