That the median voter thinks Democrats will open the border is an epic messaging failure. These are the wages of quietly continuing Trump’s asylum policy without telling anyone. Democrats should have pushed an immigration bill with strong enforcement measures and Biden should have used the bully pulpit to make the party’s position clear. Instead, Democrats are hemorrhaging Latino votes at the same time blue collar white folks think Democrats want open borders. It’s the worst of both worlds.
Polling pretty consistently shows what the majority of Americans are concerned about, and immigration is one of those things. That many Democrats have ignored not just that - but also other issues - in favor of the niche interests of the base, just shows the dysfunction of what passes for our current political parties.
Its not so much that they ignored it, they simply don't have a good solution given their other preferences. Republicans might support being harsh enough at the border that people stop coming. Democrats don't want to do that, but don't have an alternate solution so are stuck doing nothing.
Maybe massively beefing up asylum screening to allow rapid LIFO deportation those without valid claims isn't a "good" solution, at least it is one that's consistent with our laws.
Would the kind of immigration bill that Democrats would have voted for been able to get past the filibuster? I doubt it. Party-line vote bills have only passed when they were filibuster-immune budget bills; I don't think an immigration bill could have made that claim.
I am not sure what "open the border" means to most people, but the southern border is seeing massive increases in illegal crossings and that isn't something that helps the Democrats. Watch the border counties in Texas for a sense of what the border crisis means electorally - in 2020, the swing in the four overwhelmingly Hispanic counties in the Rio Grande Valley to Trump relative to 2016 was between around 20% to over 50%. In a special election for a House seat in South Texas since 2020, a Republican won for the first time in, I think, forever. We'll see if there's anything similar in this election in the governor's race and House races this time; if there is, it is a bad sign for the Democrats in 2024. The chances of a deal on immigration are pretty slim but it is a real problem that isn't going away.
The wholesale abuse of our asylum system doesn't seeming meaningfully (key word) different from open borders or unlimited immigration.
Show up, claim asylum, have a minimal screening/hearing, and then get released (and be allowed to work) for literally years while the backlog is worked through, and even then just fade into the shadows when/if you don't think your claim will be accepted.
The recent thing with Venezuelans having to stay in Mexico is a bandaid, but at least it was something.
Venezuelans at least have a certifiably tyrannical government to flee. They have a kind of prima facie claim to "asylum." But agree with the larger point. Biden could at least have got caught trying to deal with "asylum seekers."
I agree with the point about Venezuela, but there are two problems here.
1. Venezuelans aren't fleeing to the US. They are crossing through multiple safer countries on their path to US migration. Many other countries in the world have safe third country policies that prevent asylum claims from distant lands. If you're curious why Canada's border doesn't have the problems the US has, it's because no other country borders Canada and their policy prevents asylum claims from foreign nationals crossing from the US.
2. The US had a safe third country agreement with Mexico at the end of the Trump administration that was deliberately ended early in the Biden administration. Cynically, I think the Dems' only real reason for wanting to keep the Venezuelans specifically in Mexico is they are likely Republican voters if/when they gain citizenship. People fleeing tyrranical left governments tend to be reactionary in that way.
If a person is fleeing political repression (not just the sordid economic consequences of repression) I don't see why the fact that they might have fled to somewhere else is particularly relevant. Of course people do not show up with "Political Refugee" and "Economic Migrant" stamped on their wrists, so we need a process to admit the one and reject the other.
I'm not going to comment on the messaging failure as I haven't thought about it. But immigration really isn't a driver of Hispanic votes relative to the average voter. And this is a big mistake both coalitions make.
Several billions of ARP could have been used to staff up processing of asylum seekers and if Republicans voted against it, they could have been rhetorically flayed.
Staffing up the processing doesn't help much if you aren't actually going to reject many of them, or if you release them into the country for a while beforehand and give them a chance to sneak into the shadows.
But the point of the staffing IS to reject some, most, I would guess. Given the backlog we should need to do some LIFO so that new potential asylum seekers could see that the odds have changed.
It seems to be the case that in 2020 there was an epic messaging failure, indicating to people south of the border that if Biden got elected the doors would swing wide allowing immigrants into the US. Maybe not, but it seems that way.
Was it a messaging failure or a messaging success? If the message was "don't come but we won't do much to stop you" that might not be much different to someone in, say, Honduras, from "come on in". The failure was perhaps in not anticipating how the change in rhetoric would be perceived, but - given the massive increases in illegal immigration -- it is hard to say that the people perceiving a big change were wrong in how they perceived it.
Immigration policy is a mess and no one has any particularly good ideas for solutions that can command enough support among enough politicians that they can survive changes in administrations or produce changes in the law that will outlast any particular administration.
I wonder if the messaging was even done by the Democrats. Wasn't Fox News and Donald Trump warning in 2020 that if Joe Biden was elected we would have open borders and illegal immigrants would have an easy time getting into the country? What if people south of the border believed them?
This article was basically written to give moderate republicans like me permission to vote for a democratic senator. And even though I know that, it totally worked. I don’t live in a swing state but maybe someone else reading this with similar politics does. Well done. At minimum I won’t feel bad if the dems keep the senate now.
Oh, the horror, we have an actual stab at real anti-trust enforcement for the first time in 50 years, whatever will the business community do?!
Seriously, do you think that the likes of Singapore allow the degree of regulatory capture, rent-seeking, and monopolistic practices that are permitted in the status quo in the US?
Do you think that they would allow venture capital firm to, for instance, loot a $4 billion cash dividend from a healthy grocery business in order to put it in ill enough health to justify selling it to a competitor and reducing competition in that market to virtually nil in approximately 15% of the country?
No, the Singaporean authorities expect business to act not just in its own interest but within guiderails set to ensure that it acts within the interests of the state and populace.
Singapore can spend as little as it does on social provision in large part *because* it has firmly harnessed the business community and private sector to the job of providing a reasonable standard of living to the vast majority of workers and has curtailed rent-seeking, thus forcing businesses to generate value in order to generate profit. The government *absolutely* holds the whip hand in that relationship and is not afraid to use it.
The US does a bad job of all this, and thus spends a shitload more money on basic social provision.
The senior ranks of the PAP would laugh any GOP politician out of the fucking room if they proposed the Republican platform regarding business be implemented in any particular in Singapore. I know that because I have friends from my China days who are members of long-standing PAP politicians' families and they find the entire GOP an anti-intellectual, vacuous, hopelessly corrupt laughing stock. Their opinions of Democrats aren't much better, but mostly because they consider "peddling racialism" to be among the cardinal sins of any politician (given Singapore's history, not surprising), not because they're "bad for business".
Seriously, the GOP is not pro-market or pro-competition, not when you look at policy. They're pro-rentseeking, pro-kleptocracy, pro-capture and pro-monopolist.
"There is no way to own a company and generate value by destroying that company."
I'm pretty sure that as long as your definition of "generating value" is "generating value for the buyers of the company at the expense of its solvency" this is absolutely a thing that happens.
How is it a mistake if Cerberus's successful bid to transfer its own debt for the acquisition on to Remington resulted in a situation where allowing the secured creditors to acquire the asset was a better choice than paying off the debt using external capital to retain ownership of Remington? Isn't that strongly indicative that the terminal value was less than the cost of the outstanding debt? (Since otherwise it would make more sense to just pay the debt off, given that Cerberus' stock-in-trade is raising enormous amounts of capital and it has easy access to capital markets?) (EDIT: or in the alternative just making payments using external capital for a short while until you sell off the company for its NPV, assuming NPV > capital already extracted and transferred to Cerberus).
Yes, obviously it is true that Cerberus would have preferred the asset it retained to be higher rather than lower in value -- the anticompetitive situation described by David with respect to Albertsons is a distinct case in which the insolvency of the acquired company is alleged to be an affirmative boon in and of itself -- but capitalizing enterprise value into immediate up-front dividend payments to the private equity firm at the expense of the solvency of the operating company that now gets to pay previously-absent debt service isn't some kind of out-there hypothetical.
So... not paying any attention to the Albertson's saga, then?
Sure, you know what you're talking about. (rolls eyes)
I would argue with you, and I can, because there's a clear logic underpinning smash-and-grabs like this, but as usual you've sidestepped every question and drilled down on a single, in favor of a content-less, stupidly, profoundly ignorant one-liner reflective of an ill-informed, imbecilic, masturbatory sham of a belief structure.
So, you've proven that any attempt at good-faith engagement is pointless, because your belief structure is indefensible on good-faith terms. All you have is one-liners and whining.
I will allow myself to be sucked into this for one final response, and then the fact that you really can't seem to rebut anything will tell, and I'm done:
The obvious (blatantly exceedingly obvious) point here is that Albertson's "value" to Kroger is mainly in the form of removing competition and increasing pricing control in, again, around 20% of markets nationwide, rather than its physical plant or assets.
Decapitalizing Albertson's *increases* its value to Kroger as it provides the only possible justification for an anti-competitive merger that would be rejected unequivocally were Albertson's healthy: they are seeking to engineer a situation in which "Albertson's is not viable as it is not able to cover operating costs."
Albertson's value to Kroger is altered by far less than $4 billion because Kroger can cover operating expenditures, and, again, its value is as much in removing it from the table as in anything it actually owns.
If this is the best of your understanding of the industry in which you claim to work, I have no clue how in the ever-loving *fuck* you are still employed.
Commenters here are largely ignorant of finance, private equity, wall street and banks. They'd all be benefitted by reading Matt Levine over at Bloomberg.
I actually do read some of his stuff when it fits into my monthly Bloomberg free access, lol. There is a difference between ignorance and skepticism.
Nothing pisses me off like SCF's "you don't work in X industry so you can't possibly know anything about it" line, which is all the rebuttal he ever seems to have when someone suggests he's wrong.
What concrete pro-business benefits would an R senate have? Manchin is currently the swing vote and I don’t think he has much love for Elizabeth Warren,
When I read about the ambassador-nominee to Brazil being held up by Republicans because she once said moving the embassy to Jerusalem was stupid, I thought to myself: "Huh, that sounds really bad for such a minor issue. But Matt is usually fair when criticizing the GOP, so must be the case."
But I was curious as to who this Elizabeth Bagley is, so off to the rabbit hole I went.
Turns out, back in 1998, she had what she describes as a "free flowing conversation" with a journalist where her comments "fit into the traditional tropes of anti-Semitism," according to Democratic Senator Ben Cardin. She said she regretted her "poor choice of words" where she said money was why US lawmakers support Israel. She has tried to back away from her comments by saying she was "very sorry about that choice of words and none of them reflect any of my thinking then or now."
She is a major fundraiser for the Party. She married an heir to the RJ Reynolds tobacco fortune and has raised millions of dollars over the years. Long associated with the Clintons, she gave over $1M to the Clinton Foundation. Has a house on Nantucket and DC.
Highlighting opposition to her as an example of irrational opposition seems unfair. And reducing that opposition to objecting to her saying moving the embassy was stupid appears to be really unfair.
Turns out, there are about 27% of 194 ambassador positions are open as of 7/15/22. At the same point during the Trump administration, there were 28% unfilled. So almost exactly the same.
Just your periodic reminder that when you read something about how terrible and irrational one party is acting, it is worth taking those statements with a huge grain of salt. Sometimes it might be true, but oftentimes it is not. Matt is better than most but still is prone to exaggerating small differences for partisan purpose.
Without commenting on the merits of a single individual, the number of executive appointments requiring the advice and consent of the Senate is just wildly, obscenely excessive, in a way that prevents the functioning of wide swathes of the executive branch for years at a time.
It's late 2022 and we still don't have something like a third of appointed positions filled. Trump didn't have something like a quarter of them filled when he left office. Obama had rolling vacancies over 15% or so?
~1200 positions... Department of Interior has 14 senate confirmed positions. I understand Secretary, Deputy Secretary(since they could become acting secretary at any time), Inspector General(as someone who is supposed to be independent and oversee the rest)
And these sub-cabinet roles currently average about 115 days for confirmation - that's the average - some of these are significantly longer.)
It's worth noting that the only reason Biden has been able to confirm any judicial nominees has been Lindsey Graham. Republicans have overwhelmingly opposed many nominees with backgrounds that are not even a little bit partisan.
Stephanie Davis was a career federal prosecutor, then a federal magistrate judge (a nonpartisan merit-based position), then a federal district judge nominated by Trump. She's also far too old to be a serious Supreme Court nominee in the future. She got two Republican votes.
Andre Mathis is a biglaw partner who spent his entire career doing corporate defense work. He was only confirmed because John Kennedy, a former law firm partner, thought it was absurd that he was being blocked and rebelled even though he typically votes no on nominees. His confirmation hearing was marked by a number of racist dog-whistles by Marsha Blackburn, who among other things called his minor traffic tickets as a "rap sheet" and said that she thought he was not intellectually capable of being a federal judge.
John Lee is a former biglaw corporate defense partner who was confirmed to the district court by voice vote, had a sterling reputation as a trial judge, and is too old for Supreme Court consideration, and he got three Republican votes.
Even "moderate" and "reasonable" GOP Senators like Romney have been voting no across the board.
Zionists absolutely, positively have used money to induce Congressional support for Israel. Why else would we support a country with a) an unfortunate taste for ethnic cleaning b) legalized apartheid in its military and certain other institutions c) few allies d) many bitter enemies and e) a nuclear arsenal that makes our nonproliferation efforts an exercise in hypocrisy.
If Donald Trump wants people to stop calling him a fascist, he should stop trying to overthrow elections. If Zionists want people to stop using “anti-semitic” tropes, they should stop acting in ways that lend them credence.
Of course neither Trump nor Zionists will change because both care about their policy goals (personal power or a strong Jewish state) more than they care about what tropes their actions support. Accordingly, both pursue their policy agendas and then try to shame and delegitimize opponents who see and describe the world clearly.
You push your hatred to Israel in each opportunity. OK you hate Jews and their only country. We got it. You are not unique. There are plenty of people like you.
I mean... plenty of Americans just think Israel does not act as an ally and shouldn't be treated as such.
You have a nuclear arsenal, your security is not under serious threat. There is no reason or interest which dictates the US should be involved in your security or economic development.
Your government has sold US-provided and US-derived military technology to the PRC on multiple occasions, you refuse to back and often undermine American attempts to extricate itself from unwanted involvements in the Middle East, you tacitly favor Putin over real American allies and interests in Europe...
Why, pray tell, should any American be "ok“ with defense cooperation with or subsidies for Israel when all your country does is harm our interests at every single turn?
Israel is one of the most reliable allies of the United States. Being a superpower means caring a lot about your allies. As one US admiral put it, Israel is like an US aircraft carrier in the middle east.
The PRC story is very old and the one man responsible for that was fired.
Since Israel and Russian army share a border and Israel is not part of NATO, conflict with Russia is something Israel cannot afford to have. That's why it is extremely careful regarding arming Ukraine, but it is obvious where the heart of Israelis is (unlike Palestinian president that left Ramallah to hug Putin).
"Israel is one of the most reliable allies of the United States."
Please, describe 3 ways in which this is true. I cannot think of even one way in which Israel has acted as an ally to the United States since shortly after I was born, and even that was just "we will refrain from nuking Iraq in retaliation for scud strikes while the United States beats it bloody."
Actual impacts on America's concrete interests which Israel has aided in some way, that is.
Tying to bait America into war with Iran on multiple occasions does not count, nor does any covert or military action you've undertaken with our help to prevent regional powers from developing the capacity to attack you. All of those things were America acting as an ally to Israel, not the other way around.
If I hated Jews, why would I subscribe to Matt’s blog or spend several hours a week engaging his ideas?
I feel that Zionists are the segregationists of the 21st century and those who enable them are tainted by the act. However, Jews need not be Zionists. There are plenty of authentically Jewish communities in the US. There’s also assimilation, which is a perfectly legitimate choice.
While there are many Jews that aren't Zionists, the opposite is also true. There are many non-American and non-Jewish people who believe that Israel has a right to exist. Let's say, the Emiratis after the Abraham Accords. My understanding is that you don't dislike all types of Zionists though...
By the way, I'm curious if you'd use this analogy for other people. "The Irish need not be supporters of Éire. There are plenty of authentically Irish communities in the US."
"The Irish need not be supporters of Éire. There are plenty of authentically Irish communities in the US."
Would that that be illogical or objectionable in some way? I'm not following this particular thread very well, so maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like something one could say about any state with an ethnic foundation (ie most nations in Europe and Asia).
I fully agree with you. I'm just looking for consistency. If you oppose Zionism but also the existence of the Italian nation state and the Japanese nation state, there is nothing wrong with your worldview. In fact, I would say that this is probably the dream society for me as well and my only objections would be about whether we can ever realistically reach this point.
2) Have the Irish done anything to the British that is remotely as bad as what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians?
The zionist project is basically the equivalent of trying to give a US state back to native Americans. There is an ancient historical claim, but there were very, very few Jews in Palestine in 1900. Rather, there was a large population of non-Jews born in Palestine who had to be displaced or marginalized to make Zionism viable.
I oppose Zionism for much the same reason I oppose giving Georgia back to the Cherokee Indians.
That being said, Jews who were born in Israel proper have a pretty strong claim to stay there. Unfortunately, to the extent they support apartheid and further colonization of the West Bank, they aren’t very sympathetic.
1) Do you include like the Swiss in this category? (They do recognize Israel.)
2) I'm very surprised, but we agree! I believe that your analogy is correct, and I do now see the consistency in your argument.
Two tiny points. The Irish are still not more militarily powerful than the British. You have first to see what happens after someone obtains power in order to decide whether they are restrained from circumstances or from principles. Moreover, I would say that in the category of Jews born in Israel proper you should probably add all the Jews who lived in Egypt and Iraq and Yemen and fled for their lives. There is something specific that has happened every time there was a Jewish minority somewhere with an Arab majority.
“If I hated Jews, why would I subscribe to Matt’s blog or spend several hours a week engaging his ideas?” Is that the modern day version of “i have Jewish friends”??
If you hated every kind of nationalism OK, but you obviously hate Jewish nationalism more than anything else even though all nations have a nationalistic majority (even Scandinavians as we see recently and obviously Arabs). Targeting the Jews for something that you don't target anyone else for.. Well it has a name. Matt dreams about Jews being integrated into the old Austrian Hungarian empire, so you can tolerate him. Matt's vision is fine, but Jews are allowed to have other dreams too.
Jewish Nationalism is uniquely pernicious because of the way it has distorted US politics. No other nation has the equivalent of AIPAC or such a prominent, wealthy and motivated cadre of donors demanding politicians serve the interests of a foreign country even when they conflict with those of the US.
But, yeah, if Anglophone Canadian nationalists wanted to confine francophones to open air prisons, purge them from the military, prevent them from voting in national elections, and develop a robust nuclear deterrent in case France took up for its french speaking cousins, and if Anglo Canadian expats donated lots of money to influence US elections in order to get US taxpayers to subsidize this mad project, I’d have some very harsh things to say about Anglo-Canadian nationalists.
It really depends on what the criticism is. I think that "I really hate Netanyahu/Xi." and "The Jewish/Chinese people don't deserve a state in their historic homeland." are very different types of criticism.
If ethnicities deserve homelands, then the Kurds should have a sovereign state, as well as a few hundred other ethnicities that are living across borders. I know you're not necessarily making that argument, but I guess I just wanted to jump in to say it's a bad one, imo.
Also, when you say historic, are we talking about history from 2000-3000 years ago or history from the past 80 years? I feel like the more recent claim is much more legitimate - the vast majority of Israelis were born in that country and have never known another. But I can't express how much I really, really don't care that someone thinks their ancestors lived there in 30AD. That's a bad argument all around.
I do believe that much suffering would have been averted by the existence of a Kurdish sovereign state indeed. Overall, I would like a world where there are no borders, as I've already said. My only points would be about whether this is possible.
When I say "historic" I mean history, which includes what happened 2000-3000 years ago. What happens with Israelis that are currently alive is what I would call "current events". I'm fine with people picking one or the other framework (see my responses to David on this, nothing wrong with not wanting to revive the world of 30AD or 1930AD, but live in the present). I just want consistency.
Because there are massive tradeoffs to "giving Jewish people a state in their historic homeland" I'd say that is a fair political question that doesn't hinge on feeling of the Jewish people themselves.
Consider what it would mean to say "The Sioux people deserve a state in their historic homeland" - would it be racist to not take that to the conclusion that it's been taken in Israel?
I don't have strong positions on Israel itself - really tough obviously - I just don't think it's fair to conflate beliefs on Israel with anti-semitism.
Well, there are massive tradeoffs to giving the Chinese a state too, as the Taiwanese or anyone affected by the nine-dash line would tell you. By the way, Israeli statehood is older than the PRC. It's not something that happened within my lifetime or the lifetime of my parents.
You said she used anti-semitic tropes by suggesting that zionists’ donations influenced Congress. I say anyone who doesn’t see the influence of zionist money on our Israel policy isn’t thinking clearly
No, counselor, that is not what I said. I said reducing opposition to her as merely being because she "once said moving the embassy was stupid" is mischaracterizing the argument.
tbh, my reply was as relevant to your comment as most comments are to matt’s post. you were talking about journalistic decisions and, in doing so, you pretty clearly implied that it’s understandable that republicans would block a nominee for saying 24 years ago that zionist money influences US-Israel policy.
I used to think this, and I still do at the individual level - I assume the vast majority of people are somewhat rational and not proactively evil.
But 1) the Republican party has decided -- probably rationally -- that stymying opposition governance is generally a good strategy, 2) There's a strong single-issue pro-Israel lobby that would absolutely wield power to prevent an appointment of someone who took the wrong side of an Israel issue.
It's not at all a stretch of "assume everyone's acting rationally" to believe Matt's take.
Same appointment rates between Trump and Biden also don't challenge my priors. It seems probable that low Trump appointment levels had more to do with his lack of interest in getting them done, and Biden's low appointment levels have more to do with Republican opposition.
I'd like to see more here before fully believing Matt's take on the Brazilian ambassador, but it's not a violation of Occum's razor or whatever.
I will post my evidence that Matt mischaracterized the opposition in a way that is both partisan and unfair. I offer no judgement on whether she should or should not be confirmed. Only that when an article or blog post describes the opposition in a way that can only be read as "those other guys are irrational and stupid", it is worth taking that with a big grain of salt.
Thanks, will read in a bit. I don't doubt you, just making the point that I don't think Matt's story relies on repubs being irrational or stupid - seems like there would be "rational but unfortunate" reasons for them to oppose in the current environment.
Debt ceiling brinkmanship actually seems like an example. I think holding the US hostage by threatening to default on legislated commitments is bad, but I don't think Republicans are "irrational and stupid" for doing it. I think they're putting cold, short-term, individual rationality above the interests of the country.
The widespread beliefs of many republicans on 2020 voter fraud and vaccines do seem "irrational and stupid" in a way that's actually challenged my previous priors on not ascribing common beliefs to irrationality or stupidity. I have a hard time maintaining my pre-2020 commitment to assuming those.
The fact that the vast majority of the crazy has piled up on one side of the ledger is making me reevaluate these priors as well.
The "experts" have their foibles, absolutely, but how in hell the GOP is going to govern when it's completely divorced from literally everyone who knows what they're talking about when it comes to crafting China export bans, driving down infrastructure costs, streamlining permitting, etc... is beyond me.
Is it genuinely going to be 30 years of culture war rhetoric and tax cuts all the way down if they succeed in pushing us over the edge towards a herrenvolk democracy?
I think this hits the great understated reason not to put Republicans in charge of Congress. Instead of working with moderate Democrats to steer policy in a slightly more conservative direction they will simply create government and possibly fiscal dysfunction.
For all my moderating recently on cultural issues, I still can't fathom ever voting for the party that's so openly hostile to the idea of government itself to be in charge of running it.
Respectfully, while this may once have been true, I don't see how it is now. The one thing they will do is cobble together the votes for a budgeting busting tax cut for the highest earners. They will do that no matter the circumstances. That is it.
Same. I've always had my issues here and there with the Democrats. That list got a good bit longer during the Trump presidency and 2020 in particular. But I also don't see a Republican majority as solving any of that, certainly not when their goal is to create government failure.
So, should we assume based on this piece that Matt believes it's a foregone conclusion that Congress will NOT deal with the debt ceiling in the lame duck session? The mind positively reels at the gross stupidity or fecklessness on the part of Democrats if they don't take action (ditto the Electoral Count Reform Act).
Also, Matt writes:
>>I’m concerned about overturning the 2024 election.<<
Is he saying here that he worries that big GOP margins next week will translate into gains that will persist in November of 2024? Because, again, it's the latter election's Congress that certifies the Electoral College vote, right?
Democrats won't take the debt ceiling gun out of Republican hands as long as the GOP is threatening to shoot itself in the foot again.
The chance of a debt default is so vanishingly low as to be zero. Republicans got killed by this tactic in the past -- rightfully so -- and they aren't going to do that again.
Addendum / Edit: The responses to me below are WHY Dems won't take this off the table. It fires up voters who fear what some wacko Republicans might do.
I think you have far too much faith in the ability of the GOP House caucus to act rationally.
I think Matt summarized the likely outcome well (they try to hold the debt ceiling hostage to get Democrats to enact their agenda but ultimately cave when it does not work, perhaps after one or two short term suspensions of the debt ceiling), but I also think the possibility of catastrophe is meaningfully greater than zero.
The House will have some real crazies in it next year, and Kevin McCarthy seems less capable than his predecessors at corralling his members to take votes they don’t like. Also, it is not clear that he has the courage to pass a debt ceiling increase with mostly Democratic votes.
I imagine we’ll see who is right in the next 12 months or so.
At the very least, we should take the "debt ceiling as a negotiating tactic" off the table completely. I worry like some of the others on this thread that the GOP caucus will be even crazier than in 2011, McCarthey will be a weak leader and that therefore this increases the chances of default (even if it is only a 25% chance, this is still nuts. The chances should be like 0.1%).
Using the "debt ceiling" as a negotiating tactic really is an astonishing waste of time. I know a divided government is unlikely to pass too much meaningful legislation. But it seems at least possible a somewhat "smart deficit reduction plan from Collins and Murkowski could pass. Months of negotiating around the debt ceiling seems to make this more likely.
But just in general, the "debt ceiling" is an anachronism. And is now creating an additional friction in government function. Threatening the full faith and credit of the United States is an extraordinarily damaging way to get legislation passed. It's just one more piece to the dogpile of unnecessary impediments to function government.
The short-term incentive is to ask the Dems who were in congress in 2011 (Which is many of them), how many of you enjoyed the "nuclear brinksmanship" of that period? Is that something you really want to return to for weeks if not months?
I'm really hoping recent statements by Biden and other Dems about the debt ceiling is purely a "lets not give GOP ammunition prior to midterms" gambit. Because not only is raising the debt ceiling asap the right call on the merits (I said in a previous slow boring comment thread if we can't eliminate it, at least raise to 400 quadrillion dollars), the long-term political blowback to raising it a "lame duck" session right before the holidays would be zilch. Maybe for like 3 days you'll get the "tsk tsk tsk" articles in WSJ or on Fox Business, you're polling falls for like a week. And then everyone moves on and it's barely a sliver of a glimmer effecting voters' approval or disapproval of the President or Congress. after at best a week.
If you say so. But the GOP seems to get more radical by the nanosecond. I was watching Maddow the other night (yeah, Maddow, but still!) and she highlighted some Tweeted (or, uh, Truth-Socialed) praise that Donald Trump recently heaped on Blake Masters. Among other compliments, the former president praised Masters for being "a strong elections denier." Think about that for a moment. The former president (and quite possibly future president) of the country that fancies (or used to fancy) itself the world's greatest democracy explicitly praising a politician for his opposition to Democratic norms. He might as well praise Masters for being a "strong authoritarian" or a "strong Fascist."
I fear we're approaching the point where Republicans aren't overly concerned with the
political ramifications of their actions, because they no longer need to court electoral majorities. Elections schmelections. So bring on the debt crisis!
How can you say the chances of default are zero? How can you still have so much trust in these people and their ultimate National responsibility ? Even their own competence not to get things out of hand and to stop at the brink (even should that be their aim)? It boggles the mind.
I don't think the chances of default are zero and I think Republicans are probably going to be lunatics about it, but I do think that chances of default (Treasury not making a payment on debt when due) are very low. I think if Republicans are truly intransigent about raising the debt ceiling that the White House has to take the position of "the debt limit is unconstitutional and we are going to keep paying the bills try to sue us and stop us and cause economic catastrophe." I wouldn't be surprised if the Supreme Court agreed and this whole debt ceiling dance went away. If the Supreme Court says it is constitutional, markets meltdown and we probably have a TARP situation where Republicans cave to total market mayhem and raise the debt ceiling before an actual default hits. I do think it's possible they still don't vote for it in that situation and we do have a default, but I think it's a pretty low probability.
There is no scenario whereby Republicans force or allow the government to default on debt payments. This is firmly in the conspiracy-theory world.
Republicans are objectively wrong when they attribute the dumbest thing some Democrat has said to the entire Democratic Party. And I think too many are doing the same thing with respect to the debt ceiling on the Republican side.
It’s not a conspiracy theory as I don’t claim that they will conspire to do it on purpose rubbing their hand in glee. I do think however that polarization dynamics in us politics are spiraling out of control. The combination of this dynamic with the deterioration in quality of gop politicians and the rise of extremism in their ranks combines to create a situation where this scenario is far from zero as resulting from a standoff between Republican congress and democratic Whitehouse when neither wants to be the first to blink. You are overestimating both the responsibility and the sheer ability of gop congressional leadership to prevent disaster at the last minute.
For posterity's sake, will it count as "forcing a debt default" if Treasury has to mint some obscenely-high denomination coin or bill to avoid it because the GOP didn't back off the brink?
I will be extremely happy to reconsider my priors, as they assume this country is in dire straits. Parenthetically I wonder whether Jan 6th (and all it represents - election denialism , subversion efforts etc) had any effect on your willingness to vote gop at national (or indeed key state !) level?
Failure to raise the debt limit isn’t just Republicans shooting themselves in the foot. It’s them launching our entire nucal ICBM fleet on the global financial market. Copying my explanation from another comment,
The potential global financial meltdown when all market participants need to account for the possibility of the US Federal Government defaulting on any of its financial obligations are beyond imagination. Particularly with the massive US Treasury market being foundational to all global dollar financing. This isn’t just a run-of-the-mill government shutdown when we fail to pass a budget; this is financial nuclear armageddon.
It would be very, very bad. Agreed. But the fact that the outcomes would be extremely undesirable is hardly insurance it won't happen. Maybe enough Republicans will turn out to be quite confident Biden and the Democrats are the ones who'll be blamed. Republicans don't have to be correct about that. Just foolish enough to pull the trigger.
(One hopes Biden would mint a damn quadrillion dollar coin—or take some other kind of robust if unorthodox executive action—if push came to shove. But who knows?)
100% agree. And I do hope that alternative solutions like the platinum coin or challenging the constitutionality of the debt limit would allow us to avoid actual default.
Yet I worry that even the heightened risk of this unimaginable event would cause market participants to start positioning for financial meltdown and thereby trigger that very event. E.g., some investors start selling treasuries, driving down their price, and that triggers further selling such that we end up in a doom loop where the entire Treasury market collapses.
It will happen, there will be a crisis , and in the aftermath the us and the dollar will be in the path to lose their central place. US credibility will never recover. Another huge step in American decline, alas, brought to you by democrats refusing to take the danger seriously and republicans having gone fully to the dark side. Mark my words.
Disagree. Democrats are too concerned about working stiffs to hold the economy hostage for their political advantage. House Democrats thought Trump was a quasi-fascist but passed the CARES Act anyway and then tried to appropriate more money than McConnell would allow. The CARES Act almost saved Trump, and McConnell likely cost Trump the election by pulling back the punch bowl.
>>McConnell likely cost Trump the election by pulling back the punch bowl.<<
My distinct impression at the time was McConnell was pricing in a Biden victory at that point (perhaps wrongly, although obviously Biden did win in the end), and didn't see the merit in juicing the economy further. And you may well be right. It was a pretty close election, and more stimulus might well have been a difference-maker.
McConnell’s motives are hard to unpack. He was also defending his Senate majority and might have kept that even if Trump had lost. The Georgia runoffs didn’t happen til January 5, and getting out stimulus checks right after the November election might have saved his majority. I suspect McConnell was acting out of opposition to massive borrowing and spending rather than political calculation. He definitely understands that Keynesian stimulus helps the incumbent party.
>He definitely understands that Keynesian stimulus helps the incumbent party.<
Oh, I don't doubt that. But the measure in question was July-ish IIRC. And perhaps McConnell thought it was too late to have much impact on November? (Side note: I doubt McConnell reads Krugman, but PK maintains voter perceptions regarding the trajectory of the economy have generally calcified by end of Q2 in an election year).
But you raise you good point about GOP Senate numbers, of course, and yes, all things equal, a fiscal conservative like Mitch McConnell prefers less federal borrowing.
I think this is correct. If you look at the recent past, when each party can't agree on a debt ceiling increase, they temporarily suspend limits, usually until after the next election. Or suspend the limit and have an automatic increase when the suspension expires. I think both parties still would like to use this for the usual partisan purposes, but they are more careful now and willing to punt rather than play hardball.
And if Democrats lose both the House and Senate, I think we'll see a lot of them come out of the woodwork to oppose a debt ceiling increase unless they can get something they want in such a "must pass" bill.
There are two numbers involved here: Tax receipts, and Constitutionally authorized spending.
The notion that we need to authorize a third number (the projected difference between the two at a certain point in time) is stupid. It serves no useful purpose at all. Either increase tax receipts or don't authorize the spending, dammit.
>>a lot of countries have some sort of debt ceiling (some constitutional!), but the American one is the only one that's bad per the media.<<
Really? I've read a number of sources claim it's only the USA and Denmark. I'll defer to your claim. But in any event we seem to be the only rich country where not paying our debtors is used as blackmail.
But that's just it, the debt brake is required to be considered when enacting spending and taxation proposals, not to post facto authorize already agreed-upon spending and taxation.
The Senate elections this time around could impact the January 2025 electoral vote count. If Democrats lose Senate seats now they will that much more unlikely to win a Senate majority in 2024.
Yeah. It's all about the Senate. And House margins matter, too. If Democrats go into 2024 with 203 House members, they'll obviously be in a weaker position than if they go into that election with 216.
What those polls tell me is that the GOP is still able to get the Democrats stuck on the message that they are soft on crime and soft on the border, while Republicans still get to ride on the perception that they are the party of "energy abundance", and I scare quote that because I have high confidence that that's code for the very narrow slice of energy that means "lower gas prices", and not the holistic picture of energy abundance that Matt has laid out in the past. And despite Matt's best efforts, cuts in entitlement programs don't make the list. It tells me that Democrats are still struggling in the messaging department.
> I don’t know what will happen exactly, but the [debt] crisis or standoff will be at least somewhat economically damaging, and it won’t end with cuts-only entitlement reform.
We can and should avoid this showdown by increasing the debt limit through reconciliation in the lame duck session. I still don’t understand our Democratic leadership’s aversion to increasing the limit along partisan lines.
The potential global financial meltdown when all market participants need to account for the possibility of the US Federal Government defaulting on any of its financial obligations are beyond imagination. Particularly with the massive US Treasury market being foundational to all global dollar financing. This isn’t just a run-of-the-mill government shutdown when we fail to pass a budget; this is financial nuclear armageddon.
If the concern is Republicans campaigning in 2024 on something like “Democrats increased the debt limit to 35T!” then we should increase the limit to something absurd like a googol dollars (1 followed by 100 zeros). Make it clear that this is a ridiculous, likely unconstitutional, artificial constraint that serves no purpose. With such an esoteric and generally incomprehensible number most voters won’t even be able to apprehend this as any sort of concrete concern.
My guess is that our leadership believes that Republicans will always back down and we can avoid any potential partisan attack. Yet we can neutralize the potential for attacks and eliminate the tail risk of Republicans taking this game of chicken all the way to global financial annihilation.
>>I still don’t understand our Democratic leadership’s aversion to increasing the limit along partisan lines.<<
Probably most Democrats do but a few don't (and they don't have a vote to spare in the Senate)? That's just a guess. Joe Manchin, for instance, is facing a brutal fight in 2024 if he decides to run, and probably needs everything to break perfectly for him. So I wouldn't be surprised if that's one vote (Sinema's is another) that might be hard to get.
And we should’ve done this in early 2021 and already eliminated the entire issue. Instead, we had something of a showdown that ended in McConnell letting us pass a small increase along partisan lines anyways.
I can agree that the previous showdowns have worked in the Democrats favor so far. Because, yes, there are always enough reasonable Republicans that get on board to avoid the financial armageddon.
But what if those same reasonable Republicans are proposing a bill that raises the limit while also cutting social security? They can use the same argument that something has to be done in an attempt to force Democrats to accept that horrible deal. Meanwhile we Democrats have a clean bill that just raises the debt limit that we feel has to pass.
Just cause they’ve caved before doesn’t mean we should count on that being a foregone conclusion. They might be able to structure their social spending cuts package in a way polls well among Republicans, particularly if they market it as a solution to inflation. And if they do well in the midterms then they could believe that they have a mandate to push through their legislation through whatever means necessary.
There’s just some tail risk that we end up in a situation where Republicans believe that they have the leverage and the legitimacy to take the game of chicken to the brink. And we don’t even need to hit the debt limit before market participants start positioning for financial meltdown and thereby trigger that very event.
And this is a distracting tail risk that we keep running into and thereby consume time and energy on some Republican BS sabotage tactic. We could unilaterally eliminate this permanently to remove both the tale risk and obstruction.
I think this piece does a really fantastic job laying out the complete lack of a constructive GOP policy agenda. I do think you handwave the “sweeping reconciliation bill” point. It seems trivially obvious that if Dems won, BBB and HR1 would go immediately onto the congressional agenda. I don’t see how they would pass, but what indication has been given that Ds moved on from those ideas?
I am pretty confident, at this point, that they would absolutely not consider the BBB framework again, as none of the moderates think it warranted.
We might get permitting reform, and probably some kind of stab at high-skilled immigration reform to backstop CHIPS, and further tinkering with Medicare in a deficit reduction reconciliation package.
The House progressive caucus just released a letter calling for Biden to enter peace negotiations with Russia over Ukraine. That wing of the party is not thinking strategically right now. Like Ray wrote, if Dems somehow kept their majorities the progressive caucus would take it as a mandate to enact their favored policies.
Um... and that would end precisely how the letter ended? Quickly, ignominiously, and with every "supporter" frantically backpedaling away from it within literal *hours*.
Jayapal has Iraq brain-worms and someone should primary her ass in 2024, but...
There is a *zero percent chance* that Biden or the Senate would OK major domestic spending bills as opposed to using reconciliation to pursue deficit reduction and shore up Medicare/Obamacare, and attempting reforms on other fronts on a bipartisan basis.
Given that in the midst of significant inflationary pressures, Biden used executive action to forgive 500+ billion in student debt (and was called out for not doing more!), you'll forgive me for not accepting that Democrats will demonstrate restraint should they continue to hold a trifecta.
Elected Democrats see that inflation is a political liability. They don’t seem primed to pass inflationary legislation. I doubt that narrowly maintaining their majorities against the insurrectionist party would change that. If a democrats somehow hold on, the narrative will be “toxic Trumpist candidates and election deniers caused huge GOP underperformance.”
There's something conspicuously absent from this analysis of what will or won't happen if GOP takes both houses of Congress. What happens with Ukraine funding? McCarthey has already signaled that he's open to cutting Ukraine funding if he's Speaker.
Now this could just be postering and a negotiating tactic. It seems right now there are plenty of votes to keeping funding for Ukraine going. But I would NOT count on that continuing on the GOP side. There's the obvious, who on the GOP side is getting Russia money. I know, I know, it's a rabbit hole that can lead to not so helpful places. But considering what we know about the NRA, considering how many GOP officials spent July 4th in Moscow in 2017*, considering previous comments made by Paul Ryan, I feel pretty confident that the number of GOP officials who have some sort of financial connections to Russia is more than zero.
But even beyond that, even if GOP officials are not at all connected financially to Russia, they are very interested in making sure they win re-election in 2024. And given the dynamics of gerrymandering, the biggest danger to re-election is losing a primary. And GOP primary voters seem to be very alarmingly pro-Putin. Purely from saving your own political hide aspect, wouldn't be shocked if some of the pro giving Ukraine aid start to flip. What happens if Tucker Carlson does a weeklong special program live from Moscow (given his statements about Putin and given that he already did this in Hungary, a real possibility btw) and GOP House members started getting feedback from the large contingent of GOP primary voters who are Tucker fans? And then there are the GOP House members who are likely just flat-out Pro-Putin out of personal preference.
Beyond the actual dynamics of the war itself, there's the secondary effects. Voters say the number one issue is inflation. You know what's a huge driver or at least impact on inflation? The war in Ukraine. It seems extremely clear that Putin is hoping a GOP controlled Congress can do the work his army clearly is not capable of doing. Aid to Ukraine is likely going to be a huge impact on Putin's next move which will obviously impact the trajectory of energy markets.
It's just odd to me that Matt would leave out a pretty big issue where who controls the House and/or Senate could have a huge impact.
* I'm aware that foreign policy is almost always way down on the list of voter concerns in any election barring a situation where there are significant numbers of American troops involved (and most importantly dying) in a "hot" war. But I feel extremely confident that the typical median voter is pretty anti-Putin at this point (as opposed to GOP base). And I also feel pretty confident that the typical median voter is not aware that large swathes of the GOP, including Ron Johnson, spent July 4th, 2017 in Moscow. If Mandela Barnes (or other Dem candidates) hasn't had any ads or brought up this fact about Johnson or the other GOPers who went to Moscow, that is a real failure to me.
"Some 30% of respondents overall said in the new survey they believe the administration is doing too much to help Ukraine, up from 6% in a March Journal poll. The change was driven by a big shift among GOP voters: 48% of Republicans now say the U.S. is doing too much, up from 6% in the previous survey."
Your "cop-friendly" and "cop-skeptical" paragraphs say the same thing, with the difference of an "un-":
"The rise in crime is caused by police willfully shirking their duty to protect the public, because they don't like being criticized. The criticisms to which they object are:
fair (cop-skeptical version)
unfair (cop-friendly version)."
When even your attempt to be friendly leaves the police willfully shirking their duty because they don't like being criticized, then I'd say you're either bad at supporting cops, or the cops' behavior is insupportable.
When "criticism" almost always leads to you getting benched, usually fired, and often having your house picketed and your family harassed, you too would start to reconsider the merits of an $80k a year job in an expensive metro.
I have *no doubt* at all that there are quite a few cops who are throwing a bitchfit at the mere prospect of accountability.
But I also think it perfectly rational for the majority of the "I want to do the job well, but it's just a job" demographic to look at the current situation and pull back from doing anything hard or potentially controversial.
In this situation we've only got the people who are genuinely in their jobs to selflessly support others who are still willing to step up, and that's no way for any "industry" to continue functioning.
I'd say that when you criticize an entire profession, particularly one that you've never so much as tried first-hand for 5 minutes and could / would never do, you ought to have a little bit of humility, lest you sound like you have no idea what you're talking about.
Two things. I'm a moderate who doesn't generally vote for Democrats, but I'll be voting for Maggie Hassan and Chris Pappas this year for precisely the reasons that Matt outlines. I want an opposition party who is principled and if it takes losing a few elections to get there, I think that's the price to pay. Second, I know it would be politically bad for Biden to say something like: "Whether there are more or fewer police in Detroit, San Francisco, or San Antonio is not something that should be decided by the federal government, but by the citizens of those cities - if you have strong opinions on how to reform policing in your city vote for a mayor and city council who agree with you on those issues", but it would really be a breath of fresh air.
I agree completely with the narrow points you've been making on crime, but watching you and others dance around the real issue has convinced me that the Democratic party simply isn't ready to fix anything. I cast my first ever vote for a Republican as a result.
The problem is that a powerful minority of Democratic officials are de facto anarchists. Republicans won't actually fix anything on crime but certain Democrats will absolutely work to make it worse. The example that bothers me most personally is how here in Seattle the local county kept the jails on Covid standards until a couple of months ago, well after schools were fully reopened. The "surprise side effect" is that the jail simply couldn't accept as many new prisoners and so quite a few convicted criminals never did any time. Given that the county executive has discussed how he would like to close the jail in five years this doesn't seem accidental!
I understand that you aren't going to argue too strongly against Democrats right before an election but I think you're severely underestimating just how toxic this dynamic is. Just to take one example, it's _clearly_ why the attack on Paul Pelosi was a below the fold article and why it's difficult for Democrats to argue for such common sense measures as giving Nancy a security detail. Imagine the attack ads if she does get one: "There are several thousand mentally ill drug addicts roaming the streets of San Francisco. Democrats believe Nancy Pelosi deserves to be protected from them while the rest of the city has to fend for themselves".
The anarchists have to be purged from the party. There's no other path forward.
This article makes no mention of Biden's veto. The republicans will not pass anything this term because it can't be put into law past democratic president. The only question on the ballot is do you approve of the Democrats performance and future agenda.
It actually comments on this in some detail. He says the veto will protect from an abortion ban and points to problems with confirmations and the debt ceiling as the big issues with an R senate.
I feel many of the same frustrations as Matt wrt to the police activity discussion. ‘Back the blue’ does sometimes seem to be suggesting that cops just can’t be criticized at all. But in specific people are pointing to a variety of what they say are politically motivated criminal charges leveled at POs and it’s unfair to ignore this. There is a real question about how many weak cases should be pursued following viral video, and what effect that has on cops more broadly.
The challenge is that in many places police and police unions, with some help from the courts, have succeeded in eliminating any normal channels of accountability for themselves. This results in the only plausible avenue being criminal prosecution which of course become highly politicized and therefore fraught for the local prosecutor's office.
the channel is local political control and reform. The union doesn’t just create these conditions they bargain with elected officials. Usually democratic elected officials.
As a concrete example, in June 2020, an Atlanta police officer was fired and charged with murder after fatally shooting an assaliant. The shooting happened when attempting to arrest the individual, who stole the officer’s taser gun and fired it at officers. It was a highly contentious incident at the time.
Now all charges have been dropped and the officer reinstated in Aug 2022 with the explanation, [1]
> The prosecutors said that these actions gave the other officer, Garrett Rolfe, justification to use deadly force. Mr. Rolfe fired three shots at Mr. Brooks, hitting him twice, in the back and buttocks.
>
> “It is my conclusion that the use of deadly force was objectively reasonable and that they did not act with criminal intent,” Mr. Porter said.
As an Atlanta resident, I’ve heard a lot about this killing morale among officers and making them highly risk averse in policing. There were many complaints about the charges being politically motivated due to the heightened concerns over police brutality. And it certainly hurt that the popular police chief had to resign over the incident.
I could imagine some voters still angry about incidents like this and somehow thinking that electing Republicans at the national level will magically address the issue.
There was a similar incident in Philadelphia in (I think) late 2020, and then that knife attack in Ohio, and others that are slipping my mind right now.
Christ knows *I* am not going to go become a cop with all this going on.
Are the police unions attempting to cover for their worst members, and is there a culture of opacity surrounding even fairly serious abuses? You bet your ass.
Is the current tack of the reformists fixing it? Fuck no.
Yes this is a big one people talk about a lot. Is electing Hershel Walker going to help with it? Maybe very slightly. politics does operate by vibe on some levels, which is why this prosecution got launched in the first place.
"Law and Order has to be the strongest for those who impose the law and order."
But it's not about Law & Order. The big arguments aren't on whether police should accept bribes or deal drugs or shoot their ex-girlfriends.
The big arguments are about "were the police right to feel threatened and resort to force in XYZ incidents"? Were they right to seek a no-knock warrant in ABC case? If they pulled over a disproportionate amount of black/asian/muslim/whatever people were they acting on legitimate suspicions or were they profiling in an illegitimate way?
Those aren't "law and order" questions. Those are questions both for people legitimately overseeing the profession and for twitter / media dilettantes second-guessing every decision that officers make. The former is OK, but the latter is absolutely damaging to all of our interests.
That’s fine, I think you’re wrong that the dust would ever settle from your policy of launching tons of doomed pretexual prosecutions. But it’s a theory, and it makes note of what Matt’s interlocutors are actually saying. If Matt agrees, he should write that.
I'm for stronger much of what you advocate, but also think your going to far. Few people enjoy working in an environment where they are constantly second guessed - if you escalate the situation to where people can be held criminally liable for their actions, they will be incredibly resistant to taking any chances at all.
Let me provide comparison - there are many doctors and hospitals now that are facing vague laws around abortion and that is influencing their decisions because they fear they could be prosecuted if they make the wrong decision. They absolutely hate it and raise the issue a great deal. We don't want to apply the same situation to police because as you can see in situations like Ulvade, they will often refuse to put themselves at risk *at a departmental level.*
"But that's why I'm not a cop - I'm not noble enough to make a choice I'd feel morally compelled to make."
I fundamentally believe that we should not require others to make sacrifices we are not willing to make. Nor do I think its wise to assume that there is some cohort of people who are just more "noble." That way leads to aristocracy and valuing people based on their "nobility."
Instead we should focus on creating institutions and careers where average people can be expected to succeed by adhering to a reasonable standard. Not that there won't be failures, but they will be the exception not the norm. And that those failures will be judged reasonably so that the egregious violations like George Floyd are punished severely, but that doesn't lead to a wide spread condemnation of normal police actions.
It might be much more efficient to go back to the crazy status quo of 2015 of so, when crime was really low (also due to the professionalization of the police career and data analysis), police abuses were low and cops didn't feel second guessed and hung-out-to-dry by the left, and pay was reasonable but not way-too-high.
Or, we can try your crazy moonshot towards a utopia some decades from now.
Right well I’m more in a place where I doubt we will ever get ‘the Justice we all deserve’ on this earth and would like to look for some practical solutions for bringing down the crime rate.
Mandatory use of and strict enforcement of eVerify, the ability to apply for asylum in home countries that precludes the ability to apply for asylum on US soil, many more border patrol agents, dogs, and technology to catch drug and human smugglers, and large walls built in border cities.
Many more beat cops on the streets, actual prosecution of quality of life crimes and illegal gun possession crimes, and a gun background check system with much fewer holes.
I think I misread what the intent of what the top level comment is in this subthread, so I'm going to retract my question, but not delete it so that your comment remains explicable.
I broadly agree with your list except your point about Medicaid: Democrats have to be careful about how they structure and sell (to the public) safety net enhancements, of course, but voters like healthcare deliverables.
feel like commentators here (and not MY!) forget that like 90% of the reason dems will lose on tuesday is because inflation has been double digits for the last year and outpaced wage growth + it’s a midterm under a dem president.
if you told someone in 2000 who into a coma and just woke up to guess what the midterm results would be, they’d probably guess right.
That the median voter thinks Democrats will open the border is an epic messaging failure. These are the wages of quietly continuing Trump’s asylum policy without telling anyone. Democrats should have pushed an immigration bill with strong enforcement measures and Biden should have used the bully pulpit to make the party’s position clear. Instead, Democrats are hemorrhaging Latino votes at the same time blue collar white folks think Democrats want open borders. It’s the worst of both worlds.
Polling pretty consistently shows what the majority of Americans are concerned about, and immigration is one of those things. That many Democrats have ignored not just that - but also other issues - in favor of the niche interests of the base, just shows the dysfunction of what passes for our current political parties.
Its not so much that they ignored it, they simply don't have a good solution given their other preferences. Republicans might support being harsh enough at the border that people stop coming. Democrats don't want to do that, but don't have an alternate solution so are stuck doing nothing.
Maybe massively beefing up asylum screening to allow rapid LIFO deportation those without valid claims isn't a "good" solution, at least it is one that's consistent with our laws.
I'd say it is a policy failure. The messaging problems are the natural reaction to that.
No bill would have passed. Messaging occupies policy vacuums.
Democrats passed several important bills over the last two years when party-line votes, or very near to them.
Would the kind of immigration bill that Democrats would have voted for been able to get past the filibuster? I doubt it. Party-line vote bills have only passed when they were filibuster-immune budget bills; I don't think an immigration bill could have made that claim.
I am not sure what "open the border" means to most people, but the southern border is seeing massive increases in illegal crossings and that isn't something that helps the Democrats. Watch the border counties in Texas for a sense of what the border crisis means electorally - in 2020, the swing in the four overwhelmingly Hispanic counties in the Rio Grande Valley to Trump relative to 2016 was between around 20% to over 50%. In a special election for a House seat in South Texas since 2020, a Republican won for the first time in, I think, forever. We'll see if there's anything similar in this election in the governor's race and House races this time; if there is, it is a bad sign for the Democrats in 2024. The chances of a deal on immigration are pretty slim but it is a real problem that isn't going away.
The wholesale abuse of our asylum system doesn't seeming meaningfully (key word) different from open borders or unlimited immigration.
Show up, claim asylum, have a minimal screening/hearing, and then get released (and be allowed to work) for literally years while the backlog is worked through, and even then just fade into the shadows when/if you don't think your claim will be accepted.
The recent thing with Venezuelans having to stay in Mexico is a bandaid, but at least it was something.
Venezuelans at least have a certifiably tyrannical government to flee. They have a kind of prima facie claim to "asylum." But agree with the larger point. Biden could at least have got caught trying to deal with "asylum seekers."
I agree with the point about Venezuela, but there are two problems here.
1. Venezuelans aren't fleeing to the US. They are crossing through multiple safer countries on their path to US migration. Many other countries in the world have safe third country policies that prevent asylum claims from distant lands. If you're curious why Canada's border doesn't have the problems the US has, it's because no other country borders Canada and their policy prevents asylum claims from foreign nationals crossing from the US.
2. The US had a safe third country agreement with Mexico at the end of the Trump administration that was deliberately ended early in the Biden administration. Cynically, I think the Dems' only real reason for wanting to keep the Venezuelans specifically in Mexico is they are likely Republican voters if/when they gain citizenship. People fleeing tyrranical left governments tend to be reactionary in that way.
If a person is fleeing political repression (not just the sordid economic consequences of repression) I don't see why the fact that they might have fled to somewhere else is particularly relevant. Of course people do not show up with "Political Refugee" and "Economic Migrant" stamped on their wrists, so we need a process to admit the one and reject the other.
I'm not going to comment on the messaging failure as I haven't thought about it. But immigration really isn't a driver of Hispanic votes relative to the average voter. And this is a big mistake both coalitions make.
Several billions of ARP could have been used to staff up processing of asylum seekers and if Republicans voted against it, they could have been rhetorically flayed.
Staffing up the processing doesn't help much if you aren't actually going to reject many of them, or if you release them into the country for a while beforehand and give them a chance to sneak into the shadows.
But the point of the staffing IS to reject some, most, I would guess. Given the backlog we should need to do some LIFO so that new potential asylum seekers could see that the odds have changed.
It seems to be the case that in 2020 there was an epic messaging failure, indicating to people south of the border that if Biden got elected the doors would swing wide allowing immigrants into the US. Maybe not, but it seems that way.
Was it a messaging failure or a messaging success? If the message was "don't come but we won't do much to stop you" that might not be much different to someone in, say, Honduras, from "come on in". The failure was perhaps in not anticipating how the change in rhetoric would be perceived, but - given the massive increases in illegal immigration -- it is hard to say that the people perceiving a big change were wrong in how they perceived it.
Immigration policy is a mess and no one has any particularly good ideas for solutions that can command enough support among enough politicians that they can survive changes in administrations or produce changes in the law that will outlast any particular administration.
I wonder if the messaging was even done by the Democrats. Wasn't Fox News and Donald Trump warning in 2020 that if Joe Biden was elected we would have open borders and illegal immigrants would have an easy time getting into the country? What if people south of the border believed them?
This article was basically written to give moderate republicans like me permission to vote for a democratic senator. And even though I know that, it totally worked. I don’t live in a swing state but maybe someone else reading this with similar politics does. Well done. At minimum I won’t feel bad if the dems keep the senate now.
Oh, the horror, we have an actual stab at real anti-trust enforcement for the first time in 50 years, whatever will the business community do?!
Seriously, do you think that the likes of Singapore allow the degree of regulatory capture, rent-seeking, and monopolistic practices that are permitted in the status quo in the US?
Do you think that they would allow venture capital firm to, for instance, loot a $4 billion cash dividend from a healthy grocery business in order to put it in ill enough health to justify selling it to a competitor and reducing competition in that market to virtually nil in approximately 15% of the country?
No, the Singaporean authorities expect business to act not just in its own interest but within guiderails set to ensure that it acts within the interests of the state and populace.
Singapore can spend as little as it does on social provision in large part *because* it has firmly harnessed the business community and private sector to the job of providing a reasonable standard of living to the vast majority of workers and has curtailed rent-seeking, thus forcing businesses to generate value in order to generate profit. The government *absolutely* holds the whip hand in that relationship and is not afraid to use it.
The US does a bad job of all this, and thus spends a shitload more money on basic social provision.
The senior ranks of the PAP would laugh any GOP politician out of the fucking room if they proposed the Republican platform regarding business be implemented in any particular in Singapore. I know that because I have friends from my China days who are members of long-standing PAP politicians' families and they find the entire GOP an anti-intellectual, vacuous, hopelessly corrupt laughing stock. Their opinions of Democrats aren't much better, but mostly because they consider "peddling racialism" to be among the cardinal sins of any politician (given Singapore's history, not surprising), not because they're "bad for business".
Seriously, the GOP is not pro-market or pro-competition, not when you look at policy. They're pro-rentseeking, pro-kleptocracy, pro-capture and pro-monopolist.
"There is no way to own a company and generate value by destroying that company."
I'm pretty sure that as long as your definition of "generating value" is "generating value for the buyers of the company at the expense of its solvency" this is absolutely a thing that happens.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.html
IIRC Toys 'R Us was basically the same thing.
I love how the argument basically boils down to "Nuh-uh!!!" and then liking his own posts.
How is it a mistake if Cerberus's successful bid to transfer its own debt for the acquisition on to Remington resulted in a situation where allowing the secured creditors to acquire the asset was a better choice than paying off the debt using external capital to retain ownership of Remington? Isn't that strongly indicative that the terminal value was less than the cost of the outstanding debt? (Since otherwise it would make more sense to just pay the debt off, given that Cerberus' stock-in-trade is raising enormous amounts of capital and it has easy access to capital markets?) (EDIT: or in the alternative just making payments using external capital for a short while until you sell off the company for its NPV, assuming NPV > capital already extracted and transferred to Cerberus).
Yes, obviously it is true that Cerberus would have preferred the asset it retained to be higher rather than lower in value -- the anticompetitive situation described by David with respect to Albertsons is a distinct case in which the insolvency of the acquired company is alleged to be an affirmative boon in and of itself -- but capitalizing enterprise value into immediate up-front dividend payments to the private equity firm at the expense of the solvency of the operating company that now gets to pay previously-absent debt service isn't some kind of out-there hypothetical.
So... not paying any attention to the Albertson's saga, then?
Sure, you know what you're talking about. (rolls eyes)
I would argue with you, and I can, because there's a clear logic underpinning smash-and-grabs like this, but as usual you've sidestepped every question and drilled down on a single, in favor of a content-less, stupidly, profoundly ignorant one-liner reflective of an ill-informed, imbecilic, masturbatory sham of a belief structure.
So, you've proven that any attempt at good-faith engagement is pointless, because your belief structure is indefensible on good-faith terms. All you have is one-liners and whining.
Bye.
Sorry, private equity, yes.
I will allow myself to be sucked into this for one final response, and then the fact that you really can't seem to rebut anything will tell, and I'm done:
The obvious (blatantly exceedingly obvious) point here is that Albertson's "value" to Kroger is mainly in the form of removing competition and increasing pricing control in, again, around 20% of markets nationwide, rather than its physical plant or assets.
Decapitalizing Albertson's *increases* its value to Kroger as it provides the only possible justification for an anti-competitive merger that would be rejected unequivocally were Albertson's healthy: they are seeking to engineer a situation in which "Albertson's is not viable as it is not able to cover operating costs."
Albertson's value to Kroger is altered by far less than $4 billion because Kroger can cover operating expenditures, and, again, its value is as much in removing it from the table as in anything it actually owns.
If this is the best of your understanding of the industry in which you claim to work, I have no clue how in the ever-loving *fuck* you are still employed.
Commenters here are largely ignorant of finance, private equity, wall street and banks. They'd all be benefitted by reading Matt Levine over at Bloomberg.
I actually do read some of his stuff when it fits into my monthly Bloomberg free access, lol. There is a difference between ignorance and skepticism.
Nothing pisses me off like SCF's "you don't work in X industry so you can't possibly know anything about it" line, which is all the rebuttal he ever seems to have when someone suggests he's wrong.
What concrete pro-business benefits would an R senate have? Manchin is currently the swing vote and I don’t think he has much love for Elizabeth Warren,
When I read about the ambassador-nominee to Brazil being held up by Republicans because she once said moving the embassy to Jerusalem was stupid, I thought to myself: "Huh, that sounds really bad for such a minor issue. But Matt is usually fair when criticizing the GOP, so must be the case."
But I was curious as to who this Elizabeth Bagley is, so off to the rabbit hole I went.
Turns out, back in 1998, she had what she describes as a "free flowing conversation" with a journalist where her comments "fit into the traditional tropes of anti-Semitism," according to Democratic Senator Ben Cardin. She said she regretted her "poor choice of words" where she said money was why US lawmakers support Israel. She has tried to back away from her comments by saying she was "very sorry about that choice of words and none of them reflect any of my thinking then or now."
She is a major fundraiser for the Party. She married an heir to the RJ Reynolds tobacco fortune and has raised millions of dollars over the years. Long associated with the Clintons, she gave over $1M to the Clinton Foundation. Has a house on Nantucket and DC.
Highlighting opposition to her as an example of irrational opposition seems unfair. And reducing that opposition to objecting to her saying moving the embassy was stupid appears to be really unfair.
Turns out, there are about 27% of 194 ambassador positions are open as of 7/15/22. At the same point during the Trump administration, there were 28% unfilled. So almost exactly the same.
Just your periodic reminder that when you read something about how terrible and irrational one party is acting, it is worth taking those statements with a huge grain of salt. Sometimes it might be true, but oftentimes it is not. Matt is better than most but still is prone to exaggerating small differences for partisan purpose.
Without commenting on the merits of a single individual, the number of executive appointments requiring the advice and consent of the Senate is just wildly, obscenely excessive, in a way that prevents the functioning of wide swathes of the executive branch for years at a time.
It's late 2022 and we still don't have something like a third of appointed positions filled. Trump didn't have something like a quarter of them filled when he left office. Obama had rolling vacancies over 15% or so?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_positions_filled_by_presidential_appointment_with_Senate_confirmation
~1200 positions... Department of Interior has 14 senate confirmed positions. I understand Secretary, Deputy Secretary(since they could become acting secretary at any time), Inspector General(as someone who is supposed to be independent and oversee the rest)
And these sub-cabinet roles currently average about 115 days for confirmation - that's the average - some of these are significantly longer.)
https://presidentialtransition.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2020/01/Senate-Confirmations-Issue-Brief.pdf
It's worth noting that the only reason Biden has been able to confirm any judicial nominees has been Lindsey Graham. Republicans have overwhelmingly opposed many nominees with backgrounds that are not even a little bit partisan.
Stephanie Davis was a career federal prosecutor, then a federal magistrate judge (a nonpartisan merit-based position), then a federal district judge nominated by Trump. She's also far too old to be a serious Supreme Court nominee in the future. She got two Republican votes.
Andre Mathis is a biglaw partner who spent his entire career doing corporate defense work. He was only confirmed because John Kennedy, a former law firm partner, thought it was absurd that he was being blocked and rebelled even though he typically votes no on nominees. His confirmation hearing was marked by a number of racist dog-whistles by Marsha Blackburn, who among other things called his minor traffic tickets as a "rap sheet" and said that she thought he was not intellectually capable of being a federal judge.
John Lee is a former biglaw corporate defense partner who was confirmed to the district court by voice vote, had a sterling reputation as a trial judge, and is too old for Supreme Court consideration, and he got three Republican votes.
Even "moderate" and "reasonable" GOP Senators like Romney have been voting no across the board.
Zionists absolutely, positively have used money to induce Congressional support for Israel. Why else would we support a country with a) an unfortunate taste for ethnic cleaning b) legalized apartheid in its military and certain other institutions c) few allies d) many bitter enemies and e) a nuclear arsenal that makes our nonproliferation efforts an exercise in hypocrisy.
If Donald Trump wants people to stop calling him a fascist, he should stop trying to overthrow elections. If Zionists want people to stop using “anti-semitic” tropes, they should stop acting in ways that lend them credence.
Of course neither Trump nor Zionists will change because both care about their policy goals (personal power or a strong Jewish state) more than they care about what tropes their actions support. Accordingly, both pursue their policy agendas and then try to shame and delegitimize opponents who see and describe the world clearly.
You push your hatred to Israel in each opportunity. OK you hate Jews and their only country. We got it. You are not unique. There are plenty of people like you.
I mean... plenty of Americans just think Israel does not act as an ally and shouldn't be treated as such.
You have a nuclear arsenal, your security is not under serious threat. There is no reason or interest which dictates the US should be involved in your security or economic development.
Your government has sold US-provided and US-derived military technology to the PRC on multiple occasions, you refuse to back and often undermine American attempts to extricate itself from unwanted involvements in the Middle East, you tacitly favor Putin over real American allies and interests in Europe...
Why, pray tell, should any American be "ok“ with defense cooperation with or subsidies for Israel when all your country does is harm our interests at every single turn?
Israel is one of the most reliable allies of the United States. Being a superpower means caring a lot about your allies. As one US admiral put it, Israel is like an US aircraft carrier in the middle east.
The PRC story is very old and the one man responsible for that was fired.
Since Israel and Russian army share a border and Israel is not part of NATO, conflict with Russia is something Israel cannot afford to have. That's why it is extremely careful regarding arming Ukraine, but it is obvious where the heart of Israelis is (unlike Palestinian president that left Ramallah to hug Putin).
"Israel is one of the most reliable allies of the United States."
Please, describe 3 ways in which this is true. I cannot think of even one way in which Israel has acted as an ally to the United States since shortly after I was born, and even that was just "we will refrain from nuking Iraq in retaliation for scud strikes while the United States beats it bloody."
Actual impacts on America's concrete interests which Israel has aided in some way, that is.
Tying to bait America into war with Iran on multiple occasions does not count, nor does any covert or military action you've undertaken with our help to prevent regional powers from developing the capacity to attack you. All of those things were America acting as an ally to Israel, not the other way around.
A lot of US intelligence about ISIS and Iran come from Israel. That's the background of this story:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/intelligence-trump-shared-with-russia-was-from-israel-officials-say-1494960259
If I hated Jews, why would I subscribe to Matt’s blog or spend several hours a week engaging his ideas?
I feel that Zionists are the segregationists of the 21st century and those who enable them are tainted by the act. However, Jews need not be Zionists. There are plenty of authentically Jewish communities in the US. There’s also assimilation, which is a perfectly legitimate choice.
While there are many Jews that aren't Zionists, the opposite is also true. There are many non-American and non-Jewish people who believe that Israel has a right to exist. Let's say, the Emiratis after the Abraham Accords. My understanding is that you don't dislike all types of Zionists though...
By the way, I'm curious if you'd use this analogy for other people. "The Irish need not be supporters of Éire. There are plenty of authentically Irish communities in the US."
"The Irish need not be supporters of Éire. There are plenty of authentically Irish communities in the US."
Would that that be illogical or objectionable in some way? I'm not following this particular thread very well, so maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like something one could say about any state with an ethnic foundation (ie most nations in Europe and Asia).
I fully agree with you. I'm just looking for consistency. If you oppose Zionism but also the existence of the Italian nation state and the Japanese nation state, there is nothing wrong with your worldview. In fact, I would say that this is probably the dream society for me as well and my only objections would be about whether we can ever realistically reach this point.
1) Non Jewish Zionists are the worst
2) Have the Irish done anything to the British that is remotely as bad as what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians?
The zionist project is basically the equivalent of trying to give a US state back to native Americans. There is an ancient historical claim, but there were very, very few Jews in Palestine in 1900. Rather, there was a large population of non-Jews born in Palestine who had to be displaced or marginalized to make Zionism viable.
I oppose Zionism for much the same reason I oppose giving Georgia back to the Cherokee Indians.
That being said, Jews who were born in Israel proper have a pretty strong claim to stay there. Unfortunately, to the extent they support apartheid and further colonization of the West Bank, they aren’t very sympathetic.
1) Do you include like the Swiss in this category? (They do recognize Israel.)
2) I'm very surprised, but we agree! I believe that your analogy is correct, and I do now see the consistency in your argument.
Two tiny points. The Irish are still not more militarily powerful than the British. You have first to see what happens after someone obtains power in order to decide whether they are restrained from circumstances or from principles. Moreover, I would say that in the category of Jews born in Israel proper you should probably add all the Jews who lived in Egypt and Iraq and Yemen and fled for their lives. There is something specific that has happened every time there was a Jewish minority somewhere with an Arab majority.
“If I hated Jews, why would I subscribe to Matt’s blog or spend several hours a week engaging his ideas?” Is that the modern day version of “i have Jewish friends”??
If you hated every kind of nationalism OK, but you obviously hate Jewish nationalism more than anything else even though all nations have a nationalistic majority (even Scandinavians as we see recently and obviously Arabs). Targeting the Jews for something that you don't target anyone else for.. Well it has a name. Matt dreams about Jews being integrated into the old Austrian Hungarian empire, so you can tolerate him. Matt's vision is fine, but Jews are allowed to have other dreams too.
Jewish Nationalism is uniquely pernicious because of the way it has distorted US politics. No other nation has the equivalent of AIPAC or such a prominent, wealthy and motivated cadre of donors demanding politicians serve the interests of a foreign country even when they conflict with those of the US.
But, yeah, if Anglophone Canadian nationalists wanted to confine francophones to open air prisons, purge them from the military, prevent them from voting in national elections, and develop a robust nuclear deterrent in case France took up for its french speaking cousins, and if Anglo Canadian expats donated lots of money to influence US elections in order to get US taxpayers to subsidize this mad project, I’d have some very harsh things to say about Anglo-Canadian nationalists.
The same people who would scoff at "It's racist to criticize China" often take the position that "It's anti-Semitic to criticize Israel."
The same people who would scoff at "It's anti-semitic to criticize Israel" often take the position that "It's racist to criticize China."
It seems obvious to me that criticizing Israel or China should be totally fair game, and that conflating this with racism or anti-semitism isn't fair.
It really depends on what the criticism is. I think that "I really hate Netanyahu/Xi." and "The Jewish/Chinese people don't deserve a state in their historic homeland." are very different types of criticism.
If ethnicities deserve homelands, then the Kurds should have a sovereign state, as well as a few hundred other ethnicities that are living across borders. I know you're not necessarily making that argument, but I guess I just wanted to jump in to say it's a bad one, imo.
Also, when you say historic, are we talking about history from 2000-3000 years ago or history from the past 80 years? I feel like the more recent claim is much more legitimate - the vast majority of Israelis were born in that country and have never known another. But I can't express how much I really, really don't care that someone thinks their ancestors lived there in 30AD. That's a bad argument all around.
I do believe that much suffering would have been averted by the existence of a Kurdish sovereign state indeed. Overall, I would like a world where there are no borders, as I've already said. My only points would be about whether this is possible.
When I say "historic" I mean history, which includes what happened 2000-3000 years ago. What happens with Israelis that are currently alive is what I would call "current events". I'm fine with people picking one or the other framework (see my responses to David on this, nothing wrong with not wanting to revive the world of 30AD or 1930AD, but live in the present). I just want consistency.
Because there are massive tradeoffs to "giving Jewish people a state in their historic homeland" I'd say that is a fair political question that doesn't hinge on feeling of the Jewish people themselves.
Consider what it would mean to say "The Sioux people deserve a state in their historic homeland" - would it be racist to not take that to the conclusion that it's been taken in Israel?
I don't have strong positions on Israel itself - really tough obviously - I just don't think it's fair to conflate beliefs on Israel with anti-semitism.
Well, there are massive tradeoffs to giving the Chinese a state too, as the Taiwanese or anyone affected by the nine-dash line would tell you. By the way, Israeli statehood is older than the PRC. It's not something that happened within my lifetime or the lifetime of my parents.
You seem to have confused my comment about how journalists sometimes mis-characterize an argument with a discussion of Israeli politics.
You said she used anti-semitic tropes by suggesting that zionists’ donations influenced Congress. I say anyone who doesn’t see the influence of zionist money on our Israel policy isn’t thinking clearly
No, counselor, that is not what I said. I said reducing opposition to her as merely being because she "once said moving the embassy was stupid" is mischaracterizing the argument.
tbh, my reply was as relevant to your comment as most comments are to matt’s post. you were talking about journalistic decisions and, in doing so, you pretty clearly implied that it’s understandable that republicans would block a nominee for saying 24 years ago that zionist money influences US-Israel policy.
fair enough
We could do easily do that too, but apparently presidents don't want to.
I used to think this, and I still do at the individual level - I assume the vast majority of people are somewhat rational and not proactively evil.
But 1) the Republican party has decided -- probably rationally -- that stymying opposition governance is generally a good strategy, 2) There's a strong single-issue pro-Israel lobby that would absolutely wield power to prevent an appointment of someone who took the wrong side of an Israel issue.
It's not at all a stretch of "assume everyone's acting rationally" to believe Matt's take.
Same appointment rates between Trump and Biden also don't challenge my priors. It seems probable that low Trump appointment levels had more to do with his lack of interest in getting them done, and Biden's low appointment levels have more to do with Republican opposition.
I'd like to see more here before fully believing Matt's take on the Brazilian ambassador, but it's not a violation of Occum's razor or whatever.
I will post my evidence that Matt mischaracterized the opposition in a way that is both partisan and unfair. I offer no judgement on whether she should or should not be confirmed. Only that when an article or blog post describes the opposition in a way that can only be read as "those other guys are irrational and stupid", it is worth taking that with a big grain of salt.
Here's what I found:
Bloomberg story: https://tinyurl.com/56fs74n9
Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Frawley_Bagley
Thanks, will read in a bit. I don't doubt you, just making the point that I don't think Matt's story relies on repubs being irrational or stupid - seems like there would be "rational but unfortunate" reasons for them to oppose in the current environment.
Debt ceiling brinkmanship actually seems like an example. I think holding the US hostage by threatening to default on legislated commitments is bad, but I don't think Republicans are "irrational and stupid" for doing it. I think they're putting cold, short-term, individual rationality above the interests of the country.
The widespread beliefs of many republicans on 2020 voter fraud and vaccines do seem "irrational and stupid" in a way that's actually challenged my previous priors on not ascribing common beliefs to irrationality or stupidity. I have a hard time maintaining my pre-2020 commitment to assuming those.
The fact that the vast majority of the crazy has piled up on one side of the ledger is making me reevaluate these priors as well.
The "experts" have their foibles, absolutely, but how in hell the GOP is going to govern when it's completely divorced from literally everyone who knows what they're talking about when it comes to crafting China export bans, driving down infrastructure costs, streamlining permitting, etc... is beyond me.
Is it genuinely going to be 30 years of culture war rhetoric and tax cuts all the way down if they succeed in pushing us over the edge towards a herrenvolk democracy?
How does *that* end?
I think this hits the great understated reason not to put Republicans in charge of Congress. Instead of working with moderate Democrats to steer policy in a slightly more conservative direction they will simply create government and possibly fiscal dysfunction.
For all my moderating recently on cultural issues, I still can't fathom ever voting for the party that's so openly hostile to the idea of government itself to be in charge of running it.
Republicans aren't libertarians.
The Republicans want government to exist and do lots of stuff.
Just different stuff than Democrats want to do, and with slightly different boundaries.
Respectfully, while this may once have been true, I don't see how it is now. The one thing they will do is cobble together the votes for a budgeting busting tax cut for the highest earners. They will do that no matter the circumstances. That is it.
The business-GOP is less and less able to redirect and jerk around the populist GOP, so I think this will change.
Same. I've always had my issues here and there with the Democrats. That list got a good bit longer during the Trump presidency and 2020 in particular. But I also don't see a Republican majority as solving any of that, certainly not when their goal is to create government failure.
So, should we assume based on this piece that Matt believes it's a foregone conclusion that Congress will NOT deal with the debt ceiling in the lame duck session? The mind positively reels at the gross stupidity or fecklessness on the part of Democrats if they don't take action (ditto the Electoral Count Reform Act).
Also, Matt writes:
>>I’m concerned about overturning the 2024 election.<<
Is he saying here that he worries that big GOP margins next week will translate into gains that will persist in November of 2024? Because, again, it's the latter election's Congress that certifies the Electoral College vote, right?
Democrats won't take the debt ceiling gun out of Republican hands as long as the GOP is threatening to shoot itself in the foot again.
The chance of a debt default is so vanishingly low as to be zero. Republicans got killed by this tactic in the past -- rightfully so -- and they aren't going to do that again.
Addendum / Edit: The responses to me below are WHY Dems won't take this off the table. It fires up voters who fear what some wacko Republicans might do.
I think you have far too much faith in the ability of the GOP House caucus to act rationally.
I think Matt summarized the likely outcome well (they try to hold the debt ceiling hostage to get Democrats to enact their agenda but ultimately cave when it does not work, perhaps after one or two short term suspensions of the debt ceiling), but I also think the possibility of catastrophe is meaningfully greater than zero.
The House will have some real crazies in it next year, and Kevin McCarthy seems less capable than his predecessors at corralling his members to take votes they don’t like. Also, it is not clear that he has the courage to pass a debt ceiling increase with mostly Democratic votes.
I imagine we’ll see who is right in the next 12 months or so.
At the very least, we should take the "debt ceiling as a negotiating tactic" off the table completely. I worry like some of the others on this thread that the GOP caucus will be even crazier than in 2011, McCarthey will be a weak leader and that therefore this increases the chances of default (even if it is only a 25% chance, this is still nuts. The chances should be like 0.1%).
Using the "debt ceiling" as a negotiating tactic really is an astonishing waste of time. I know a divided government is unlikely to pass too much meaningful legislation. But it seems at least possible a somewhat "smart deficit reduction plan from Collins and Murkowski could pass. Months of negotiating around the debt ceiling seems to make this more likely.
But just in general, the "debt ceiling" is an anachronism. And is now creating an additional friction in government function. Threatening the full faith and credit of the United States is an extraordinarily damaging way to get legislation passed. It's just one more piece to the dogpile of unnecessary impediments to function government.
"Months of negotiating around the debt ceiling seems to make this more likely." Should read make this "less likely".
The short-term incentive is to ask the Dems who were in congress in 2011 (Which is many of them), how many of you enjoyed the "nuclear brinksmanship" of that period? Is that something you really want to return to for weeks if not months?
I'm really hoping recent statements by Biden and other Dems about the debt ceiling is purely a "lets not give GOP ammunition prior to midterms" gambit. Because not only is raising the debt ceiling asap the right call on the merits (I said in a previous slow boring comment thread if we can't eliminate it, at least raise to 400 quadrillion dollars), the long-term political blowback to raising it a "lame duck" session right before the holidays would be zilch. Maybe for like 3 days you'll get the "tsk tsk tsk" articles in WSJ or on Fox Business, you're polling falls for like a week. And then everyone moves on and it's barely a sliver of a glimmer effecting voters' approval or disapproval of the President or Congress. after at best a week.
If you say so. But the GOP seems to get more radical by the nanosecond. I was watching Maddow the other night (yeah, Maddow, but still!) and she highlighted some Tweeted (or, uh, Truth-Socialed) praise that Donald Trump recently heaped on Blake Masters. Among other compliments, the former president praised Masters for being "a strong elections denier." Think about that for a moment. The former president (and quite possibly future president) of the country that fancies (or used to fancy) itself the world's greatest democracy explicitly praising a politician for his opposition to Democratic norms. He might as well praise Masters for being a "strong authoritarian" or a "strong Fascist."
I fear we're approaching the point where Republicans aren't overly concerned with the
political ramifications of their actions, because they no longer need to court electoral majorities. Elections schmelections. So bring on the debt crisis!
How can you say the chances of default are zero? How can you still have so much trust in these people and their ultimate National responsibility ? Even their own competence not to get things out of hand and to stop at the brink (even should that be their aim)? It boggles the mind.
I don't think the chances of default are zero and I think Republicans are probably going to be lunatics about it, but I do think that chances of default (Treasury not making a payment on debt when due) are very low. I think if Republicans are truly intransigent about raising the debt ceiling that the White House has to take the position of "the debt limit is unconstitutional and we are going to keep paying the bills try to sue us and stop us and cause economic catastrophe." I wouldn't be surprised if the Supreme Court agreed and this whole debt ceiling dance went away. If the Supreme Court says it is constitutional, markets meltdown and we probably have a TARP situation where Republicans cave to total market mayhem and raise the debt ceiling before an actual default hits. I do think it's possible they still don't vote for it in that situation and we do have a default, but I think it's a pretty low probability.
There is no scenario whereby Republicans force or allow the government to default on debt payments. This is firmly in the conspiracy-theory world.
Republicans are objectively wrong when they attribute the dumbest thing some Democrat has said to the entire Democratic Party. And I think too many are doing the same thing with respect to the debt ceiling on the Republican side.
It’s not a conspiracy theory as I don’t claim that they will conspire to do it on purpose rubbing their hand in glee. I do think however that polarization dynamics in us politics are spiraling out of control. The combination of this dynamic with the deterioration in quality of gop politicians and the rise of extremism in their ranks combines to create a situation where this scenario is far from zero as resulting from a standoff between Republican congress and democratic Whitehouse when neither wants to be the first to blink. You are overestimating both the responsibility and the sheer ability of gop congressional leadership to prevent disaster at the last minute.
When nothing at all comes to pass, I hope you will reconsider your priors.
If the GOP does force a debt default, I will never vote for any member of the party at the national level again.
For posterity's sake, will it count as "forcing a debt default" if Treasury has to mint some obscenely-high denomination coin or bill to avoid it because the GOP didn't back off the brink?
I will be extremely happy to reconsider my priors, as they assume this country is in dire straits. Parenthetically I wonder whether Jan 6th (and all it represents - election denialism , subversion efforts etc) had any effect on your willingness to vote gop at national (or indeed key state !) level?
Failure to raise the debt limit isn’t just Republicans shooting themselves in the foot. It’s them launching our entire nucal ICBM fleet on the global financial market. Copying my explanation from another comment,
The potential global financial meltdown when all market participants need to account for the possibility of the US Federal Government defaulting on any of its financial obligations are beyond imagination. Particularly with the massive US Treasury market being foundational to all global dollar financing. This isn’t just a run-of-the-mill government shutdown when we fail to pass a budget; this is financial nuclear armageddon.
It would be very, very bad. Agreed. But the fact that the outcomes would be extremely undesirable is hardly insurance it won't happen. Maybe enough Republicans will turn out to be quite confident Biden and the Democrats are the ones who'll be blamed. Republicans don't have to be correct about that. Just foolish enough to pull the trigger.
(One hopes Biden would mint a damn quadrillion dollar coin—or take some other kind of robust if unorthodox executive action—if push came to shove. But who knows?)
100% agree. And I do hope that alternative solutions like the platinum coin or challenging the constitutionality of the debt limit would allow us to avoid actual default.
Yet I worry that even the heightened risk of this unimaginable event would cause market participants to start positioning for financial meltdown and thereby trigger that very event. E.g., some investors start selling treasuries, driving down their price, and that triggers further selling such that we end up in a doom loop where the entire Treasury market collapses.
It will happen, there will be a crisis , and in the aftermath the us and the dollar will be in the path to lose their central place. US credibility will never recover. Another huge step in American decline, alas, brought to you by democrats refusing to take the danger seriously and republicans having gone fully to the dark side. Mark my words.
Disagree. Democrats are too concerned about working stiffs to hold the economy hostage for their political advantage. House Democrats thought Trump was a quasi-fascist but passed the CARES Act anyway and then tried to appropriate more money than McConnell would allow. The CARES Act almost saved Trump, and McConnell likely cost Trump the election by pulling back the punch bowl.
>>McConnell likely cost Trump the election by pulling back the punch bowl.<<
My distinct impression at the time was McConnell was pricing in a Biden victory at that point (perhaps wrongly, although obviously Biden did win in the end), and didn't see the merit in juicing the economy further. And you may well be right. It was a pretty close election, and more stimulus might well have been a difference-maker.
McConnell’s motives are hard to unpack. He was also defending his Senate majority and might have kept that even if Trump had lost. The Georgia runoffs didn’t happen til January 5, and getting out stimulus checks right after the November election might have saved his majority. I suspect McConnell was acting out of opposition to massive borrowing and spending rather than political calculation. He definitely understands that Keynesian stimulus helps the incumbent party.
>He definitely understands that Keynesian stimulus helps the incumbent party.<
Oh, I don't doubt that. But the measure in question was July-ish IIRC. And perhaps McConnell thought it was too late to have much impact on November? (Side note: I doubt McConnell reads Krugman, but PK maintains voter perceptions regarding the trajectory of the economy have generally calcified by end of Q2 in an election year).
But you raise you good point about GOP Senate numbers, of course, and yes, all things equal, a fiscal conservative like Mitch McConnell prefers less federal borrowing.
There was also a debate in December 2020 about how big the new round of stimulus should be, and McConnell opted for smaller checks.
I think this is correct. If you look at the recent past, when each party can't agree on a debt ceiling increase, they temporarily suspend limits, usually until after the next election. Or suspend the limit and have an automatic increase when the suspension expires. I think both parties still would like to use this for the usual partisan purposes, but they are more careful now and willing to punt rather than play hardball.
And if Democrats lose both the House and Senate, I think we'll see a lot of them come out of the woodwork to oppose a debt ceiling increase unless they can get something they want in such a "must pass" bill.
Democrats should, but the probably won't. For starters, I doubt Manchin and Sinema would sign on, as it would hurt their bipartisan image.
There are two numbers involved here: Tax receipts, and Constitutionally authorized spending.
The notion that we need to authorize a third number (the projected difference between the two at a certain point in time) is stupid. It serves no useful purpose at all. Either increase tax receipts or don't authorize the spending, dammit.
>>a lot of countries have some sort of debt ceiling (some constitutional!), but the American one is the only one that's bad per the media.<<
Really? I've read a number of sources claim it's only the USA and Denmark. I'll defer to your claim. But in any event we seem to be the only rich country where not paying our debtors is used as blackmail.
But that's just it, the debt brake is required to be considered when enacting spending and taxation proposals, not to post facto authorize already agreed-upon spending and taxation.
Right. Germany's law seems like PAYGO or sequestration rather than a hard ceiling that can rattle financial markets.
The Senate elections this time around could impact the January 2025 electoral vote count. If Democrats lose Senate seats now they will that much more unlikely to win a Senate majority in 2024.
Yeah. It's all about the Senate. And House margins matter, too. If Democrats go into 2024 with 203 House members, they'll obviously be in a weaker position than if they go into that election with 216.
What those polls tell me is that the GOP is still able to get the Democrats stuck on the message that they are soft on crime and soft on the border, while Republicans still get to ride on the perception that they are the party of "energy abundance", and I scare quote that because I have high confidence that that's code for the very narrow slice of energy that means "lower gas prices", and not the holistic picture of energy abundance that Matt has laid out in the past. And despite Matt's best efforts, cuts in entitlement programs don't make the list. It tells me that Democrats are still struggling in the messaging department.
> I don’t know what will happen exactly, but the [debt] crisis or standoff will be at least somewhat economically damaging, and it won’t end with cuts-only entitlement reform.
We can and should avoid this showdown by increasing the debt limit through reconciliation in the lame duck session. I still don’t understand our Democratic leadership’s aversion to increasing the limit along partisan lines.
The potential global financial meltdown when all market participants need to account for the possibility of the US Federal Government defaulting on any of its financial obligations are beyond imagination. Particularly with the massive US Treasury market being foundational to all global dollar financing. This isn’t just a run-of-the-mill government shutdown when we fail to pass a budget; this is financial nuclear armageddon.
If the concern is Republicans campaigning in 2024 on something like “Democrats increased the debt limit to 35T!” then we should increase the limit to something absurd like a googol dollars (1 followed by 100 zeros). Make it clear that this is a ridiculous, likely unconstitutional, artificial constraint that serves no purpose. With such an esoteric and generally incomprehensible number most voters won’t even be able to apprehend this as any sort of concrete concern.
My guess is that our leadership believes that Republicans will always back down and we can avoid any potential partisan attack. Yet we can neutralize the potential for attacks and eliminate the tail risk of Republicans taking this game of chicken all the way to global financial annihilation.
>>I still don’t understand our Democratic leadership’s aversion to increasing the limit along partisan lines.<<
Probably most Democrats do but a few don't (and they don't have a vote to spare in the Senate)? That's just a guess. Joe Manchin, for instance, is facing a brutal fight in 2024 if he decides to run, and probably needs everything to break perfectly for him. So I wouldn't be surprised if that's one vote (Sinema's is another) that might be hard to get.
The lame duck session is after the election.
And we should’ve done this in early 2021 and already eliminated the entire issue. Instead, we had something of a showdown that ended in McConnell letting us pass a small increase along partisan lines anyways.
I can agree that the previous showdowns have worked in the Democrats favor so far. Because, yes, there are always enough reasonable Republicans that get on board to avoid the financial armageddon.
But what if those same reasonable Republicans are proposing a bill that raises the limit while also cutting social security? They can use the same argument that something has to be done in an attempt to force Democrats to accept that horrible deal. Meanwhile we Democrats have a clean bill that just raises the debt limit that we feel has to pass.
Who backs down in that hypothetical situation?
Just cause they’ve caved before doesn’t mean we should count on that being a foregone conclusion. They might be able to structure their social spending cuts package in a way polls well among Republicans, particularly if they market it as a solution to inflation. And if they do well in the midterms then they could believe that they have a mandate to push through their legislation through whatever means necessary.
There’s just some tail risk that we end up in a situation where Republicans believe that they have the leverage and the legitimacy to take the game of chicken to the brink. And we don’t even need to hit the debt limit before market participants start positioning for financial meltdown and thereby trigger that very event.
Yes, I agree completely.
And this is a distracting tail risk that we keep running into and thereby consume time and energy on some Republican BS sabotage tactic. We could unilaterally eliminate this permanently to remove both the tale risk and obstruction.
I think this piece does a really fantastic job laying out the complete lack of a constructive GOP policy agenda. I do think you handwave the “sweeping reconciliation bill” point. It seems trivially obvious that if Dems won, BBB and HR1 would go immediately onto the congressional agenda. I don’t see how they would pass, but what indication has been given that Ds moved on from those ideas?
They would?
I am pretty confident, at this point, that they would absolutely not consider the BBB framework again, as none of the moderates think it warranted.
We might get permitting reform, and probably some kind of stab at high-skilled immigration reform to backstop CHIPS, and further tinkering with Medicare in a deficit reduction reconciliation package.
The House progressive caucus just released a letter calling for Biden to enter peace negotiations with Russia over Ukraine. That wing of the party is not thinking strategically right now. Like Ray wrote, if Dems somehow kept their majorities the progressive caucus would take it as a mandate to enact their favored policies.
Um... and that would end precisely how the letter ended? Quickly, ignominiously, and with every "supporter" frantically backpedaling away from it within literal *hours*.
Jayapal has Iraq brain-worms and someone should primary her ass in 2024, but...
There is a *zero percent chance* that Biden or the Senate would OK major domestic spending bills as opposed to using reconciliation to pursue deficit reduction and shore up Medicare/Obamacare, and attempting reforms on other fronts on a bipartisan basis.
Given that in the midst of significant inflationary pressures, Biden used executive action to forgive 500+ billion in student debt (and was called out for not doing more!), you'll forgive me for not accepting that Democrats will demonstrate restraint should they continue to hold a trifecta.
Elected Democrats see that inflation is a political liability. They don’t seem primed to pass inflationary legislation. I doubt that narrowly maintaining their majorities against the insurrectionist party would change that. If a democrats somehow hold on, the narrative will be “toxic Trumpist candidates and election deniers caused huge GOP underperformance.”
There's something conspicuously absent from this analysis of what will or won't happen if GOP takes both houses of Congress. What happens with Ukraine funding? McCarthey has already signaled that he's open to cutting Ukraine funding if he's Speaker.
Now this could just be postering and a negotiating tactic. It seems right now there are plenty of votes to keeping funding for Ukraine going. But I would NOT count on that continuing on the GOP side. There's the obvious, who on the GOP side is getting Russia money. I know, I know, it's a rabbit hole that can lead to not so helpful places. But considering what we know about the NRA, considering how many GOP officials spent July 4th in Moscow in 2017*, considering previous comments made by Paul Ryan, I feel pretty confident that the number of GOP officials who have some sort of financial connections to Russia is more than zero.
But even beyond that, even if GOP officials are not at all connected financially to Russia, they are very interested in making sure they win re-election in 2024. And given the dynamics of gerrymandering, the biggest danger to re-election is losing a primary. And GOP primary voters seem to be very alarmingly pro-Putin. Purely from saving your own political hide aspect, wouldn't be shocked if some of the pro giving Ukraine aid start to flip. What happens if Tucker Carlson does a weeklong special program live from Moscow (given his statements about Putin and given that he already did this in Hungary, a real possibility btw) and GOP House members started getting feedback from the large contingent of GOP primary voters who are Tucker fans? And then there are the GOP House members who are likely just flat-out Pro-Putin out of personal preference.
Beyond the actual dynamics of the war itself, there's the secondary effects. Voters say the number one issue is inflation. You know what's a huge driver or at least impact on inflation? The war in Ukraine. It seems extremely clear that Putin is hoping a GOP controlled Congress can do the work his army clearly is not capable of doing. Aid to Ukraine is likely going to be a huge impact on Putin's next move which will obviously impact the trajectory of energy markets.
It's just odd to me that Matt would leave out a pretty big issue where who controls the House and/or Senate could have a huge impact.
* I'm aware that foreign policy is almost always way down on the list of voter concerns in any election barring a situation where there are significant numbers of American troops involved (and most importantly dying) in a "hot" war. But I feel extremely confident that the typical median voter is pretty anti-Putin at this point (as opposed to GOP base). And I also feel pretty confident that the typical median voter is not aware that large swathes of the GOP, including Ron Johnson, spent July 4th, 2017 in Moscow. If Mandela Barnes (or other Dem candidates) hasn't had any ads or brought up this fact about Johnson or the other GOPers who went to Moscow, that is a real failure to me.
"Some 30% of respondents overall said in the new survey they believe the administration is doing too much to help Ukraine, up from 6% in a March Journal poll. The change was driven by a big shift among GOP voters: 48% of Republicans now say the U.S. is doing too much, up from 6% in the previous survey."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/republican-opposition-to-helping-ukraine-grows-wsj-poll-finds-11667467802
It's super depressing.
Your "cop-friendly" and "cop-skeptical" paragraphs say the same thing, with the difference of an "un-":
"The rise in crime is caused by police willfully shirking their duty to protect the public, because they don't like being criticized. The criticisms to which they object are:
fair (cop-skeptical version)
unfair (cop-friendly version)."
When even your attempt to be friendly leaves the police willfully shirking their duty because they don't like being criticized, then I'd say you're either bad at supporting cops, or the cops' behavior is insupportable.
When "criticism" almost always leads to you getting benched, usually fired, and often having your house picketed and your family harassed, you too would start to reconsider the merits of an $80k a year job in an expensive metro.
I have *no doubt* at all that there are quite a few cops who are throwing a bitchfit at the mere prospect of accountability.
But I also think it perfectly rational for the majority of the "I want to do the job well, but it's just a job" demographic to look at the current situation and pull back from doing anything hard or potentially controversial.
In this situation we've only got the people who are genuinely in their jobs to selflessly support others who are still willing to step up, and that's no way for any "industry" to continue functioning.
I'd say that when you criticize an entire profession, particularly one that you've never so much as tried first-hand for 5 minutes and could / would never do, you ought to have a little bit of humility, lest you sound like you have no idea what you're talking about.
https://grahamfactor.substack.com/p/how-depolicing-happens
"If you increase the cost of something you get less of it (all else equal)."
Correct. That's why people who care about good policing want to make bad policing more costly to the bad police, so that we will get less of it.
Two things. I'm a moderate who doesn't generally vote for Democrats, but I'll be voting for Maggie Hassan and Chris Pappas this year for precisely the reasons that Matt outlines. I want an opposition party who is principled and if it takes losing a few elections to get there, I think that's the price to pay. Second, I know it would be politically bad for Biden to say something like: "Whether there are more or fewer police in Detroit, San Francisco, or San Antonio is not something that should be decided by the federal government, but by the citizens of those cities - if you have strong opinions on how to reform policing in your city vote for a mayor and city council who agree with you on those issues", but it would really be a breath of fresh air.
I agree completely with the narrow points you've been making on crime, but watching you and others dance around the real issue has convinced me that the Democratic party simply isn't ready to fix anything. I cast my first ever vote for a Republican as a result.
The problem is that a powerful minority of Democratic officials are de facto anarchists. Republicans won't actually fix anything on crime but certain Democrats will absolutely work to make it worse. The example that bothers me most personally is how here in Seattle the local county kept the jails on Covid standards until a couple of months ago, well after schools were fully reopened. The "surprise side effect" is that the jail simply couldn't accept as many new prisoners and so quite a few convicted criminals never did any time. Given that the county executive has discussed how he would like to close the jail in five years this doesn't seem accidental!
I understand that you aren't going to argue too strongly against Democrats right before an election but I think you're severely underestimating just how toxic this dynamic is. Just to take one example, it's _clearly_ why the attack on Paul Pelosi was a below the fold article and why it's difficult for Democrats to argue for such common sense measures as giving Nancy a security detail. Imagine the attack ads if she does get one: "There are several thousand mentally ill drug addicts roaming the streets of San Francisco. Democrats believe Nancy Pelosi deserves to be protected from them while the rest of the city has to fend for themselves".
The anarchists have to be purged from the party. There's no other path forward.
This article makes no mention of Biden's veto. The republicans will not pass anything this term because it can't be put into law past democratic president. The only question on the ballot is do you approve of the Democrats performance and future agenda.
It actually comments on this in some detail. He says the veto will protect from an abortion ban and points to problems with confirmations and the debt ceiling as the big issues with an R senate.
I feel many of the same frustrations as Matt wrt to the police activity discussion. ‘Back the blue’ does sometimes seem to be suggesting that cops just can’t be criticized at all. But in specific people are pointing to a variety of what they say are politically motivated criminal charges leveled at POs and it’s unfair to ignore this. There is a real question about how many weak cases should be pursued following viral video, and what effect that has on cops more broadly.
The challenge is that in many places police and police unions, with some help from the courts, have succeeded in eliminating any normal channels of accountability for themselves. This results in the only plausible avenue being criminal prosecution which of course become highly politicized and therefore fraught for the local prosecutor's office.
the channel is local political control and reform. The union doesn’t just create these conditions they bargain with elected officials. Usually democratic elected officials.
As a concrete example, in June 2020, an Atlanta police officer was fired and charged with murder after fatally shooting an assaliant. The shooting happened when attempting to arrest the individual, who stole the officer’s taser gun and fired it at officers. It was a highly contentious incident at the time.
Now all charges have been dropped and the officer reinstated in Aug 2022 with the explanation, [1]
> The prosecutors said that these actions gave the other officer, Garrett Rolfe, justification to use deadly force. Mr. Rolfe fired three shots at Mr. Brooks, hitting him twice, in the back and buttocks.
>
> “It is my conclusion that the use of deadly force was objectively reasonable and that they did not act with criminal intent,” Mr. Porter said.
As an Atlanta resident, I’ve heard a lot about this killing morale among officers and making them highly risk averse in policing. There were many complaints about the charges being politically motivated due to the heightened concerns over police brutality. And it certainly hurt that the popular police chief had to resign over the incident.
I could imagine some voters still angry about incidents like this and somehow thinking that electing Republicans at the national level will magically address the issue.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/us/rayshard-brooks-officers-no-charges.html
There was a similar incident in Philadelphia in (I think) late 2020, and then that knife attack in Ohio, and others that are slipping my mind right now.
Christ knows *I* am not going to go become a cop with all this going on.
Are the police unions attempting to cover for their worst members, and is there a culture of opacity surrounding even fairly serious abuses? You bet your ass.
Is the current tack of the reformists fixing it? Fuck no.
Yes this is a big one people talk about a lot. Is electing Hershel Walker going to help with it? Maybe very slightly. politics does operate by vibe on some levels, which is why this prosecution got launched in the first place.
"Law and Order has to be the strongest for those who impose the law and order."
But it's not about Law & Order. The big arguments aren't on whether police should accept bribes or deal drugs or shoot their ex-girlfriends.
The big arguments are about "were the police right to feel threatened and resort to force in XYZ incidents"? Were they right to seek a no-knock warrant in ABC case? If they pulled over a disproportionate amount of black/asian/muslim/whatever people were they acting on legitimate suspicions or were they profiling in an illegitimate way?
Those aren't "law and order" questions. Those are questions both for people legitimately overseeing the profession and for twitter / media dilettantes second-guessing every decision that officers make. The former is OK, but the latter is absolutely damaging to all of our interests.
That’s fine, I think you’re wrong that the dust would ever settle from your policy of launching tons of doomed pretexual prosecutions. But it’s a theory, and it makes note of what Matt’s interlocutors are actually saying. If Matt agrees, he should write that.
I'm for stronger much of what you advocate, but also think your going to far. Few people enjoy working in an environment where they are constantly second guessed - if you escalate the situation to where people can be held criminally liable for their actions, they will be incredibly resistant to taking any chances at all.
Let me provide comparison - there are many doctors and hospitals now that are facing vague laws around abortion and that is influencing their decisions because they fear they could be prosecuted if they make the wrong decision. They absolutely hate it and raise the issue a great deal. We don't want to apply the same situation to police because as you can see in situations like Ulvade, they will often refuse to put themselves at risk *at a departmental level.*
"But that's why I'm not a cop - I'm not noble enough to make a choice I'd feel morally compelled to make."
I fundamentally believe that we should not require others to make sacrifices we are not willing to make. Nor do I think its wise to assume that there is some cohort of people who are just more "noble." That way leads to aristocracy and valuing people based on their "nobility."
Instead we should focus on creating institutions and careers where average people can be expected to succeed by adhering to a reasonable standard. Not that there won't be failures, but they will be the exception not the norm. And that those failures will be judged reasonably so that the egregious violations like George Floyd are punished severely, but that doesn't lead to a wide spread condemnation of normal police actions.
It might be much more efficient to go back to the crazy status quo of 2015 of so, when crime was really low (also due to the professionalization of the police career and data analysis), police abuses were low and cops didn't feel second guessed and hung-out-to-dry by the left, and pay was reasonable but not way-too-high.
Or, we can try your crazy moonshot towards a utopia some decades from now.
Right well I’m more in a place where I doubt we will ever get ‘the Justice we all deserve’ on this earth and would like to look for some practical solutions for bringing down the crime rate.
A party that managed to thread the needle on finding all the ideas voters like would clean up:
- Massive >>unashamed<< enforcement of the Mexican border. Asylum greatly restricted.
- Don't do anything doctrinaire with healthcare. Anyone promising Medicaid for all or privatising something or other can fuck off.
- More cops. No talk of defunding them, and anyone that even glances at that policy is banished from the party.
- Abortion is legal but with restrictions like in European countries.
- Full steam ahead on oil. Climate change is real, but right now restricting oil production just means importing more.
- Anyone with weird ideas to do with transsexualism, racial demagoguery of left or right wing types, or idiotic conspiracy theories never sees power.
This would absolutely not clean up American elections
What do "massive unashamed enforcement of the Mexican border" and "more cops" look like to you?
Mandatory use of and strict enforcement of eVerify, the ability to apply for asylum in home countries that precludes the ability to apply for asylum on US soil, many more border patrol agents, dogs, and technology to catch drug and human smugglers, and large walls built in border cities.
Many more beat cops on the streets, actual prosecution of quality of life crimes and illegal gun possession crimes, and a gun background check system with much fewer holes.
I think I misread what the intent of what the top level comment is in this subthread, so I'm going to retract my question, but not delete it so that your comment remains explicable.
I broadly agree with your list except your point about Medicaid: Democrats have to be careful about how they structure and sell (to the public) safety net enhancements, of course, but voters like healthcare deliverables.
feel like commentators here (and not MY!) forget that like 90% of the reason dems will lose on tuesday is because inflation has been double digits for the last year and outpaced wage growth + it’s a midterm under a dem president.
if you told someone in 2000 who into a coma and just woke up to guess what the midterm results would be, they’d probably guess right.