A Mostly Peaceful Transition of Power
President Donald J. Trump walks across the South Lawn of the White House Friday, Oct. 11, 2019, and boards Marine One to begin his trip to Louisiana. 11 October 2019 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead [Public Domain]
For four years, the RESIST! folks have longed for Trump to be driven from the White House, preferably in handcuffs, or — depending on the variety of daydreaming you are doing — forced out at gunpoint by the military. Since the election has gone sideways, the MAGA Militia folks have harbored (and by harbored we mean post all over their social media) fantasies of a red hatted Trump Army manning the barricades around the White House to protect their president from the deep state globalists who tried to cheat him out of his rightful place as God Emperor of the United States of Trump. A whole bunch of folks in the commentariat class are wringing their hands and writing their comments about how we aren’t going to get the traditional peaceful transition of power. Media seeing the coming end to the sugar high of having the outlandish Trump to cover 24/7 would have no objection getting a few more ratings squeezes out of the outgoing 45th president.
They will all be disappointed. History tells us exactly what President Trump will do from here on out. And it doesn’t end in a bang.
For his part, President Trump has spent most of his time since election night maintaining a low public profile while keeping his highly vocal and divisive social media presence cranked to 11. That was, until Sunday when the president’s Twitter account went silent for almost a full day before dropping this nugget Tuesday evening:
…fight, and I believe we will prevail! Nevertheless, in the best interest of our Country, I am recommending that Emily and her team do what needs to be done with regard to initial protocols, and have told my team to do the same.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 23, 2020
The same Emily Murphy who, earlier on Tuesday, had blown off her scheduled appearance before a house committee as she continued to delay the formal transition of power process to President-elect Biden. Which was a lovely little tempest in a tea cup; Murphy should either do her job or resign, not this silly song and dance at the behest of the president, and now she’s made enemies of congress and a laughing stock of herself to boot. The tweet is pure Trump: graciously granting someone to do what they are supposed to be doing anyway, trying to take credit for the mundane workings of government, not conceding a thing while totally conceding that very thing to those who know how to speak Donald, never give up, never surrender…except when you are and making sure it doesn’t look like it.
This is stage three of the Four Stages of Trump Decision making.
Stage one is do something outrageous to get a reaction. Stage Two is double down on stage one to get even more of a reaction. Stage three is, while everyone is still reacting to stages one & two, start modulating to whatever course of action you are actually going to do. Stage four, wind up at a relatively conventional position without acknowledging steps one through three ever happened in the first place and declare a great victory.
We’ve seen this over and over again. For years. This is not a surprise to anyone. This is how it was always going to go down, because this is how Donald J. Trump does just about everything. Let’s call it Bluff Bluff, Give.
Obama birth certificate: ‘member that?
In the spring of 2011, as the Republican primary got under way, Trump embraced the birther theory wholesale, wielding his trademark innuendos and falsehoods. Fox News then picked up the crusade, devoting hours of airtime to his insinuations.
“He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there is something on that birth certificate—maybe religion, maybe it says he’s a Muslim; I don’t know,” Trump told Fox News in late March of that year. “I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding,” he told NBC in early April. “I may tie my tax returns into Obama’s birth certificate,” he suggested later that month. Trump rose sharply in the primary polls, but never formally ran, instead endorsing Romney, who gushed, “It means a great deal to me to have the endorsement of Mr. Trump.”
The episode appeared to conclude with the 45th president successfully forcing the 44th to show his papers. On April 27, the White House released Obama’s “long form” birth certificate. This temporarily embarrassed Trump and led to a dip in the number of Americans questioning Obama’s birthplace. At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that year, Obama mocked Trump as he sat and seethed, red-faced, in the audience.
Fox News, foreshadowing its essential symbiosis with the Trump campaign, and later the Trump presidency, framed the reality-show star’s crusade as a great victory. “It legitimizes his candidacy,” Dick Morris told Bill O’Reilly in April 2011. “It empowers Trump,” O’Reilly agreed. Here was a glimpse of the future, in which the reality-show star would make some outrageously false claim, and the whole of conservative media would rush to make that falsehood true through rote repetition.
But Morris was missing the big picture there. It wasn’t just the conservative media hyping up the outlandish claims that kept fuel on the fire, but the overreaction of Trump’s opponents to everything he did that gave him cover to operate in the very chaos he likes to thrive in. Rhetorical escalation from condemning the president’s many bad policies and often worst behavior into declaring every single thing he did to be the imminent end of the Republic was just as useful to Trump as the parroting supporters were. Sucking almost all the oxygen out of the media room meant everything continued to revolve around Trump.
So, the pattern that began with the Bluff Bluff, Give of the Obama birth certificate — and the subsequent, in his face humiliation that Trump used as fuel for his own rise to the White House, is well established. From things like troops in Syria, to the hiring/firing of various officials, to the wall, to more recently demanding ICE kick out all foreign students that weren’t on online only before relenting, Bluff Bluff, Give is the default Trump setting. The posture is “he fights” but really it is “he picks his spots,” and those spots usually including taking the convenient exit from the scuffle while folks aren’t paying attention and moving on to the next thing.
Which brings us to the peaceful transition of power. Just for fun, you can watch for folks who will attribute a George Washington quote to that phrase, but it’s a fake — though that’s probably fitting in 2020 politics. Let’s go to a more recent example though: Ronald Reagan during his excellent Ken Khachigian -penned first inaugural address:
To a few of us here today this is a solemn and most momentous occasion, and yet in the history of our nation it is a commonplace occurrence. The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place, as it has for almost two centuries, and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-four-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.
Well, this transition of power isn’t going to be normal, but what has been normal this year? Or the last four, for that matter? The President’s current ostentatious course of action means many things, almost all of them condemnable to one degree or another, but they are the bluffs before the inevitable give. There will be no coup. There will be no troops enforcing the end of one administration and the start of the other. Along with his tweet about the GSA, there will be other statements and tweets where the left hand declares victory while the right hand does the bare minimum that is required. It will be chaotic in comparison because the chronically under-staffed and poorly administrated Trump years have been exactly that, and aren’t going to magically become competent in the protocols and machinations of government. The rhetoric to keep the online faithful primed to give money and attention will continue while the actions will be closer to the norm. The former is all bluff, the latter is the give.
The left hand of Trump will keep up with the unsavory ridiculousness of multiple Randy Quaid tweets — perhaps the lowest point in presidential interpersonal communication since then-President George H. W. Bush fainted after vomiting in then-Japanese Prime Minster Miyazawa’s lap — but unbecoming as that is, it’s just noise as the machinations of government and the right hand of Trump begrudgingly start packing boxes.
On January 20th, probably without the participation of Donald John Trump, Joe Biden will become President of the United States in whatever ceremony Covid allows to take place. Donald Trump will tweet about victory, crow about fairness, and spend the rest of his life making money off both. But he will do so as a private citizen. No bluff in the world is going to change that. More importantly, Donald Trump isn’t going to change. We have a few more weeks of bluffing, of driving the media and his opponents into a frenzy while stoking his own followers.
But Donald Trump, as he signaled with that tweet, knows the game’s up. He gives.
I honestly think one of the big reasons Mitch tolerated, even encouraged, Trump is because Trump is the Misdirection to end all Misdirection’s. Trump is such a show that Mitch doesn’t have to be a magician with dope slight of hand skills, he can flat out do whatever the hell he wants and Trump was certain the make sure the media would forget all about whatever Mitch had done before the next Monday rolled around.Report
Agreed. HIs holding open federal judgeships under Obama to complete the remake of the courts, his 2017 deficit busting tax cut, his sitting on something like 500 bills dealing with the nation’s business – including two COVID relief packages – all subsumed by the toddler’s antic at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Well played Moscow Mitch.Report
We’ve had four years of this.
Let me repeat myself; Ignore everything he says (especially on Twitter). Look at what he’s doing before you decide that there’s a problem.
There were no troops being mobilized, a “coup” was never in the cards, the number of judges ignored and/or political enemies arrested holds steady at zero.
Trump running his mouth on twitter isn’t a threat to democracy, and it never was.Report
He has lawyers trying to get ballots thrown out and for R leg’s to elect Trump. This is exactly what they have said and are saying still. They want the courts to decide the election. Has any of this been likely to succeed: no. But it isnt’ just him tweeting. It’s his lawyers, incompetent buffoons just like their boss they may be. They didn’t lose something like 35 court challenges just on his shit tweeting. They tried to overturn an election he decisively lost. Good thing it’s failed.Report
The oddest, most interesting assumption to most of their lawsuits seems to be a firm, dedicated legal belief that the ballots are fatally flawed just for the Presidential race, but no other.
They insist the Presidential ballots be thrown out, discarded, electors chosen by the Legislature — but seemingly think every other race on the ballot is just fine.
The PA dismissal they’re appealing mentioned it as yet another fatal flaw, and I’ve seen the defendants mention it in their briefs, but it doesn’t really get the public coverage it should.
How can you, with a straight face, claim only one race on a ballot containing dozens is fatally flawed and must be discarded? Not the entire ballot, just that one race.
As the Judge in PA noted, the Courts can’t simply hold the election to have been Constitutional and unconstitutional at the same time.
You even see it on random people screaming on Twitter. Revote the Presidential election. But not the House races, or the Senate races, or the state and local races. Just that ONE.
Just an article of faith that the fatal, unconstitutional flaw exists for a sole line on the ballot, and no other part. It’s not like they’re alleging the ballots didn’t have Trump’s name.
That assumption alone should kill any lawsuit as unserious.Report
Gore did something very similar, just with less crassness and more high sounding arguments that had nothing to do with what he was actually trying to do.Report
Under the Neustadt conception of Presidential power, a sizeable portion of what POTUS does is what he says. On that basis, I have difficulty with the popular “ignore what he says, look at what he does” rationale. In particular, what he says impacts what a lot of people, principally with the Republican party, do.
Two things can be true simultaneously, what Trump is doing is an attempt to subvert normal American democracy and an actual coup isn’t likely to be attempted, let alone succeed.
But this mostly lends itself to Trump is essentially America’s Berlusconi thesis.Report
That’s why I like to focus on what he does and not what he says he’ll do.
He’s a Troll. He says stuff to get people spun up. His big political skill is he attracts Nazi accusations which make his opponents look insane to anyone who checks to see what is happening.Report
The 8chan precedent suggests trolling like a Nazi encourages plenty of people to act like Nazis. The Trump phenomena appears to have followed the same process.
I’m not disagree with all of your point, but the people who get concerned about his rhetoric aren’t wrong either. its a problem, if not an apocalyptic one.Report
As one of those people, the way I would put it is that a liberal democracy only exists when a large enough majority of people believe it should exist. And this can only exist in an environment of mutual trust.
Rhetoric which attacks elections is itself a danger to democracy.Report
Three cheers for the strength of American norms and institutions! And thank the Gods for Trump’s personality flaws!
The alarmists have been right about one thing. I agree with them that Trump does not value democracy, he does not value the Constitution or the law. He would dispense with those things if he could so long as he could keep power.
He’s made gestures at the three ways one might conceivably get the Constitution set aside, suspended, overruled, or just plain ignored: military takeover, external emergency, or judicial finesse.
Re: the military.
It would be quite a thing to cultivate a single friendship with a high-ranking member of the military so deep that the military person would value their relationship with the politician more than they value their loyalty to their service branch and the Constitution to which they’ve repeatedly sworn allegiance. To get enough such relationships in place as to make an attempt to gain the military’s allegiance when the mask comes off and the Constitution is proclaimed suspended would be noticed.
The way Trump’s relationship with Michael Flynn was noticed. And questioned. And examined. And subjected to legal investigation and scrutiny. And resulting in Flynn’s disgrace. Michael Flynn might have served as Trump’s military second, I suppose, but there weren’t enough of him in the active military to actually move the institution.
Trump doesn’t understand what it is to build relationship-based loyalty anyway. He does deals, not relationships. He purchases loyalty in transactions. Michael Cohen’s story shows us why that’s not a sustainable model of obtaining the massive amount of loyalty needed to just proclaim himself king or President for life or whatever he would have come up with in his inchoate extraconstitutional fantasies.
Re: external threats
History shows that leaders trying to set aside Constitutional governments typically not only cultivated strong relationships within the military and other critical institutions, but also rallied marginal support to higher levels right before the coup by generating fear of some powerful-seeming enemy.
I suppose Trump could have sought an enemy bigger-seeming than himself and tried to polarize things for a transaction big enough that he might have pulled it off. But the Chinese/Iranians/North Koreans/Russians wouldn’t go to war with us and make a scary war. They had their own issues to deal with, each of them, and had no good enough reason to take on that kind of risk.
I also suppose Trump tried to find internal enemies sufficiently powerful-looking and scary that people would have gone along with him subverting the Constitution to bid for their safety. But Trump chose to disregard the once-in-a-century opportunity to use the pandemic as such an enemy, because he saw the pandemic as a threat to his legitimate bid to hang on to power. COVID threatened the economy and he thought the way to keep the economy on his side was to convince people to ignore COVID. Having done that, COVID was no longer available as an enemy of sufficient power to set the Constitution aside.
So his last real attempt to rally the merely politically-loyal to transcend and support something extraconstitutional was the BLM protests of this spring and summer. But I think most Americans understood that, while perhaps scary and perhaps believing that the protesters were more violent than they were, these were not enemies worth lighting the Constitution on fire for.
Re: judicial finesse
So, finally, rather than trying to subvert the Constitution outright, he might render democracy itself meaningless, either by cheating at the ballot box or getting judges to undo the results of adverse democracy, hang on to power that way. Fortunately, it looks like we learned a few lessons from 2000; our voting laws and techniques are different now, and COVID forced some other last-minute changes on him that he never really understood and in some cases (like urging his own supporters to not vote by mail) he actively subverted. And then he chose the wrong people to try and seek judicial finesse of the election.
Could it have worked? We’ll never know, because the people who went into courts on his behalf presented such awful factual and legal theories, and presented them so ineptly, that they’ll become a “how not to practice” manual for the next generation of lawyers. Some of his own appointees threw out his legal challenges. Was that because they needed to demonstrate their own political independence, as the judiciary has an institutional incentive to do? Or was it because they just weren’t given enough cover to have actually undertaken an attempt at judicially reversing the election? Or was it because the results of the election were too much for a single judge or group of judges to actually make a difference? All of the above, maybe, and more.
I write all this like Trump’s failure was inevitable. It wasn’t. A smarter man, one better at cultivating deeper loyalties in relationships and able to do so quickly, one better able to engineer external threats and pull mass-media political levers, maybe could have done it. It’s happened in democracies before. It will happen again, though hopefully not here.
It may be that the byproducts of Trump’s narcissistic personality created the very roadblocks that prevented him from doing this awful and dangerous thing that I’m fully convinced he would have done if he could. Karma is grandly ironic that way, as the Greek dramatists knew.
Make no mistake, our norms and institutions have taken a beating at his hands. But they aren’t dead yet and can be rehabilitated. We’ve gotten a good look at just how many of us were quite willing to buy into a cult of personality around so awful a person as Donald Trump. We should be chilled at the number of Americans who have an appetite for having a king (perhaps under a different name). And we should be chilled to be shown the degree to which our institutions were always fragile and dependent upon the normative decisions of a surprisingly small group of people.
And no, this particular drama won’t be all the way done until January 20, 2021, although at this point, Birnam Wood is advancing upon Dunsinane Hill.Report
Sounds like Trump had one relationship with a former general, studiously avoided opportunities to amass power based on internal threats, and brought court cases through the appropriate legal channels.Report
Filing literally dozens of suits, where literally all but one or two are dismissed immediately is appropriate behavior and should be normalized.Report
Good thing he’s lazy, stupid, and ignorant. The next one might not be.Report
Quick! Better replay Obama Part II: BUT LOUDER!Report
No clue what you’re trying to say.Report
That Obama, among other things, led to Trump.
And now we swung back to Biden. Oooh, look at his cabinet!
Maybe it’ll be 2009-2016 all over again.Report
Post hos, ergo propter hoc.Report
Yeah, sometimes things happen in a total vacuum.
We really dodged a bullet with Trump being lazy, stupid, and ignorant.Report
What would you finger as the Obama decisions that led to Trump? Or was it more a factor of simply who Obama was?Report
If I had to finger one thing? The “Too Big To Fail” mistake that didn’t result in people going to jail following the economic crisis.
That was pretty much when it was cemented that the Democrats were no threat to the banks nor big business.Report
Mmmhmm.. that is an interesting point. So he should have thrown a bunch of bankers or something in jail. Or gone even harder on the financial industry. It’s funny considering how horribly hard done by they felt that Dodd-Frank was on em. I’d be inclined to agree with you, though, that Obama was really high minded and really didn’t connect, or even try to connect, with populists.Report
I asked myself “what’s the most populist place that talked about this?” and I came to the conclusion that it was NPR’s Market Place.
Here’s what they had to say about it.Report
I’ve always liked this youtube video that summarizes what happened in ’08 pretty evenly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9YLta5Tr2A
The difficulty, of course, is no one really pulled an Enron. There wasn’t exactly fraud. Just everyone, from the investors to the bankers down to the borrowers taking on a bunch of risk and thinking they’d be fine because housing prices always rose.
But that causes one a lot of trouble because taking on a lot of risk isn’t criminal and the courts are oddly particular about only throwing bankers, or anyone, into jail when they do something illegal.Report
Going to jail wasn’t needed or desirable since they didn’t commit crimes.
However if we’re going to be bailing these guys out for burning down their own businesses, then we should be firing the top two levels of management, clawing back bonuses, and getting rid of golden parachutes.
Bailing out the banks was needed, bailing out the bankers not so much.Report
I’m on board with that entirely! Of course I also was alive in ’09, ’10, ’11 and remember how what Obama did was reviled as monstrous government statism and overweening cruelty to Americas productive elite. The Tea Party, for instance, was launched by a rant by a banker absolutely beside himself over Dodd Frank and the HARP program that the Obama admin launched to try and help distressed homeowners refinance.
But, of course, we know now that 99% of the libertarians of the time weren’t actually libertarians; they were just embarrassed Republicans who didn’t want to wear that label in the shadow of Bush W.Report
And by clawing back bonuses, you mean the government changing the terms of a private contract?
I remember every conservative and libertarian in America telling me how evil and illegal that would be.Report
If we’re going to leave the private contracts be then we should stand back and let the banks burn. THAT is the libertarian argument, and there’s something to that.
Bailing them out required us to pass laws. Since we’re already doing that, it would be trivial to say any bank which takes advantage of the government’s wallet and lets themselves be bailed out has the bonuses they’ve given out be null and void.Report
I agree. More than that. I was screaming for it at the time. But Very Serious People said Very Serious Things about the sanctity of contracts and the need to keep high performers.Report
(Whose need to keep high performers?)Report
Well, you have to understand, if those executives can’t keep their bonuses, and golden parachutes, and jobs, then they can’t contribute to certain politicians re-election campaigns…Report
Sounds like Priests talking about why we need god.
We seriously need rules for what to do when this happens in the future. The banks will blow themselves up again, it’s their nature. We’ll need to bail them out again because if we don’t there will be vast economic damage.
We won’t jail them because it won’t be illegal. If we’re going to bail them out then the idiots in charge need to lose their shirts so they have skin in the game.Report
Just to be clear, these people you are talking about, the ones in charge who you want to force to lose their shirts…Are these the same guys who picked up the phone and ordered the United States Senate to give them a massive tax cut, and the Senators meekly obeyed?
These guys? Are going to…be forced to lose their shirts?
By whom, exactly?Report
If you pass laws saying this now, they’ll each KNOW that it will never apply to them (because they’ll never need bailing out), and will only cripple their competitors and/or keep them in line.Report
He has the desire to be a tyrant, but not the work ethic.Report
My fear about the military was never that Trump would use it to take over. Well, I shouldn’t say “never,” because I sometimes feared that.
But my main fear, and in my opinion a less implausible fear was that by refusing to concede, he would try to stay in power and some sort of crisis would develop, maybe involving MAGA militia types (for example) in various parts of the country. At that point, the military would somehow be forced to intervene to install Biden. The military would do so as part of its oath to the constitution and the law, but the precedent for the military as a power broker would have been established.
I realize that there are several steps from here to there, but that was, I think, a not wholly unreasonable fear. A mostly unreasonable fear, but not wholly one.
Thankfully, it appears that I was wrong.Report
I am as happy as anyone that Trump has been defeated, and repeatedly failed to destroy American democracy due to his staggering stupidity and epic laziness.
However…the force that brought him to power is still there, just a few narrow percentage points away from victory. And it still controls the majority of our states. And is within striking distance of controlling both houses of Congress.
And even the bumbling and comic ineptness isn’t much comfort. History shows us that most authoritarian governments are in fact comprised of bumbling idiots and most democracy-ending power grabs are very much like what we’ve seen, a series of shambolic misadventures.
This is just a chapter in a very long series.Report
And Democrats such as yourself will spend your time and efforts trying to marginalize “Those People” and keep them from being politically active through shame they don’t have, instead of identifying the levers of power they want and removing them.Report
Huh?Report
If Republicans do bad things, it’s the fault of Democrats for not stopping them.
Republicans have no agency.Report
If Democrats do bad things, it’s the fault of Republicans because they probably did it first and wrecked the norm.
Democrats have no agency.
See, it works both ways.Report
What is it about the chief executive office that is so attractive to the rightward authoritarians?
It has a lot of power. If Trump was not lazy and incompetent, he very well could have done serious damage to our form of government.
What is the smarter play, to work to trim back the power of the executive such that a competent fascist can’t do much but make speeches and fume; or hope and pray that you can manage the electorate such that they do not vote in a competent fascist to the office?
Both parties need to work to trim back the executive, but right now, the GOP has shown itself to be untrustworthy in that regard. So has the DNC, but perhaps they could pivot, if the threat of a competent fascist is so concerning.Report
OK, I understand that. The connection, if any, between the stuff before the comma and the stuff after it confused me.Report
Except that even the bare minimum power that a liberal democracy needs to function is far too dangerous to be left in the hands of people who are sociopathic.
The essential prerequisite for a liberal democracy, however structured, is the willingness to abide by the norms and rules, and to be both a loyal opposition when out of power and tolerant partner when in power.
Republicans are neither.
Republicans in the executive branch are dangerous authoritarians as evidenced by Trump.
Republicans in the legislative branch are dangerous authoritarians as evidenced by their refusal to remove a President who committed crimes.
Republicans in the judicial branch are dangerous authoritarians as evidenced by SCOTUS.
Republicans at the federal level are dangerous authoritarians as evidenced by Bill Barr.
Republicans at the state level are dangerous authoritarians as evidenced by the Georgia abortion bill.
Republicans at the municipal level are dangerous authoritarians as evidenced by the sheriffs vowing to ignore mask mandates.
There is no level of power small enough to be entrusted to Republicans.Report
By that logic, there is no level of power small enough to be entrusted to Democrats, who can be just as corrupt and venal as Republicans, just in different ways.
Don’t pretend your chosen party is all goodness and light.
However, that said, your argument fails further upstream, in the assumption that the current level of power vested in the executive, or even in the legislature is the absolute necessary minimum.
I contend that you are very, very wrong, and we could very much scale back the amount of power those branches of government have, at every level, and still have a well functioning society. But the first step is deciding that it needs to happen, and doing the hard work of figuring what needs to stay versus what can safely go.
Or, you can cling to the futile hope that somehow you can prevent the other half of the country from voting in a fresh round of hell next time. And next time, the candidate might not be obviously horrible, s/he might just get into office and have top advisors who are, and who have significant influence over them.Report
We certainly could and probably should transfer more power towards Congress away from the Executive.
But the Democrats are more trustworthy with power than the Republicans. They still believe that all citizens are equally entitled to vote and they have repeatedly shown a willingness to abide by that vote even when it goes against them.
Whatever criticisms of the Democrats you have, the two are not symmetrical.Report
Chip, I think the discussion between you and Oscar is largely about price and not principle, if we leave aside the whole, Republicans are worse than Democrats discussion.*
As you say, we probably could/should transfer more power to Congress. I guess the question is what and how. Maybe at least on the margins, Congress can by law do this. I wouldn’t know where, explicitly, to start. Another thing we could do, also on the margins, is trim the power of the state itself. Not cut it off altogether or drastically, but take away some of its power.
I do agree with your comment above that a functional liberal democracy in the modern era needs to give the president or government quite a lot of power. But I also agree with Oscar (and you, from your follow up comment) that we can at least trim some of that power.
*Even there, I think you’re arguing about price. I don’t think Oscar believes the two parties are exactly and always equivalent in every way possible. I read him as saying only that they’re fully capable of doing some pretty horrible things if given enough power to do so.Report
Another thing we could do, also on the margins, is trim the power of the state itself.
OK, lets defund the police.Report
But not police unions.
And don’t touch QI.Report
That doesn’t strike me as “on the margins,” but good luck with that.Report
I wouldn’t call that “trustworthy with power”. At best, it’s being willing to trust in the system.
And TBH, it makes sense, if you think of Progressive and Conservative from a security standpoint. It’s the old “Security has to be lucky all the time, insurgents only have to be lucky once”. It’s pretty obvious that most of the time, when society changes, it tends to stick. Mostly because such changes take a while, and everyone adapts to the reality, if given enough time. So anytime the left gains the upper hand, they are going to try to move some balls forward, and the right is going to have a hell of a time moving them back.
So the right has philosophical need to hold the line, which means holding power. The left only has to wait two years to try and get lucky again.
That said, neither should be trusted with actual governmental power, not because of anything I said above, but because the kind of people who pursue power are the kind of people who should not be trusted with it. Hard left Progressives have ideas that sound an awful lot like ideas the hard right Moral Majority liked to parade about in the 80’s.Report
I made the quip about “defund the police” because it is the same as “reduce government power”.
They both can’t be taken at face value and are almost always substituting for unspoken specific action the speaker is choosing not to discuss.Report
Didn’t I have a post all about options for defunding the police that were real and tangible?
I may not be a hardcore libertarian, but I’m not some squishy libertarian hiding out from my old friends in the GOP. I have some ideas as to what could go, and I would be happy to entertain many, many more.Report
But “reduce government power” isn’t limited to redefining the police mission is it?
Otherwise it would be stated as “”redefining the police mission”.
“Reduce government power” also has implications for the welfare state, and the regulatory state doesn’t it?
But by the same token, there are some powers of government, vast powers, which are not meant to be included in the phrase “reduce government power”. Powers such as protection of property and personal rights.
The accurate understanding of “reduce government power” is “reduce [some certain types of] government power”.Report
Wait a minute, I said that.
Didn’t I say exactly that?
Let me look back… Oh, yes, here it is!
I have never suggested it’s a blanket gutting of powers back to bare constitutional limits, because some are necessary. I have always said that it would be a process that would require careful analysis.
But it won’t be done because those powers didn’t just materialize, there was always some justification for them, and there will always be someone making the case to retain those powers, and it’s always easier to just go along to get along.*
But if you are truly worried about the decline of liberal democracy and the rise of fascist elements in our government, you would be smart to start looking very hard at those powers and not blindly accepting arguments for them as just powers simply because an ally is in favor of retaining them.
*You see exactly this in efforts to reform police and drug laws.Report
Which is why using the phrase “reduce government power” is meaningless since it means completely different things to different people.Report
Oh, that’s the quibble! It’s a “Defund the Police” counter.
Fine, instead of “reduce government power”, substitute “Critically evaluate the current state of federal government powers and their distribution amongst the branches so as to significantly reduce the harm a potential populist demagogue could inflict should they rise to sufficient position without adequate political opposition.”Report
Yeah, someone should really have to write an essay on Altering the Police Paradigm before we take them seriously when they start talking about “reducing government power”.
What do they mean when they say things? They never really define it, do they?Report
Is it worth noting that up and down the Front Range, where the population (hence LEO size) is exploding, a whole bunch of the communities/counties are taking the opportunity to add mental health co-responders?
Digging through recent history in my “new” county, I find that the voters approved a dedicated tax to fund a mental health facility that will provide more appropriate handling than jail can. Groundbreaking is scheduled for next month.Report
That is a good thing.
I’m hoping that it has measurable benefits that can be sold to other communities. (Fingers crossed)Report
Speak of the devil and she will appear:
Looks like Pelosi is failing to keep her reined in.Report
Um.. by reined in you mean not saying idiot things on twitter? There’s no political leader anywhere ever who’s kept their caucus from saying idiot things on twitter. It is twitter.Report
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that she’s saying an idiot thing.
This is the part of AOC that I kinda like. I hope she keeps this pressure on.
There’s some stuff that she says that is too dumb to quote because, hey, you’re nutpicking.
But shit like this? Good for her.Report
I agree.
When we talk about making actual progress instead of merely symbolic motions, this is what it looks like.Report
Exactly, this is moving the ball forward.Report
I don’t know. AOC’s willingness to hold her own side’s feet to fire on something specific like that is actually good thing IMO. Her problem is inability to distinguish a principled stance from one that is stupid or unnecessarily alienating. This appointment strikes me as a gift to the right. Though maybe Biden is more savvy than I think. He played the primary through the general election almost perfectly. Held it together all the way through.Report
(Dude. I agree. It’s the other 80% of the stuff that is a gift to the right.)Report
She’s right. If there’s a hell, Emanuel’s going to roast in it for the McDonald thing. It’s not really something we should be looking past when considering people for government appointments.Report
There are enough layers of management between Emanuel and the beat cops that it’s not clear to me the degree to which he was involved.
This sort of thing is standard long-time practice for Chicago. I would think that every level of management would view it in their best interest to not send it further up and do their best to suppress it from everyone.
This could easily be less “him personally” and more “this is part of being the Mayor of Chicago and has always gone on”.Report
Nope. He and McCarthy, police superintendent at the time, sat on the video for a year, until after the mayoral race was over.
Emanuel’s hands were all over this one.Report
This is Chicago man, the police send it up the chain specifically to make sure the higher ups get their hands on it, then the cops dare the politicians to do something.
The politicians stay true to form and do nothing for as long as they can.Report
I was actually pretty shocked that Van Dyke was convicted. I was going to head through the west side but diverted because I wasn’t sure which way the verdict was going to come down.Report
That was exactly my thinking the day/week the decision was supposed to come down. I had some choice in the matter. There was a roundabout way I could avoid the area to get home. But it was a constrained choice, and I was nervous for my safety.Report
I sure didn’t want to re-enact the Reginald Denny video.Report
I’m pretty happy to see that my predictions about Trump being incapable of actually, seriously, endangering the transition is coming true. That said I feel all this handwaving at Trumps tweets does let the GOP off the hook. If the Dems politicians and officials in 2016 had done and said half as much as what Trump and the GOP did this year moderate right winger would be through the roof.Report
I look forward (note I actually don’t) to all the anti-anti-Trump people who rationalized every Trump move acting like Biden is a dictator when he attempts to put forward a slightly anodyne EO that relates to corporate oversight.Report
From what I understand, the idea of an anti-anti-Trumper came about as referring to someone who doesn’t rationalize what Trump does, but objects to the way some people oppose him. A person who rationalizes what Trump does is, in my view, a Trump supporter, not an anti-anti-Trumper. But that’s just my understanding. I haven’t really studied the history of anti-anti-Trumpism.
I am, I confess, a sometime anti-anti-Trumper. Maybe I’m more than “sometime” and am too much of one. Still, I don’t envision calling Biden a dictator unless he does something dictatorial, and the E.O. you mention doesn’t count in my book.Report
Anti-anti Trumpers usually still support Trump while acknowledging his faults but incoherently claim his opponents are worse IIRC.Report
You might very well be right.Report
Anti-anti-Trumpers specifically target people like David French as traitors for having the same beliefs and values that they had before Trump, i.e. being insufficiently nihilist.Report
Well, after hearing you, North, and Jessie, I can rest assured that I’m provisionally excused from the charge of being an anti-anti-Trumper.Report
I still want him to get the United Express Flight 3411 treatment, but I expect to be disappointed.Report
The great thing about the Trump tweet Andrew quoted is that Emily Murphy had just said, like a minute earlier, that her decision to start the transition was made all on her own, not because of what anyone else said. She was trying to hold on to just a shred of her dignity, but Trump had to make it about him.Report
Part of me still believes that after the long weekend, Trump will begin firing the appointees in the upper ranks willy-nilly and not replace them. So Biden’s folks end up talking to a senior, but typically with a narrow focus, civil servant for the next two months (there are serious limits on who can be “acting”). If those are there. That same part thinks that Trump’s EO making it much easier to fire senior civil servants was a prelude.Report
You’re thinking from a framework that values the information a staffer could pass along. Why would you project that framework onto Trump? I could picture him firing people because he doesn’t like them, but to want to sabotage Biden through the loss of institutional knowledge? Doesn’t sound believable. Besides, there isn’t much time to fire senior staff and replace them anyway, so there isn’t any distinction between firing someone and promoting his assistant and firing someone and not promoting his assistant. The Biden team would be dealing with the assistant either way.Report
The mainstream media is already saying that he “decapitated” the civilian oversight of DoD. I don’t credit Trump with coming up with the idea, I credit certain staff/advisors. The “burn it all down” fanatics. And there’s a pronounced difference between talking to the Sec of Energy or their top deputy, say, and having to talk to a slew of GS-14s to see what’s in process and how it’s scheduled.Report
Gee, thanks for your faith in the civil service. We so appreciate the support.
Not that anyone here would likely notice (which is the point) but senior civil servants run federal agencies all the time during transitions. Its how you get folks with job X “performing the non-exclusive duties” of job Y for 9 months after a new president takes over. Those folks HAVE TO HAVE a broad focus to run the agency until political leadership takes the reins. We do it every 4 years, and we even have manuals on how to do it.
Come this Monday in fact we will all be getting directions on how to prepare our little slice of the electronic binders of information on our agencies that are being generated for the Transition Team – many of whom were senior civil servants or political appointees at our agencies in prior administrations. Absent the lethargy and disinterest we saw in this administration it usually works quite well.Report
I have a great deal of faith in the civil service. What I fear is what I would fear in any large hierarchical organization, public or private, if the top two or three layers of management were abruptly chopped off. If you tell me that it’s okay, everything will be fine with that much management missing, I’ll take your word for it.Report
We do it every four years. How many times have you noticed anything amiss?Report
IT BEGINS!!!!!
To be sure, you must understand that 2002 was a different time in the country’s history and the discussions over the 2nd Intifada still had a lot of pre-9/11 assumptions baked in them and many people had a living memory of apartheid in South Africa and, let’s face it, college students have a lot of crazy opinions and we really shouldn’t care what college students think 18 years ago, what we need to know is whether she still has crazy opinions now and, if she does, explain that Trump is worse.Report
Heh, just so we can try and keep the scoreboard clear, Carson King wrote his twitter comments 8 years prior to the controversy that erupted around him. I wonder what the brave move is on this? Fire the lady for her comments almost 20 years ago or ignore it?Report
I have no idea.
I just know that we now live in a place where we can dig this stuff up and wave it around until someone blinks and offers an apology.
At which point… POW!Report
I’m gonna mark you down as team “the braver move is to ignore it for a week or so until twitter/the media finds the next shiny thing to obsess over”.Report
Oh, absolutely.
But we’re going to see a problem with Trump not being President anymore.
Trump was *INCREDIBLY* distracting.Report
Oooh! One thing that we enjoyed for the last 4 years was a stark choice between The Wokies and Trump.
If you oppose the Wokies, YOU MIGHT AS WELL PUT ON THE RED HAT, BIGOT!
Now? Well. Biden versus the Wokies? Oh, please give me that sweet, sweet, Biden action.
Oh, you don’t want to pick Biden? May I point you to the nearest haberdashery?Report
We’re definitly going to see a problem. All media and political watchers everywhere are basically like diabetics now from all the constant drama sugar Trump has pumped out for four years. Biden is the age of insulin. The media is going to be utterly starved which means trivialities are going to be exploded all over the big screen.Report
We’ve been living in an era where if they dug up 12 bodies in a cabinet secretary’s yard (OK, an acting cabinet secretary’s yard), a different scandal would replace it the next day. If a week later a reporter asked “What was with the 12 bodies?”, it would be dismissed as fake news, and anyway why is nobody talking about the 30 bodies in Eric Holder’s basement?Report
I was at least a little on the alarmist side, and events seem to be (thankfully) proving me wrong. That said, I still won’t breathe easy until Biden is sworn in.Report
If you ever get *TOO* worked up, remember:
We have an obesity crisis.Report
Yeah, it’s all back to normal.
Report