Category: Politics

There’s an excellent piece by Ezra Klein in yesterday’s New York Times entitled “Democrats, Here’s How to Lose in 2022.” I’m up to my neck in a work project this week, so all I’m doing today is providing a link to that article.

My friend Sarah sent me this picture from England today. (You may need to click the plus sign to see the entire image so you can read the description at the bottom of the label.)

CNN aired a “special report” yesterday about the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and their aftermath. Even for someone who’s been following the news, the reporting and images were distressing. But for me, the program’s most chilling moment was the scene pictured here from the morning of January 6. . . .

After Barack Obama was sworn in as president in 2009, Mitch McConnell famously declared that the Republicans’ number one legislative agenda was to ensure that Obama would be a one-term president. The idea was to deny the president any legislative accomplishments. Even when a bipartisan majority in Congress favored a bill, the Republicans would do their best to block it so that Obama could not lay claim to any legislative accomplishments when he ran for re-election in 2012. . . .

I believe it’s possible that enough Republican senators will either vote to convict Donald Trump in his impeachment trial or absent themselves from the trial in order to reduce the number of senators needed to convict. (The Constitution requires only that two-thirds of senators present for the proceedings vote to convict, not two-thirds of all senators.) . . .

. . . The problem for the Republican Party is that these divergent positions are irreconcilable. There can be no coalition that includes all of them, which means the party is in deep trouble. It cannot endure as the party of Trump and also the party that repudiates him, or even just wants to move beyond him. . . .

I’ve been exchanging emails with my friend Marty about the current political crisis. One question we’ve discussed is how much more damage Trump and his more militant supporters could do leading up to and including on Inauguration Day. I see two major factors that bear on that, one positive and one negative. . . .

Ever since Donald Trump became president, and increasingly over the last four years as he has proven to be the most malignant, contemptable man to hold that office, I have been stupefied by the ardor and number of his supporters. This does not include everyone who voted for Trump in the last election. At least some of those were simply casting their ballots for someone they believed could be counted on to forward their political agenda, whether that was appointing conservative judges, lowering corporate taxes, or abolishing regulations. But even so, a great many people idolize the man. . . .

One of the unanswered questions about the insurrectionist invasion of the U.S. Capitol is whether Trumpist sympathies within the law enforcement community contributed to the woefully inadequate response by the Capitol Police and the national security establishment. . . .