Yesterday, Steve Schmidt published a Substack column about which he felt so strongly that he made the whole thing available to unpaid subscribers. Basically, he wanted to oppose the idea that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” He refers to the inability to see situations and alignments as other than binary as “an addlement in the American character.” I’d’ love to tell him it’s not limited to Americans – C. S, Lewis complained about the same “addlement” in Brits in the 1940’s and 50’s. It isn’t specifically American. It’s just human. He got onto the subject – the rant, if you will – because Sean Hannity and Stephanie Ruhle were both on their respective netwotks tring to tell Boebert the same thing and he wanted to point out that, because Hannity and Ruhle agree on this one thing, and both oppose Boebert, that doesn’t make Hannity a good guy. I’m sure the fact that Hannity is not a good guy is not news to anyone here… but he was right to point it out. There is a lot more in the column, so I’ve linked it in case anyone wants to pursue the idea. Aside from that, and the fact that it’s still cold, and my space heater for the computer room died, and the one from the living room is inadequate for this space (but I do have a new one on order), it’s pretty quiet.
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Newsweek – Secret Service Members Found To Be Part of Far-Right Extremist Group—Report
Quote – The list of dues-paying Oath Keepers included 21 people who said they were currently employed by DHS at the time their names were added to the list. A total of 306 identified themselves as being affiliated with DHS…. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors extremist groups, describes the Oath Keepers as advocating “for Americans to prepare for inevitable conflict with the government by stockpiling goods and supplies, engaging in paramilitary training and working to create small, self-reliant community networks.” Click through for details. Surely no one is surprised by this. But it’s always good to have proof. And, of course, the question is – “Now what?”
Colorado Public Radio – This Ukrainian refugee is sharing her country’s history, culture and spirit through cooking classes in Fort Collins
Quote – “My idea was to make a cooking class about Ukraine, Ukrainian food, Ukrainian tradition,” said [chef Tetiana] Stratilat, who mentioned in an interview that she speaks fluent Russian and Ukrainian and “a little bit English.” What she decided to bring to the cooking classroom was not just ingredients. “I explain the Ukrainian tradition, how we serve [the] table, what‘s the symbol of these dishes, give some history so the people more understand about my country,” she said. Click through for story. Anyone surorised that all the best “Russian” food is actually Ukranian? I suppose for those of us who grew up and really spent most of our lives equating the Soviet Union with Russia, it’s understandable. But it’s time to learn the truth.
Yesterday, McCarthy continued his losing streak. The quiet part that Boehner published out loud in his book is that these people just wast chaos. They literally wasnt to make government look bad so that they can destroy it. I’m impatient for Democrats to negotiate with the few sane ones and get behind a sane person, but I do uderstand that they might want to allow this to continue for a bit longer to draw attention to Republican shenanigans. But I hope they won’t allow it to continue for 2 months and 133 ballots, as happened in 1855-56. Even with a stable White House, that would not be helpful. Meanwhile, in the Senate, Patty Murray makes history as the first female President Pro-Tem. (That’s not actually an elected office – it is the senior member of the majority party – “senior” meaning the longest-serving.) Also, the Conversation published an article about several conditions which might have caused Damar Hamlin’s incident. Not what did happen – that can’t be determined without more evidence (sometimes an autopsy, and no one wants that.)
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New York Times (no paywall) – Brazilian Authorities Will Revive Fraud Case Against George Santos
Quote – But an older criminal case may be more pressing: Brazilian law enforcement authorities intend to revive fraud charges against Mr. Santos, and will seek his formal response, prosecutors told The New York Times on Monday. The matter, which stemmed from an incident in 2008 regarding a stolen checkbook, had been suspended for the better part of a decade because the police were unable to locate him. A spokeswoman for the Rio de Janeiro prosecutor’s office said that with Mr. Santos’s whereabouts identified, a formal request will be made to the U.S. Justice Department to notify him of the charges, a necessary step after which the case will proceed with or without him. Click through for details. I love that “with or without him.” Pray for extradition. And the next time you hear a Republican say “George Soros,” respond “You mean George Santos?”
The 19th – Democratic women who made history in 2018 are stepping into leadership in 2022
Quote – Of the 35 Democratic women first elected in 2018, 25 ran for and won reelection in 2020 and 2022. And as Democrats prepare to enter the House minority in January under new leaders, many of those women are now stepping up into increasingly powerful leadership positions and are poised to exert more influence than ever before on the future of their party. “I am somewhat biased, but I do believe that the class of 2018 was a pretty extraordinary class,” said Rep. Veronica Escobar, who was one of the first two Latinas elected to Congress from Texas that year. Click through for story. The rising stars in that class aren’t all women, but a lot of them are.
Yesterday, I decided, with everthing else here quiet, to give you an update on the mailbox for tomcat@politicsplus.org. After getting it cleaned out initially, I’ve been trying to check it every week, or at least every other week. I tried at one point to close his Twitter account, but was not successful. However, this last week he did not get any emails from Twitter … so maybe Elon Musk suspended him for something (non-payment of the new feea?) I’ll just hope there aren’t any more. I did manage to close his account at Fantasy Pros – the fantasy football site. I don’t think there is enough interest for it, and in any case, I would be incompetent to run it. I am only aware of football when something horrible happens, such as the Bengals-Bills game this week. I certainly hope Hamlin survives, but the longer he has to stay in intensive care, the less likely it is that he will ever be able to play again (in fact he may already be past that point) and that will certainly be hard on him emotionally. Back to TC’s inbox, at this point everything that is coming is is emails from WordPress or their partners such as updates or expirations, many of which I already know about because alerts on the Dashboard have advised me. Besides that, there is only spam, and there really is no way to get rid of that.
These articles are not old news yet, since after 3 failed ballots they adjourned. Anyway, one has to take the Schadenfreude where one can get it. Black Woman – Beforre Noon – Round 1 – Chaos
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Crooks & Liars – Zelenskyy Delivers Most Powerful Speech Yet To Ukraine
Quote – “Of course it was hard to celebrate fully because we understand that our soldiers can’t be with their family,” Evheniya Shulzhenko said while sitting with her husband on a park bench overlooking the city. But a “really powerful” end-of-year speech by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on New Year’s Eve lifted her spirits and made her proud to be Ukrainian, Shulzhenko said. Click through. The full video in the headline has a voiced-over English translation, but no CC. But the Twitter clip in the body does have CC. And it’s pretty powerful by itself. I’m not sure I could take much more without melting into a puddle.
Washington Post (no paywall) – White contractors wouldn’t remove Confederate statues. So a Black man did it.
Quote – As a small group of Confederate heritage defenders assembled nearby — at least one of them armed — city safety coordinator Miles Jones lectured the work crew on wearing hard hats and eye protection. And who, he asked, would be the site supervisor? A bearded man in Ray-Ban sunglasses and a Norfolk State University sweatshirt stepped forward. “What’s your name, sir?” Jones asked. “Devon Henry.” “Devon Hen—” Jones began, then dropped his voice respectfully. “Oh, Mr. Henry. Of course.” Click through for story. This mixes my emotions. Sadness because so many wypipo are so bitter and small minded, but happiness that the statues are coming down and that Devon Green exists.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
Going into a New Year, a new Congress, and a new election cycle, after the end of a cycle which has produced some of the – to be charitable – weirdest candidates ever seen in the United States (at least in our lifetimes), I thought it might be a good idea to take a critical look at suggestions for how to find, draft, and elect candidates who will work for us. Let me say right now, I am not totally on board with the scoring system the author proposes – I see the possibiity (or probability, especially for Republicans) of ambitious legislators drafting and introducing large amounts of nonsense legislation in order to get high marks. Not everyone is, or should be, a creator. We also need analysts – and above all, votes. Good, sound votes. But it is a place to start.
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Workhorses, not show horses: Five ways to promote effective lawmaking in Congress
Americans dislike Congress, especially when it fails to act on pressing problems. They are then surprised by legislative accomplishments on climate change, gun control and maintaining competitiveness with China.
We have spent more than a decade exploring the thousands of bills and hundreds of laws produced by members of Congress each year. We find that individual representatives and senators vary dramatically in how interested they are in lawmaking and how effectively they advance their proposals. And we see opportunities to build a better Congress.
We have devised and generated a “Legislative Effectiveness Score” for each member of the House and Senate for each two-year Congress for the past 50 years. These scores are based on 15 metrics, capturing how many bills each lawmaker sponsors, how far they progress toward law and how substantively significant they are. The scores are politically neutral, with members of both parties scoring higher upon advancing whatever policies they think are best.
Voters can use these scores to see how their political representatives have fared in this measure, perhaps finding them among the 23% of representatives or 19% of senators who were highly effective in the most recently completed Congress. And researchers use them to determine the factors that make lawmakers effective in Congress.
Based on our work, we have identified five ways that legislators, reformers and voters can help promote effective lawmaking in Congress.
Lawmakers willing to work with those from the other party are the most successful at advancing their bills through Congress. GOP Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, left, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia talk during a joint session of Congress. Win McNamee/Getty Images
1. Lawmakers can focus their legislative agendas on their interests, committee assignments and constituency needs
Members of Congress face many demands on their time. They are almost always campaigning or raising money for the next election. Their time on Capitol Hill is punctuated with committee meetings and calls to votes on the House or Senate floor.
Such pressures leave little time to formulate new policies, build coalitions and advance their proposals. Effective lawmakers do not have more time than others – they simply align these various activities toward a common goal of lawmaking.
Effective lawmakers introduce bills that combine their own interests and passions with the needs of their constituencies and their committee assignments.
Thus, time spent away from Washington, in their home states and districts, is focused on identifying the policy needs of their constituents and highlighting their policy successes; time in committee is spent making and refining their policy proposals; time milling around between votes is used to build coalitions.
For the effective lawmaker, all these different activities form a coherent whole.
2. Legislators can view lawmaking as a team sport
No member of Congress can accomplish anything by himself or herself. Effective lawmakers recognize this and build a successful team.
They then join with like-minded colleagues to take advantage of the added resources provided by legislative caucuses, such as additional staff support and independent policy analyses, apart from the help provided by party leadership.
Moreover, for effective lawmakers, their team is not limited to their political party. Those willing to co-sponsor bills written by members of the other party find more bipartisan support for their own efforts. Our analysis demonstrates that such bipartisan lawmakers are the most successful at advancing their bills through Congress.
3. Lawmakers can specialize and develop policy expertise
Members of Congress need to be generalists to vote knowledgeably on diverse policy topics on any given day. Many take that generalist view to their lawmaking portfolio, sponsoring legislation in each of the 21 major issue areas addressed by Congress.
But we find that the most effective lawmakers dedicate about half of their time, attention and legislative proposals to a single issue area. By becoming an acknowledged experts in issues of health or education or international affairs, for example, lawmakers become central to policy formulation in their area of interest.
4. Reforms can reinforce good lawmaking habits
Individual lawmakers in Congress could adopt any of the practices above to become more effective. But institutional reforms could help reinforce such good behaviors.
Election workers in Pittsburgh recount ballots on June 1, 2022, from the recent Pennsylvania primary election. AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
5. Voters can reward effective lawmaking
Without electoral rewards for effective lawmaking, members of Congress may focus on being show horses rather than legislative workhorses.
The role of voters starts with the initial selection of candidates. Voters might consider whether candidates demonstrate policy expertise and speak about the benefits of bipartisanship, for example. They might consider our analysis showing that effective state legislators and women tend to be more effective lawmakers in Congress, on average.
On the whole, Congress can function much better. Effective lawmakers from the past have shown the path forward. Our analysis of 50 years of data offers lessons that any representative or senator can adopt, as well as reforms and electoral pressures that can nudge them in the right direction.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I realize bipartisan action is pretty well necessary for change (in fact, for any change – positive of negative). At this point in time, however, broad bipartisanship is not going to be helpful … because any idea all, or even a good majority, of Republican legislators agree on is going to be guanopsychotic. Seriously. It was recently pointed out that there is a debate on whose fault it is that George Santos got elected, and the two candidates for blame are – the Democrats and the Media. No one seems to think Republicans are to blame – because everyone has come to expect that lies are simply who Republicans are. (See today’s video thread.) Of course that will hurt them in the long run, and when it does, the hurt will be long lasting. But, for now, we are stuck with it.
Yesterday, Jamie Raskin broke my heart with the announcement that he has been diagnosed with Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma, a “serious but curable form of cancer.” I’ve linked to the story which when I received the breaking news alert, said no more than that, because it is a “devloping story,” so when they know more, they’ll share more.
The Daily Beast – Republicans Play Chicken With Kevin McCarthy’s Speakership
Quote – The “Never Kevin” camp is small: just five archconservative lawmakers have publicly said they will not, under any circumstances, vote for McCarthy. But if they stick to their guns, five votes is all it could take to throw the process into chaos—and potentially open up an avenue for another candidate to ascend to the top job. The much larger “Only Kevin” camp, meanwhile, has formed to head off that scenario before it even materializes. Dozens of GOP lawmakers, from moderates to MAGA loyalists, have said they will only vote for McCarthy for Speaker, no matter how many rounds of votes it takes. If followed, that commitment to respond to hardball with hardball would basically ensure no other Republican comes close to the gavel. Click through for more analysis – but, for another, more imaginative (and IMO more likely) take, click here. At least we can hope.
Yesterday, as I’m sure everyone knows by now, the January 6 Committee voted to send criminal referrals to the Justice Department for Donald J. Trump**, John Eastmaan, “and others.” It also voted to refer to the Hoouse EthicsCommittee four Congressmen; these were not identified in the hearing, but Politico says they are Kevin McCarthy, Scott Perry, Jim Jordan, and Andy Biggs.
And now for something completely different – The New Yorker has a new puzzle. It’s a jigsaw puzzle, 36 pieces and I can’t say it’s teribly difficult – it isn’t time-limited, though it will tell you your time. But after it’s done, there’s a second challenge – to name 8 famous New York buildings. That’s probably not much challenge if you live there, but I could only name one; though I found several which were distinctive, I didn’t know their names.
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Common Dreams – The 50-Year Takeaway From Middle-Class America
Quote – Instead, through decades of financial manipulations orchestrated by neoliberal economists and financial experts and political leaders, the tremendous wealth generated by our country’s productivity has been redirected to a special few who deem themselves innovators and self-made success stories. To add to the insult, business-backed media has convinced many Americans that this is the beauty of capitalism, that any hard-working individual can be a billionaire, and that any concession to social responsibility is anti-American, bordering on communism. So, as a result, many of us accept our grotesquely unequal distribution of wealth as a natural result of progress. Click through for article. Yet another issue which could have been avoided through education. Public education needs to be defended as fiirecely as does democracy – because, without the one, we will lose the other, and with it, everything.
New Mexico Political Report – How anti-abortion pregnancy centers can claim to be medical clinics and get away with it
Quote – The women later discovered they weren’t at the abortion clinic they’d intended to visit, but at the similarly named Women’s Help Center, one of more than 2,500 crisis pregnancy centers across the country that aim to discourage people from getting abortions. Henderson, then in her early 70s, wasn’t a “cancer doctor,” as she allegedly informed one client, or indeed any type of licensed medical professional. Her only medical experience was as a radiation therapy technologist, and her license had expired 10 years earlier…. [A]s the newly unearthed Jacksonville case highlights, beneath the veneer of medical professionalism is an industry that state and federal authorities have done almost nothing to regulate. Only a few states require pregnancy centers that provide medical services to be formally licensed as clinics, a Reveal investigation has found. And, because their views are grounded in a particular ideological viewpoint, the centers aren’t subject to many other rules designed to protect patients – rules that would require them to be transparent about their operations and medical credentials. Click through for details. This is likely to get worse before it gets better (which it will not do at all withot a lot of work, investigation, and legislation.)
The Daily Beast – Want to Win in Politics? Be More Like Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell.
Quote – Establishment elites may not be popular, but they get shit done. And my unpopular hot take is that we need more of them to win elections, not to mention to grease the gears running our governmental machine. Recent events underscore this reality. Yet, take a close look at how the two major parties treat their elites. Are they vilified or celebrated? Look no further than the difference between how Republicans are treating Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and how Democrats are treating outgoing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Click through for full argument. I know, it would be challenging to find two people more different (restricting the pool to non-criminals). But there are parallels. And while I couldn’t be like Nancy myself, I can recognize her qualities and aregue for them to be demanded whe selecting our leadership.
