Dear Commons Community,

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a moderate Democrat, is emerging as one of the more influential members of the US Senate mainly because of his willingness to work for bipartisanship in a chamber that has no majority unless Vice President Kamala Harris casts a deciding vote.  He has also been in the recent past an outspoken defender of the Senate’s filibuster rule that requires most pieces of legislation to garner two-thirds majority to pass. In light of the recent passing of the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package, the New York Times has an article on him this morning reviewing his positions on Senate rules.  Part of the article is based on his interview yesterday on NBC’s Meet the Press during which he said he would not support killing off the filibuster but signaled a willingness to advance some party-line votes around it.  Below is the entire article. 

I think his views on the subject of the filibuster will be tested before the midterm elections in 2022.

Tony

———————————————————————————————

The New York Times

Manchin Expresses Openness to Making Filibuster Harder to Use

By Emily Cochrane

March 7, 2021

WASHINGTON — Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a moderate Democrat who has often balked at efforts to alter Senate rules to allow his party to muscle through its agenda over Republican opposition, signaled a willingness on Sunday to make changes to the filibuster and support future party-line votes if bipartisan negotiations proved unsuccessful.

Mr. Manchin, whose role as perhaps the most centrist Democrat in an evenly divided Senate gives him outsize influence, remained adamant on Sunday that he would not vote to outright abolish the 60-vote supermajority threshold, which requires Democrats to attract the support of 10 Republicans to pass most legislation.

But he reiterated that he would support altering the rules of the practice and potentially establishing a “talking filibuster” — requiring any senator objecting to ending debate to remain on the floor and speak for the entire time. That could make filibusters far less frequent, and give Democrats far more opportunities to pass legislation on party-line votes, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaker.

“If you want to make it a little bit more painful, make him stand there and talk, I’m willing to look at any way we can,” Mr. Manchin said of the filibuster on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “But I’m not willing to take away the involvement of the minority.”

Mr. Manchin has previously expressed openness to a “talking filibuster,” but his comments took on new weight after he became the key 50th vote to pass President Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus in a party-line vote on Saturday, and said he would be open to more such votes in the future.

His comments were also the latest signal that Democrats were already beginning to build on the lessons of wrangling Mr. Biden’s first major legislative initiative past united Republican opposition as they turn to more politically freighted ambitions. Several Democrats are pushing for a future where legislation could follow a more aggressive and partisan pattern set by the stimulus: If bipartisan talks do not translate into Republican votes, Democrats push ahead on the policies they prefer.

The sweeping relief package, which the House is expected to take up early this week after the Senate passed the measure 50 to 49 on Saturday, is the first pandemic aid bill set to become law without any Republican votes.

It will provide for up to $1,400 in direct payments to individuals, a $300 weekly federal unemployment supplement through Labor Day and billions of dollars for vaccine distribution, schools, small businesses and other institutions. It also includes a significant investment in safety net spending as part of the largest antipoverty effort in a generation.

Democrats, unwilling to compromise on the size and scope of the package after what they see as grave miscalculations during the Great Recession, pursued a fast-track budget process known as reconciliation as a way to bypass the filibuster and Republican opposition.

But the reconciliation process has to be used sparingly, only for legislation that has a direct effect on the federal budget. Mr. Manchin said he would be willing “to go to a reconciliation to where we have to get something done.”

“But I’m not going to go there until my Republican friends have the ability to have their say also,” Mr. Manchin added. “I’m hoping they will get involved to the point where we have 10 of them that will work with 50 of us.”

Democrats have several priorities on which they could find those 10 votes difficult to pick up, including voting rights legislation and an immigration overhaul.

But even if Democrats pursue ways to pass legislation with only their own votes, Mr. Manchin showed this weekend that it will not be easy. He stalled final passage of the stimulus bill and instigated the longest open vote in modern Senate history as Democratic leaders scrambled to appease his concerns about the duration of the unemployment benefit and whether a tax benefit would be targeted based on income.

While Democrats were ready to move forward with a provision that continued the existing $300 weekly benefit through October and made up to $10,200 of 2020 benefits tax free, Mr. Manchin balked, he said on Saturday, after learning about the details around 10 a.m. Friday. He had also made a promise, according to two people familiar with the private conversation, to Senator Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, that Mr. Manchin would support an amendment that would end the $300 benefit after mid-July.

Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said in an interview after the legislation passed on Saturday. With his feet propped up, shoeless, in his office, he added, “We knew we could not have the Portman amendment succeed or the bill would go down, and we never veered away from that.”

Mr. Manchin ultimately agreed to extending the $300 provision through Labor Day, a week longer than the $400 increase the House approved, and signed off on keeping the tax benefits for those whose household income was less than $150,000. On Sunday, he rejected the suggestion that Democrats would have to tailor their agenda to his beliefs, arguing that he wanted to just “look for that moderate middle” and emphasizing that they ultimately reached a compromise.

“I’m the same person I have been all my life and since I’ve been in the public offices. I’m the same,” Mr. Manchin said on ABC’s “This Week.” “I’ve been voting the same way for the last 10 years.”

Mr. Manchin’s comments came as Democrats celebrated the passage of the bill. Even with some provisions whittled down to accommodate both moderate concerns and arcane Senate rules, progressives were ebullient on Saturday, with Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, telling reporters: “This is the best day of my Senate life. It really is.”

Democrats took time to shower praise on Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff of Georgia, as well as the voters who sent them to Washington and cemented Democratic control of the Senate.

“There is no question that the people of Georgia deserve a great deal of credit for what happened here today,” Mr. Warnock said after the vote. “We simply would not be here had they not stood up in such a profound way in this historic election, and I’m deeply honored to be playing a role in government actually working for the people.”

But with frustration still bubbling over the exclusion of a provision raising the federal minimum wage to $15, some liberal lawmakers and activists have mounted a renewed campaign to end the filibuster, which has long curtailed their legislative ambitions. In the interview, Mr. Schumer acknowledged that some Democratic ambitions could not be advanced using the reconciliation process because of the strict rules, but insisted that the unity on Saturday “is going to help us stay unified to go on to other things.”

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, the US Senate passed a version of the Joe Biden COVID-19 relief package containing nearly $2 trillion in benefits. The bill passed on a strictly party line vote.  As reported by Yahoo and other news media.

Senate Democrats used the process of budget reconciliation to pass the bill with just 50 votes, circumventing the legislative filibuster that would have required ten Republicans to sign on as well. Democrats in Congress had set March 14 as the deadline for delivering the bill for Biden’s signature, the date when expanded unemployment benefits for millions of Americans are set to expire.

Despite some changes to the bill from the House version that infuriated progressives, it is expected to pass before reaching Biden’s desk. Vice President Kamala Harris did not have to cast the tie-breaking vote, as Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan was absent to attend a family funeral.

“The American Rescue Plan will go down as one of the most sweeping federal recovery efforts in history,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said shortly before final passage, adding that he wanted the American people to know “help is on the way. That their government is going to give them one final push to get us over the finish line.”

After voting on amendments began late Friday morning, the process was delayed for hours over a disagreement on federal unemployment insurance benefits after Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., pushed to decrease both the size of the weekly payments and how long they lasted. Eventually, Democrats settled on a plan that would extend the $300 per week benefits through Sept. 6 while providing tax relief on the first $10,200 in unemployment benefits for households making up to $150,000. There are concerns about the expanded benefits drying up with Congress in August recess and unable to extend them.

Manchin’s maneuvering flummoxed both fellow moderates in his caucus and the other half of the West Virginia Senate delegation.

“I don’t know,” said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mt., when asked by Politico what Manchin’s issue was. “I really don’t.”

“I have no idea what he’s doing, to be quite frank,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va. “Maybe you can tell me.”

Manchin had previously expressed concerns that extending benefits for too long would discourage people from returning to work as the economy reopened.  A study from Yale economists released last year found the benefits to not be a hindrance on returning to work. The economy added 379,000 jobs in February but there are still nearly 10 million fewer jobs than there were a year ago prior to the pandemic hitting.

“The president supports the compromise agreement, and is grateful to all the senators who worked so hard to reach this outcome,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement. “It extends supplemental unemployment benefit into September, and helps the vast majority of unemployment insurance recipients avoid unanticipated tax bills. Most importantly, this agreement allows us to move forward on the urgently needed American Rescue Plan.”

Another change from the House bill was a reduction in the number of Americans receiving stimulus payments after they tightened income thresholds which was agreed to by the White House on Wednesday. Under the new plan, about 17 million fewer Americans will receive the checks than did under the previous guidelines, saving roughly $12 billion, .006 percent of the nearly $2 trillion package.

One provision that was stripped fully from the House bill was an increase of the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15. The White House declined to overrule the Senate parliamentarian’s guidance saying the increase didn’t qualify, but passage was unlikely unless Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., — who had opposed the measure — changed positions. Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., attempted to include the increased minimum wage in the bill anyway, but the procedural vote failed, with eight Democrats voting against (Sens. Sinema, Manchin, Tester, Angus King of Maine, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Tom Carper and Chris Coons of Delaware).

Sinema drew particular ire for the exaggerated thumbs down she gave when voting no on a raise for millions of Americans, with one progressive group launching a radio ad hours after her vote. A spokesperson for the first-term Arizona Democrat called commentary on her actions “sexist.”

The bill contains funding for vaccine distribution, schools, nutrition assistance and rent relief, in addition to a temporary childhood allowance and a provision to lower Affordable Care Act premiums for some Americans.There is also $350 billion for state and local governments, a key sticking point in Republican opposition.

Democrats voted down a number of Republican amendments over the course of the “vote-a-rama,” including provisions that would have severely reduced the size of the package, cut the state and local funding, redistributed Amtrak funding to the Coast Guard and tied money for schools to reopening. GOP-proposed amendments on abortion, immigration and transgender sports participation also failed. Late Saturday morning, a bipartisan amendment proposed by Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alas., that redirected some of the funding for schools to homeless children passed with bipartisan support.

An amendment supported by Manchin, Tester and the GOP that would have overturned an executive order to cancel the Keystone Pipeline failed to reach the 60 votes needed to override the budget rules.

Biden held meetings with Republicans but said from the beginning he would not delay the bill or drastically cut its size for the sake of earning their votes, citing his experience working on a stimulus bill as vice president in 2009. A group of GOP senators proposed legislation that was a third of the size of the American Rescue Plan but it never gained traction.

“The way I see it, the biggest risk is not going too big, it’s if we go too small,”Biden said last month. “We’ve been here before. When this nation hit the Great Recession that Barack and I inherited in 2009, I was asked to lead the effort on the economic recovery act to get it passed. It was a big recovery package, roughly $800 billion. I did everything I could to get it passed, including getting three Republicans to change their votes and vote for it. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t quite big enough. It stemmed the crisis, but the recovery could have been faster and even bigger. Today we need an answer that meets the challenge of this crisis, not one that falls short.”

White House messaging on the bill has been to declare it bipartisan due to its popularity in polling among Democrats, Republicans and independents alike, even as it garnered zero GOP votes in Congress. The Biden administration has also courted support from Republican governors and mayors.

“Bipartisanship is not determined by a single zip code in Washington, D.C.,” Psaki said at Friday’s briefing. ”It’s about where the American people sit and stand and the vast majority of the American people support the American Rescue Plan, including Republicans. And so really the question is why are Republicans in Congress who aren’t supporting this package outliers in where the American public is in moving this forward.”

Congratulations to President Biden and the Democrats!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump has issued cease and desist orders to the Republican National Committee and several other GOP organizations to stop referencing him  in their fundraising efforts.  Politico, Reuters, and CNBC reported on Friday that Trump’s lawyers asked the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee to stop using the ex president’s name and likeness in fundraising appeals and merchandise.

Since Trump left office in January, the three fundraising groups have repeatedly referenced him in emails seeking donations. However, Trump was reportedly upset that his name was being used without his approval by groups that had helped Republicans who voted to impeach him.

The cease-and-desist notices come after Trump addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference. In his speech, he called for unity, while also attacking a number of top Republicans, including Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, and other lawmakers who voted in favor of his impeachment and to convict him.

“Get rid of them all,” Trump said during his speech. “The RINOs that we are surrounded with will destroy the Republican Party and the American worker,” Trump said at the time, using an acronym for “Republicans in name only.”

The Republicans have created the Donald Trumpenstein monster and don’t know how to destroy it.

Tony

Federico Klein

Dear Commons Community,

Federico Klein, a former State Department aide appointed by Donald Trump, has been charged in connection with the pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol, according to an FBI spokesperson and documents.  As reported by several media outlets.

The FBI would not discuss the case, and court documents did not appear to be online.

But documents obtained by NBC News allege that a man later identified as Klein was seen on video assaulting Washington, D.C., police officers and U.S. Capitol Police officers.

The FBI says in court documents that Klein can be seen resisting officers, attempting to take items from them, and assaulting them with a riot shield. The documents allege he “violently shoved the shield into an officer’s body in an attempt to breach the police line.”

It appears to be the first criminal case connected to a member of the Trump administration stemming from the Jan. 6 riot.

It was not immediately clear if Klein had an attorney who could speak on his behalf or if he was in custody.

Politico first reported the arrest.

The court documents say Klein was working at the State Department on Jan. 6, possessed top-secret security clearance and resigned Jan. 19.

Government records show Klein worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and was hired at the State Department in January 2017.

Government files show that at least into 2020, Klein was serving as a political appointee at the State Department as a special assistant in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment

The court documents say that Klein faces six counts, including violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds; and obstruction of Congress; and those that deal with assaulting or impeding police.

Klein was identified after the FBI got two tips from the public after the law enforcement agency had posted photos in the wake of the Capitol riot, according to the documents.

Cecilia L. Klein said that her 42-year-old son told her that he was at the Mall on Jan. 6 but that he did not go onto the Capitol grounds.

“I asked him — he said ‘I was on the Mall.’ I said, ‘did you go on the Capitol grounds?’ He said ‘no I did not, I was on the Mall,'” Cecilia Klein said by phone Thursday night.

She said she not know about the allegations or that her son had been arrested until she was contacted by Politico.

She said that her politics are very different from her son’s and that he was not a top official in the Trump administration.

“We are not talking about a Cabinet official or a sub-Cabinet official,” she said. “My son was a schedule C,” she said, referring to a classification in government.

A pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol as Congress prepared to formally count the electoral votes affirming President Joe Biden’s win. President Donald Trump had falsely claimed that there was fraud and that the election was “stolen” at a rally before the Capitol was attacked. Five people died.

Trump was later impeached for a second time and accused of inciting insurrection. He was acquitted by the Senate last month.

Justice Department officials have said they have filed charges against more than 300 people in the riot at the Capitol, some of which are under seal because the defendants have not yet been arrested. Federal prosecutors allege a wide range of motives and behavior, from extreme violence to apparent ignorance that what they were doing was illegal.

Some have been accused of assaulting police officers and threatening to attack lawmakers, while others are charged with the lesser offense of illegally entering a protected building.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It was bound to happen given all the publicity this week that six Dr. Seuss books were being removed from publication by Dr. Seuss Enterprises.  As reported by NBC News.

“Books by Dr. Seuss flooded Amazon’s U.S. bestseller list after it was announced that six of the author’s publications were being pulled over racist imagery.

“The Cat in the Hat” is currently the bestselling book on Amazon’s U.S. store, closely followed by “One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish” and “Green Eggs and Ham,” along with several other titles by the late Theodor Seuss Geisel. In total, 15 Dr. Seuss publications were in Amazon’s top 20 list on Friday morning.

“Green Eggs and Ham” and “The Cat in the Hat” also appeared in Amazon Canada’s top 10 bestselling books list.

This comes after Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the business running the late author’s estate, made the decision last year to cease publication and licensing of six of his books: ″And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” “If I Ran the Zoo,” “McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!” and “The Cat’s Quizzer.”

“These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong,” Dr. Seuss Enterprises said in the statement, with some of the author’s books having faced criticism in recent years over racist imagery.

The announcement came on Read Across America Day last Tuesday, which would have been Geisel’s 117th birthday and has been associated with the author.

President Joe Biden left any mention of Dr. Seuss out of his Read Across America Day proclamation. Former Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama mentioned Dr. Seuss in their previous speeches.

“Research in recent years has revealed strong racial undertones in many books written/illustrated by Dr. Seuss,” the statement said.

I read Dr. Seuss to my children on a regular basis when they were growing up!

Tony

Eric Swalwell

Dear Commons Community,

Representative Eric Swalwell, a Democrat from California, accused Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Rudy Giuliani, and Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., of violating federal civil rights laws and local incitement laws. All spoke at a rally near the White House on January 6th before members of the crowd moved on to the Capitol.  Swalwell, who helped argue the House impeachment case against former President Donald Trump, filed  the 65-page lawsuit against him in federal court yesterday, seeking to turn those allegations into a civil case.  As reported by NBC News,

“The mob attack was “a direct and foreseeable consequence of the defendants’ false and incendiary allegations of fraud and theft, and in direct response to the defendants’ express calls for violence,” the suit said.

Swalwell said he was among members of Congress who were trapped in the House chamber as the rioters approached. They feared for their lives and “texted loved ones in case the worst happened,” it said.

Like a similar lawsuit filed last month by Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and the NAACP, this case invokes the Civil Rights Act of 1871, commonly known as the Ku Klux Klan act, which allows lawsuits against government officials for claims that they conspired to violate civil rights.

The earlier suit contended that Trump and Giuliani conspired with two extremist groups, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Swalwell focused on the former president and speakers at the rally and said they “directly incited the violence at the Capitol.”

Like the House impeachment articles, the new lawsuit said the former president began accusing Democrats of trying to steal the election well before the voting began. After the votes were tabulated, he and the others named in the suit conspired to undermine confidence in the results, Swalwell said.

When the siege at the Capitol began, the former president “had the power to stop the rioters but refused and instead encouraged them,” he said.

Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, said in a statement that Swalwell is “a low-life with no credibility” who is engaged in “a witch hunt.” In response to the earlier suit, he said, “President Trump did not plan, produce or organize the Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse. President Trump did not incite or conspire to incite any violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6.”

Swalwell’s lawsuit quoted Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who said after the vote acquitting the former president that President Trump is still liable for everything he did while in office. “We have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one,” McConnell said.”

It will be interesting to see how this suit plays out given that a majority of US Senators voted to impeach Trump several weeks ago (a two-thirds majority was needed) on issues similar to those raised by Swalwell.

It looks like Trump will be in litigation after litigation for years to come.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Ezra Klein, New York Times opinion columnist, has a piece this morning entitled, Biden Is the Anti-Trump, and It’s Working.  The main thrust of his column is that Biden has focused all of his energy on dealing with policy issues such as the pandemic, the economy, immigration, climate, etc. Biden has let his actions drive the news cycle not his personality.  Klein’s conclusion is “Speak softly and pass a big agenda!”

His entire op-ed is below.

Tony

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New York Times

Biden Is the Anti-Trump, and It’s Working

If you can dial down the conflict, you can dial up the policy.

By Ezra Klein

Opinion Columnist

March 4, 2021

American politics feels quieter with Joe Biden in the White House. The president’s Twitter feed hasn’t gone dark, but it’s gone dull. Biden doesn’t pick needless fights or insert himself into cultural conflicts. It’s easy to go days without hearing anything the president has said, unless you go looking.

But the relative quiet is deceptive: Policy is moving at a breakneck pace. The first weeks of the Biden administration were consumed by a flurry of far-reaching executive orders that reopened America to refugees, rejoined the Paris climate accords and killed the Keystone XL oil pipeline, to name just a few. Now the House has passed, and the Senate is considering, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, a truly sweeping piece of legislation that includes more than a half-dozen policies — like a child tax credit expansion that could cut child poverty by 50 percent — that would be presidency-defining accomplishments on their own.

It goes on. The White House just sent Congress the most ambitious immigration reform bill in years. It midwifed a deal to get Merck to mobilize some of its factories to produce Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, and now Biden is saying there should be enough of a supply for every American adult to get vaccinated by the end of May. Imagine! The administration is also working on an infrastructure package that, if early reports bear out, will be the most transformational piece of climate policy — and perhaps economic policy — in my lifetime. Biden is blitzing.

This is roughly the opposite of how Donald Trump approached his presidency. Trump combined an always-on, say-anything, fight-anyone communications strategy with a curious void of legislative ambition. He backed congressional Republicans’ unimaginative and ultimately doomed Obamacare repeal effort, and then signed a package of tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy. It was bog-standard, Paul Ryan-conservatism — nothing like the populist revolution Trump promised on the campaign trail. Trump signed plenty of executive orders, but when it came to the hard work of persuading others to do what he wanted, he typically checked out, or turned to Twitter.

Even so, Trump convinced many that he was a political genius whose shamelessness had allowed him to see what others had missed: You didn’t win by being liked, you won by being all anyone ever talked about, even if they were cursing your name. “Very often my readers tried to persuade me there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and Trump had proven that,” Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U., told me. “All that mattered was you were occupying space in the spectacle — not what was actually happening to you in that glare.”

One rebuttal to that theory was always obvious. “Trump never got over 50 percent approval,” Rosen says. “He’s a widely hated man, a one-term president.” For all the talk of Teflon Don, Trump paid a price for his antics and affronts and scandals. Bad publicity actually is bad publicity.

But another way of looking at it is that Trump’s communication strategy was successful in getting Trump what he actually wanted: Attention, not legislation. Biden wants legislation, not attention, and that informs his team’s more targeted approach. “You can be all over every newscast and insert yourself in every conversation, but if you aren’t driving that conversation toward a focused agenda, it isn’t doing you a lot of good,” Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications director, told me.

So far, Biden’s quieter strategy appears to be working. As these charts show, he gets far less media attention than Trump — even after Election Day, the share of news stories with Biden’s name in the headline was less than half of what Trump got — and Google records far less search interest in his administration. But Biden is polling at about 54 percent, around 10 points higher than Trump at this stage of his presidency (or any stage of his presidency). More tellingly, the American Rescue Plan is polling between 10 and 20 points ahead of Biden, making it one of the most popular major pieces of legislation in recent decades. In one recent poll, Republicans were asked whether Biden’s plan should be abandoned for a bipartisan alternative, and they split down the middle, with as many Republicans saying the plan should be passed as abandoned. That’s remarkable.

The American Rescue Plan is a bolder, more progressive, economic package than anything a Democratic president has proposed since L.B.J. But it is not, for now, a polarizing package. It’s less polarizing even than Biden, who only polls at 12 percent among Republicans. You could chalk that up to its popular component parts, but the Affordable Care Act’s individual policies were popular, too, and the bill polled at around 40 percent. You could say it’s the coronavirus crisis, but coronavirus policy is sharply polarized. I suspect Biden’s calmer approach to political communication is opening space for a bolder agenda.

A few pieces of political science research are shaping my thinking here. In 2012, Stephen Nicholson, a political scientist at the University of Georgia, published an interesting paper called “Polarizing Cues.” In it, Nicholson asked people their opinions of proposed housing and immigration policies, sometimes telling them that Barack Obama supported the policy and at other times telling them that George W. Bush or John McCain supported the policy. What he found was that opinions didn’t much change when people heard that a political leader from their own party supported a bill. But opinions changed dramatically when you told them a political leader from the other side supported a bill — it led to sharp swings against the legislation, no matter the underlying policy content.

When I called Nicholson to ask him about the paper, he gave an insightful explanation for the results. Humans tend to see diversity in the groups we belong to, and sameness in the groups we mistrust, he said. A Democrat knows there are many ways to be a Democrat — you can be a Biden Democrat, an A.O.C. Democrat, an Obama Democrat, a Bernie Democrat, a Clinton Democrat. So a signal from any one Democratic leader is weaker, because he or she may not be the leader you care about. But no matter which kind of Democrat you are, Republicans blur in your mind into an undifferentiated mass of awful, so a signal from their political leaders is stronger. The process works the other way, too, of course. A recent Gallup poll showed 88 percent of Republicans disapprove of Biden — the more Biden makes the American Rescue Plan about himself, the more they’ll hate it.

Then there’s the book “Stealth Democracy,” by the political scientists John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse. They marshal a mountain of survey data to show that Americans have weak and changeable views on policy, but strong views on how politics should look and feel. Many, if not most, Americans believe “political conflict is unnecessary and an indication that something is wrong with governmental procedures,” they write. The more partisan fighting there is around a bill, in other words, the more Americans begin to believe something must be wrong with the legislation — otherwise, why would everyone be so upset?

Mitch McConnell understood all of this, and he ginned up political bickering to undermine Obama’s agenda. But Biden seems to understand it, too. When I talked to Bedingfield, she kept circling back to Biden’s preference for rhetoric and strategies that turn down “the temperature” on American politics. But Biden isn’t taking the usual Washington strategy toward that goal, which is to retreat to modest bills and quarter-measures. Instead, his theory seems to be that if you can dial down the conflict, you can dial up the policy.

I’ve argued before that Biden’s central insight in the campaign was that negative polarization — the degree to which we loathe the other side, even if we don’t much like our side — is now the most powerful force in American politics. Biden often refused to do things that would endear him to his base, because those same things would drive Republicans wild. That strategy is carrying over to his presidency. And in part because of it, the reaction to his signature legislative package, which really is a collection of policies progressives have dreamed of for years, isn’t cleaving along normal red-blue lines.

Like any other communications strategy, this will work until it doesn’t. Biden will have his failures, as all presidents do. But for now, it’s working, in defiance of the lessons many thought Trump’s presidency taught.

Speak softly and pass a big agenda. It’s at least worth a try.

Dear Commons Community,

The Crazy Donald released an angry statement yesterday decrying a number of Republican figures for being disloyal to him and called on Fox News to ditch longtime contributor Karl Rove, who he labeled a “RINO” and a “pompous fool.”

Trump was apparently triggered by a Wall Street Journal column in which Rove criticized the former president’s CPAC speech as “divisive, controversial and embittered.” 

“There was no forward-looking agenda,” the longtime GOP strategist wrote. “Simply a recitation of his greatest hits.” 

Rove dismissed Trump’s gripe in a statement to Reuters. 

“I’ve been called a lot of things in my career, but never a RINO,” Rove said. “I’ll continue to use my whiteboard and voice to call balls and strikes.” 

Trump has a long history of attempting to cancel people and companies that have triggered him, from the NFL to HBO to the Macy’s department store. 

Vice and CNN both have running lists.

How pathetic is Trump?

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post had an article yesterday describing Donald Trump asking small-donors to send him money and in the process potentially hurting the Republican Party’s small-dollar program.  It has previously been reported that a number of big corporate donors are holding off any donations to the Republican Party because of the January 6^th insurrection at the Capitol. Trump’s initial request was near the end of his CPAC speech on Sunday.  Here is a summary of the article.

“ After years of claiming he was so rich he didn’t need anyone else’s money for his political campaigns, Donald Trump is officially asking small-dollar donors ― many of them lower income and older ― to send him cash, potentially hurting the Republican Party’s small-dollar program.

The request was tucked in near the end of his first public appearance since leaving the presidency Jan. 20, a 90-minute speech Sunday that largely recycled his oft-repeated lies about the November election and his record in office.

“There’s only one way to contribute to our efforts, to elect ‘America first’ Republican conservatives. And in turn, to make America great again. And that’s through Save America PAC and Donald J Trump dot com,” he told his Conservative Political Action Conference audience.

One Trump adviser said that single request resulted in “millions of dollars” coming in to Trump’s new political committee and predicted it would eat into the Republican National Committee’s efforts to raise money from those donors.

“It’ll kill it,” the adviser said on condition of anonymity. “They’re not going to have a small-donor program anymore.”

What precise effect Trump’s new fundraising push for his own committee ― which he can use for virtually any purpose, including picking up his personal expenses or paying himself an eight-figure salary ― will have on the party’s efforts are unclear.

The RNC has had a healthy small-donor program, which targets those giving $50 or $20 or even $5 at a time, for decades. In 2001, for example, the party raised $40.2 million from donors who gave less than $200, accounting for 63% of the party’s total fundraising that year, according to a HuffPost analysis of Federal Election Commission filings. In 2009, those figures were $56.8 million and 69.8%.

From 2001 through 2015, the RNC collected 53.2% of its money from those who gave less than $200. From 2016 through 2020, it was 53.6%.

But in those Trump years, the party also received $156 million from a small-dollar fundraising committee it jointly ran with the Trump campaign, adding to the $428 million in small donations it raised on its own, although those solicitations frequently invoked Trump’s name in the email or text message.

One Republican close to RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said Trump told her recently that he’s willing to help the party raise money and that he plans to appear at an RNC donors retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, next month, along with other potential 2024 presidential candidates.

One former RNC member, though, said Trump’s independent solicitations for Save America PAC are certain to weaken the party’s parallel efforts. “It will definitely have a negative impact and all those people who contributed to the RNC just because of Trump will likely gravitate towards his own small-donor program,” said Steve Duprey, who was pushed out of the committee for being insufficiently loyal to Trump.

And a current RNC member, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said a major concern for the party is that Trump will use the money he raises not against Democrats in the coming midterm elections, but against Republicans who voted to impeach him for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol he incited or on those who have otherwise criticized him.

“It’s the temper tantrum PAC,” the member said, pointing to Trump’s attacks on other Republicans during his CPAC speech. “Trump’s agenda is quite different. It’s all about revenge.”

Trump boasted through the years that he did not need money from wealthy donors, from lobbyists or even from small-dollar contributors because he was so rich.

The boast, however, was never accurate. Even as he began his campaign in 2015, he funded his trips and staged his rallies using money generated by selling “Make America Great Again” hats and T-shirts. After he became the nominee in 2016, he immediately began soliciting money online from small donors and at traditional fundraisers from wealthy donors.

His money machine never let up, even after he won the presidency, allowing him to build a massive campaign operation starting almost immediately ― and also letting him funnel millions of dollars raised back into his own pocket by directing campaign and party spending at his own businesses.

All that time, however, Trump continued claiming he did not want or need his donors’ money, and he never asked for donations in a public setting ― until Sunday.

The Trump adviser said the former president now understands that a donor giving a few dollars a month becomes emotionally invested in his success and is much likelier to remain a strong supporter. “He now sees the power of a $5 donation. He’s finally got his head wrapped around that,” the adviser said, adding that Trump also needs money to remain relevant enough to run for his old job again in three years. “He needs cash. Cash puts him on the ground; it lets him do his rallies,” the adviser added.

According to new FEC filings, Trump on Saturday transformed his old campaign committee, Donald J. Trump For President, into the Make America Great Again PAC, which will allow him to use the $8 million left in it from his failed reelection bid for other purposes. His new webpage states that 90% of all donations go to Save America PAC, which he created in the days following his Nov. 3 loss, while 10% go to MAGA PAC. Donations are limited to $5,000 per year.

Trump is the first one-term president in modern times to nevertheless try to remain a force in national politics after losing reelection. He was able to raise $76 million for Save America in the weeks between the election and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection by claiming, in hundreds of fundraising texts and emails, that the money would let him pursue challenges to the election results and help Republicans hold Georgia’s two Senate seats. In the end, though, he spent none of that money for those purposes.

“Republican dollars were probably much more needed in Georgia,” said Paul Ryan, a campaign law expert with the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause, adding that while Trump now claims he will help Republicans in the midterms, he is not required to. “He has shown a total and complete willingness to raise money for a stated reason and to spend it on something else. I have no doubt he will continue doing that.”

The Republicans will have to get their act together to counter Trump’s incursion into their funding sources.

Tony

Maj. Gen. William Walker

Dear Commons Community,

During yesterday’s Senate hearings on the the January 6th insurrection and riot at the Capitol, Maj. Gen. William Walker, commanding general of the District of Columbia National Guard, told senators that the then-chief of the Capitol Police requested military support in a “voice cracking with emotion” in a 1:49 p.m. call as rioters began pushing toward the Capitol. Walker said he immediately relayed the request to the Army but did not learn until after 5 p.m. that the Defense Department had approved it. Guard troops who had been waiting on buses were then rushed to the Capitol, arriving in 18 minutes, Walker said. Defense Department leaders placed unusual restrictions on the National Guard for the day of the Capitol riot and delayed sending help for hours despite an urgent plea from police for reinforcement, according to testimony Wednesday that added to the finger-pointing about the government response.

As reported by the Associated Press.

“The hours long delay cost the National Guard precious minutes in the early hours of the Jan. 6 rioting, with Walker saying he could have gotten personnel into the building within 20 minutes of getting approval. As it stood, the support did not happen until the evening. The delay also stood in contrast to the swift authorization for National Guard deployment that Walker said was granted in response to the civil unrest that roiled Washington last June as an outgrowth of racial justice protests.

A senior Pentagon official who testified, Robert Salesses, said then-acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller wanted to take time to understand precisely how National Guard troops would be used at the Capitol and what assignments they would be given. Mindful of criticism that the response to the demonstrations last spring was heavy-handed, military officials were also concerned about the optics of a substantial National Guard presence at the Capitol, and thought such visuals could inflame the rioters, Walker said.

“The Army senior leadership” expressed “that it would not be their best military advice to have uniformed Guardsmen on the Capitol,” Walker said.

The Senate hearing was the latest in a series dedicated to the government’s preparations and response as a mob of then-President Donald Trump’s supporters laid siege to the Capitol. Taken together, the hearings have spelled out the challenge law enforcement officials face in sorting through an ocean of unverified tips but also highlighted how police inadequately prepared for the Trump loyalists; that FBI warnings about the threat of violence did not reach top police officials; and that requests for aid were not promptly answered.

“Anytime there’s an attack, we in the FBI want to bat 1,000, and we want to not ever have this happen again,” said Jill Sanborn, the bureau’s top counterterrorism official and one of the witnesses. “So we’re asking ourselves exactly the questions that you’re asking: Is there a place that we could have collected more (intelligence)? Is there something we could have done?”

Meanwhile, the Capitol Police disclosed the existence of intelligence of a “possible plot” by a militia group to breach the Capitol on Thursday. The revelation, coming as the acting police chief was testifying before a House subcommittee, differed from an earlier advisory from the House sergeant-at-arms that said police had no indication that any such violence was planned.

Much of the focus at yesterday’s hearing was on communications between the National Guard and the Defense Department. Walker, for instance, described what he said were “unusual” directives he was asked to follow, including needing approval to relocate troops from one traffic control point to another.

As chaos escalated on Jan. 6, then-Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund asked him for National Guard help in a frantic call and then again on a call with Army officials, who said they did not “think that it looked good” to have a military presence.

“The response to the request took too long, so I think there needs to be a study done to make sure that never happens again,” Walker said. “It shouldn’t take three hours to get a “yes” or “no” answer to an urgent request.”

That account was consistent with the recollection of Robert Contee, the acting chief of police for the Metropolitan Police Department, who told lawmakers last week that he was “stunned” by the delayed response. Contee said Sund pleaded with Army officials to deploy National Guard troops as the rioting escalated.

Walker’s testimony, however, conflicts a bit with timelines that were put out and discussed by senior military and defense leaders in the weeks after the riot.

According to the Defense Department, Walker was called at 3 p.m. by Army officials, and was told to prepare Guard troops to deploy. That call was designed to give the Guard notice of the impending deployment so they would have time to move troops from their traffic posts to the armory where they would get new orders, protective equipment and weapons.

The Pentagon said Miller, the acting Defense secretary, gave verbal authorization for the Guard troops to deploy at about 4:30 p.m., and that at 5:02 p.m., 154 members of the D.C. Guard left the armory, heading to the Capitol.

The Capitol Police had also indicated days earlier that they would not seek National Guard help, and in letters to Walker, District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser laid out the city’s request for help and made it clear there would be restrictions on the Guard members.

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said during a break in the hearing that senators “certainly will have questions” for Miller and for former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy.

“Whether that’s going to require testimony or not, I don’t know, but it’s definitely going to require an opportunity to ask them questions about their view, from their perspective, of why this decision-making process went so horribly wrong,” Blunt said.

At last week’s hearing, officials in charge of Capitol security blamed one another as well as federal law enforcement for their own lack of preparation as hundreds of rioters descended on the building, easily breached the security perimeter and eventually broke into the Capitol. Five people died as a result of the rioting.”

Either gross incompetence or a deliberate delay on the part of the Defense Department!

Tony