Last week, the Democratic National Committee quietly instituted a new rule for their first debate, which was created to further avoid having a "kiddie table" debate on either of the two scheduled nights. This was a smart move, given that the entire random selection scheme was set up in the first place to avoid lumping all the leading candidates together in one debate, leaving all the struggling candidates to compete with each other in the other debate. It will still be a random selection process, but there will now be two tiers.

Here is the new language, according to Politico:

"The final list of debate participants (after any tie-breaking procedure is executed, if necessary) will be divided into two groups: candidates with a polling average of 2% or above, and those with a polling average below 2%," the rule reads. "Both groups will be randomly divided between Wednesday night and Thursday night, thus ensuring that both groups are represented fairly on each night."

So both the leading candidates and those not doing so well will be evenly split between the two nights. This could still wind up creating a "kiddie table" debate, but the chances will be lower -- and even if it does happen, the undercard debate is still guaranteed to have some larger names.

Continue Reading »

What do you do with a president who wants to be impeached? That's a surreal question, but then again we live in surreal times. Donald Trump seems more and more like a man begging the House Democrats to impeach him. It's like every political decision he makes is designed to be so outrageous that it'll surely goad Democrats into starting an impeachment committee.

Continue Reading »

That headline can, of course, be read two ways. One is very serious, since America has experienced multiple natural disasters over the course of the past year which have not yet been adequately addressed by Congress. And the other is, well, ironic. As we all lurch to the end of another "Infrastructure Week" trainwreck, the Republican Senate just provided some relief from the ongoing disaster at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Mitch McConnell, taking a page out of Harry Reid's playbook, apparently threatened his whole chamber with the thing they fear more than anything else (save not getting reelected) -- the loss of one of their many, many weeks of vacation. McConnell had sworn he was going to hold a vote on a disaster relief bill before the vacation break, and he actually browbeat his fellow Republicans into doing their jobs. So they sat down with Democrats from both the Senate and the House and hammered out a "clean" disaster relief bill. "Clean," in this instance, means "with no money for Trump's frivolous border wall." Republicans also caved on the other main sticking point that Trump had personally introduced, by agreeing to provide disaster relief money for Puerto Rico. The bill sailed through the Senate today (with all the senators keeping a close eye on flight times out of National Airport, of course), and will be taken up by the House as soon as time permits (this could mean a "voice vote" with nobody in the chamber tomorrow, or if Republicans balk at this tactic, it may mean a vote after vacation time, next month.

Senate Republicans really needed a win, and not just to please McConnell. By passing a bipartisan bill (the vote was 85-8), Senate Republicans showed that Trump's current hissy fit isn't going to stop them from doing deals with Democrats. This became a big worry, as even Republicans started pointing out the fact that, other than confirm conservative judges, they have gotten absolutely nothing at all done this year.

Continue Reading »

You just know it's going to be entertaining when the White House announces an upcoming "Infrastructure Week," because the end result is always a fiery trainwreck of epic proportions. In one of the first instances of this recurring phenomenon, Donald Trump hijacked (there's simply no better word for it) what was supposed to be a press announcement rolling out a plan to reduce regulations to get road projects built faster. With Elaine Chao helplessly looking on from the sidelines, Trump instead let fly his unhinged "very fine people on both sides" rant in response to the racist riots in Charlottesville, Virginia. That was the biggest and most spectacular Trumpian trainwreck during a planned Infrastructure Week, to date. But now we've got President Man-Baby's latest temper tantrum to compare it to. Because Infrastructure Week always means "never a dull moment" in the Trump White House.

Continue Reading »

President Donald Trump is stonewalling Congress. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is not convinced that the time has yet come to open impeachment hearings. If this dynamic doesn't change, then the battles over access to Trump, Trump's advisors, and Trump's business records (including his taxes) will likely play out in the federal courts. Trump is convinced that this is either a winning strategy for him, or at the very least a way to stall the entire fight until after next year's election. If either of those are true, he will avoid any negative consequences for his actions at least until he knows whether he's going to get a second term or not. But he may have miscalculated, because his "big stall" tactic may just backfire on him in a big way.

The first of many judicial decisions to come on Trump's stonewalling was handed down yesterday. The federal judge ruled on a case where Trump is suing to quash a subpoena for his financial records, which was issued to his accounting firm. The judge essentially laughed out of court the arguments made by Trump's legal team, and for good reason. Team Trump was arguing that, constitutionally, Congress can only legislate -- make laws, that is -- and that they really have no right to investigate a sitting president at all. Investigating the president furthered no "legislative function," Trump's lawyer's argued, therefore no such investigation was legitimate or constitutional. Trump's lawyers wouldn't even agree that former presidential investigations (Whitewater, Watergate, Teapot Dome) were legal and proper.

The judge disagreed. In a big way. If Trump's legal argument were to be adopted, it would mean that Congress couldn't even investigate a president they were attempting to impeach, which is a clearly-defined congressional responsibility in the Constitution itself, he pointed out. That reasoning is ludicrous on its face, obviously. The judge ruled the subpoena was properly issued, handing Trump the first big legal loss in his stonewalling strategy (hopefully, it won't be the last, especially if Trump's lawyers continue making the same laughable argument to different judges).

Continue Reading »

It's always amusing when the inside-the-Beltway pundits realize with astonishment that they've been wrong about something. What happens is that one of them decides they know "what the American voter is thinking" and then all the rest of them stampede to the conclusion that this is really what's going on out in the heartland. They write articles and make television appearances corroborating each others' opinions, and it soon becomes virtually accepted fact among the cognoscenti. Then, reality interjects itself and their house of cards collapses -- leaving them to construct yet another false narrative to run with (which they almost always immediately do).

Part of the problem is that the pundits, always facing one deadline or another, tend to microanalyze whatever just happened and thus miss the forest for the trees (or "for one leaf," at times). They seldom sit back and look at the bigger picture, or notice how the trends slowly are bending one way or another.

Continue Reading »

It's been yet another week of life so bizarre it'd be hard to even imagine it as satirical art. Who would best be able to capture the lunacy and doublethink emanating from Trump's White House? Joseph Heller? George Orwell? Douglas Adams? Or perhaps Dr. Seuss? In other words, just another glorious week in Trumpland, folks.

The highlights (or lowlights, really) of this lunacy came during Trump's rollout of his brand-new immigration policy proposal. In the future, Trump announced, the United States should give much greater weight to skilled immigrants and much less weight to family ties in deciding who will be allowed in. Under a normal president -- even a normal Republican president -- this would be par for the course. With Trump, however, we have to consider not the par but the course itself.

Donald Trump owns a bunch of golf courses here in America. He runs these golf courses using various forms of labor. Up until very recently, he relied on workers who were undocumented (or, as Republicans so charmingly call them, "illegals"). When this practice came to light in the media, all of these folks were hastily fired. But even beyond the illegal labor force, Trump also relies heavily on a visa used specifically for seasonal workers to hire foreigners as maids and other low-skilled labor to run his hotels and golf courses. His organization snaps up as many of these visas as they can each year, so that they can hire temporary summer help from other countries, rather than hire Americans to do the same jobs -- even though these are not high-skilled jobs. So much for all his talk about hiring Americans, eh?

That's a whole lot of hypocrisy, right there. But things got really surreal when he sent out (you can't make this stuff up, folks) his own son-in-law to make the case that people should be rated not on their family connections but rather on their actual skills. Seriously. His own son-in-law made the case that family connections should not be a consideration.

Continue Reading »

So it finally looks like the Democratic 2020 presidential field is set -- at a whopping 24 candidates -- with the addition (today) of Bill de Blasio and (a few days ago) Steve Bullock. Well, I should say that the field is hopefully set at least up until September, when Stacey Abrams has said she'll make up her mind about a presidential bid. But it's probably not going to change any further before the first round of debates happens. Which all means who gets on which debate stage is going to become pretty crucial.

The Democratic National Committee is running the debates, so they get to set the rules. They have been bending over backward to avoid the appearance of favoritism (after what happened last time), so they have set the entry criteria for the first two debates awfully low. This means that almost everyone running may qualify on at least one of the two main criteria -- raising a certain number of donations from a wide variety of states and donors, or hitting at least one percent support in three accepted national polls. This is lax enough that almost everyone will clear at least one of those hurdles, with the possible exception of those candidates who are either running vanity campaigns or those who jumped in too late to raise enough donations or register in the polls in time to qualify. Still, there's a good chance that at least a few candidates will have to be cut, since the D.N.C. has limited participation to the top 20 candidates.

Each of the first two debates will take place over two nights, with 10 candidates on the stage at once. To avoid the mistake made last time by the Republicans, Democrats will not separate the two debates by who is leading at the polls (leading to a secondary "undercard" or "kiddie-table debate," which few people watched), but rather by random selection. These draws are going to be pretty important, to both the minor candidates hoping to make a name for themselves and for the major candidates as well.

Continue Reading »

What does "co-equal" really mean? That is a basic constitutional question that has never adequately been answered. We are supposed to have three co-equal branches of government in the United States, the legislative (Congress), the executive (the president and all executive branches), and the judicial (the Supreme Court and all other federal courts). Theoretically, none are supposed to be held above the other, hence the co-equal designation. But what does that really mean?

Traditionally, it has loosely meant that each branch is supposed to remain largely within its own sphere of influence. The legislative branch passes laws. The executive either signs them or vetoes them, and also implements and administers both new and existing laws. The judicial decides the correct interpretation of laws. That's the elementary-school level of the definition, but the eternal unanswered question is what happens when things aren't quite so cut and dried? What happens when one branch interprets one of those "checks and balances" that are supposed to rein in the other two branches in a way in which one (or both) of the other branches disagrees? When this happens, the usual term is that we all face a "constitutional crisis." But there are often no precedents in such crises, meaning all three branches tend to just wing it in their response.

Continue Reading »

Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington state, just signed into law the first-ever statewide experiment with a "public option" in heath insurance. This is a momentous event, but so far it hasn't been getting that much attention in the media. Inslee is also a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, so it will now be incumbent upon him to become the champion spokesman for instituting a public option nationwide.

Enacting a public option is a big deal, for a number of reasons. Many Democrats (myself included) still have strong feelings against those Democrats in Congress who directly fought against including a public option in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (otherwise known as Obamacare). Two senators in particular -- Max Baucus of Montana and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut -- successfully stripped the public option from what was being considered when the Obamacare bill was being written. Since that time, the issue has faded into the background of the healthcare debate, but it is now experiencing a renaissance of sorts.

Continue Reading »