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My apologies, but there will be no new column today. I am dealing with automotive (transmission) problems, and had to spend all day running around, leaving no time to write. Hopefully, I'll still be able to get a column out tomorrow for the weekly Friday Talking Points roundup. For now, my apologies again for the lack of column today.
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
Monday night, Bernie Sanders appeared on a CNN town hall, and was asked a rather unusual question. An audience member asked whether Bernie supported enfranchising prisoners such as the Boston Marathon bomber or people convicted of sexual assault. Bernie's answer was surprising to many, because he spoke not only in favor of incarcerated prisoners voting, but cut to the heart of the matter: to Bernie, it's a question of basic rights.
Here was Bernie's answer to the question:
I think the right to vote is inherent to our democracy. Yes, even for terrible people, because once you start chipping away and you say, "That guy committed a terrible crime, not going to let him vote. Well, that person did that, not going to let that person vote," you're running down a slippery slope. So, I believe that people who commit crimes, they pay the price. When they get out of jail, I believe they certainly should have the right the vote, but I do believe that even if they are in jail, they're paying their price to society, but that should not take away their inherent American right to participate in our democracy.
Bernie's answer made a splash in the news, but most of the stories failed to mention that his home state of Vermont already allows prisoners to vote. It is one of two states which do so (Maine is the other). So while Bernie's answer may sound radical to many, it's not actually all that radical a position for a senator from Vermont to take.
The use of the word "begins" in that headline might be a bit puzzling, since President Donald Trump has pushed back on any number of things during the course of his presidency, most often on Twitter. But today we're not talking about exchanging schoolyard insults with his political opponents, but actual legal pushback from the executive department. Which is somewhat new, and can be expected to grow over the coming months.
While Trump did attempt not just to push back against the investigation Robert Mueller conducted but to actually kill the whole investigation altogether, there wasn't much in the way of legal pushback in the form of refusing to turn over possible evidence or refusing to make people available for interviews. There were no claims of executive privilege, which is pretty unusual for a presidential investigation of this scope. Trump did successfully avoid an in-person interview under oath with Mueller's team by pushing back against the idea, but that was really about it in terms of defying requests from Mueller.
In January, however, Democrats took back control of the House of Representatives, which means they also took control of all the oversight committees. Multiple investigations into Trump and his minions soon ensued, as was to be expected. This is what Trump is now pushing back against, in a big way. He probably feels he's got the political wind at his back after the Mueller Report didn't end with indictments, and he has unleashed his legal team to do everything possible to obstruct the will of Congress as it pertains to all the investigations. At best (for him), Trump will be able to ignore the investigations completely, and even at the worst he'll be able to slow them down to a glacial pace by contesting everything in court.
Another day goes by, another Democrat jumps in the presidential race. You'll forgive me if that sounds somewhat cynical (or even a bit loopy), but that's what the first few months of 2019 have seemed like, at times. But hopefully we're getting to the end of this opening phase in the 2020 presidential race, and hopefully within the next few weeks or so we'll have a full Democratic field and nobody else will jump into the race. That's our fervent hope, at any rate. It's hard enough keeping up with the names of everyone running already!
Campaign News
Another sitting House member has decided that he should be the one to take on Donald Trump. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts officially threw his hat in the ring today. So far, this makes five current House members running (the others are John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Tim Ryan, and Eric Swalwell). Now, winning the presidency from a Senate seat is a lot rarer than people think, but winning the presidency from a House seat is almost unprecedented, so all of these campaigns should be seen as the longest of longshots.
Yesterday, Robert Mueller's investigative report on Donald Trump was made (mostly) public. Today, Trump and his cheerleaders are insisting that he has been totally vindicated and exonerated, while some Democratic candidates for president are demanding that impeachment proceedings be launched in the House of Representatives. That's a pretty wide gulf in perception, but at this point it was to be expected.
Just as has already been revealed in multiple behind-the-scenes tell-all books written about the Trump White House, at the heart of the Mueller Report's findings on obstruction of justice is a bit of incredible irony: what saved Trump from the more blatant forms of obstructing justice was nothing short of his own incompetence. He'd order an advisor to do something that was clearly illegal or highly unethical, and the advisor would either refuse outright or just do nothing in the hopes that Trump would forget about the whole thing. The fact that high-ranking aides would repeatedly just fail to act on Trump's outrageous demands in the hopes he'd soon forget about them obviously means that such a tactic was often effective. The picture this paints is not a flattering one, of Trump blowing up and screaming at someone to do something but then being so easily distracted that he'd forget all about it and often never mention it again. Again, this is the same picture painted by multiple tell-all books as well as a variety of other sources, so it is probably pretty accurate. Trump was saved from a whole lot of lawbreaking because he'd immediately forget that he had demanded such a thing. Hell of a way to run a country, isn't it?
The Mueller Report is finally out. Portions of it have been redacted, and congressional Democrats will doubtlessly continue their push to get an unredacted version to read, but even if that happens the public may never get to see the full text. So for now, we've only got what was released today to examine. And the emerging consensus seems to be that there was no one glaring thing to point to which will lead to Donald Trump's downfall. As usual, there is plenty of fishy and questionable and possibly illegal conduct by both Trump and his minions, but none of it is likely to spur immediate impeachment hearings.
The tragic fire at the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral could have been a lot worse, especially at level of the ground floor. But to a large extent this further catastrophe was avoided. Images from within the cathedral show a surprising amount of the floor to be relatively unburnt, including standing pews made of wood. The thanks for this miracle, though, belong not to God but to some unnamed Medieval stonemasons -- those who did the design and construction of the building's vaulted ceilings. Because their vaulting held fast, widespread damage at ground-level was averted.
When you examine the architecture of a cathedral, one thing quickly becomes apparent: there's really not that much to actually burn. Almost the entire building is made of stone, metal, and glass -- none of which burn very easily. The only extensive use of wood is in the construction of what might be called the "attic" and the roof itself. This is where all the flames were coming from in the videos we all saw from France while Notre-Dame de Paris burned.
Anyone at all interested in the subject of cathedral architecture would be well advised to go down to their local library and see if they have a copy of Cathedral, by David Macaulay (1973). It is an illustrated children's book which details in pen-and-ink drawings how a cathedral is built, from the ground up. It is fascinating and well worth a read, as the architectural drawings are so good that even adults will enjoy learning how cathedrals are laid out and actually constructed. Or, if you're more inclined to read a thick, multigenerational saga, you could always check out The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett, which begins with an intentionally-set fire in a cathedral attic and follows one family of stonemasons through the construction of an English cathedral in the Middle Ages.
Bernie Sanders bearded the Fox in his den last night. He outFoxed them, plain and simple. Rather than shunning Fox News, Bernie accepted an invitation from them to hold a town hall meeting on air. And he not only held his own, at some points he even appeared to have the Fox audience solidly behind him. This defies a whole lot of media storylines, and punditary heads are still exploding in Washington as the impact of Bernie's town hall reverberates.
Voters, according to many pundits, are supposed to be easily pigeonholed into easy-to-discuss categories. These categories are mutually exclusive, meaning any one voter simply cannot occupy multiple pigeonholes simultaneously. Since they're all single-issue voters, once they've aligned on that issue then nothing else matters.
Such oversimplification may be convenient for people attempting to analyze "what voters are thinking," but it doesn't really reflect the real world at all. Most voters are complex people, caring about many different political issues to varying degrees and also caring about politicians' personalities to a varying degree. Some arguments can sway voters, and combinations of issues voters really care deeply about often defy facile "left/right" framing. Maybe you're an evangelical who strongly supports legalized marijuana. Perhaps you're an environmentalist who is anti-abortion. Such combinations don't easily fit in the usual media narratives, obviously.
But getting back to what happened last night, the Democratic Party has officially put Fox News outside the pale. Earlier this year, Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez announced that none of the Democratic debates would happen on Fox, because they are nothing short of a propaganda outlet for the president. Bernie Sanders, however, obviously thinks it is a good idea to appear on Fox in a formal setting, because he believes there are plenty of Fox News viewers who might be persuaded to vote for him. He's probably right about that. Rather than shun Fox, Sanders made an appeal to their viewers, and ultimately it may prove to have been the smarter strategy.
Today is not just the day when millions of Americans have to file their income taxes, if is also the day when the millions of Democratic presidential candidates also have to file their first quarter fundraising numbers. Well, that's a slight exaggeration, but it certainly seems like millions at times, doesn't it?
Early fundraising numbers aren't completely irrelevant, but there has been a noticeable shift this election cycle over what has happened in years past, at least within the Democratic Party. It used to be that early fundraising represented mostly the ability of the candidates to sweet talk big-money donors into backing their campaigns early on -- a measure of the prowess of convincing the movers and shakers within the party of any particular candidates' chances of winning. This time around things have radically changed, because now the race is to woo small donors, rather than big-pocket money bundlers.
Welcome back! Our Friday Talking Points column has been on a forced hiatus for the past month, due to a rather severe bout with the flu. But while we're up and running once again, we're still not at 100 percent, so we're going to foreshorten our usual weekly roundup introduction this week. Instead of attempting the monumental task of getting back up to date with a month's worth of craziness from Washington, we're going to just write a generic introduction that should be able to stand in for just about any week in the Donald Trump era. Call it a "Mad Lib" fill-in-the-blank do-it-yourself rundown. Everyone ready? Then here we go....
Generic Weekly News Roundup
President Donald Trump embarrassed himself today by claiming [TOTAL LIE], and then following up on Twitter with [INSANE CONSPIRACY THEORY]. Both were immediately disproven by [WIDELY AVAILABLE AND INDISPUTABLE FACTS]. When asked for comment, the White House merely stated that "the president's words speak for themselves." Presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway was quoted blaming [ANYONE BUT TRUMP] for the whole fracas.
Earlier, Trump had fanned the political flames by tweeting [HATE-FILLED RANT], which once again clearly violates the Twitter rules of conduct; but when contacted about it, the head of Twitter stated: "We're going to interpret his tweet as [TOTAL HORSE MANURE RATIONALIZATION] rather than being savagely directed at [VULNERABLE MINORITY]."
