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Due to an unforeseen automotive emergency, there will be no column today. That's a fancy way of saying I spent all day replacing my alternator and doing a few other jobs. But the car's back together, it started right up first try, so columns will resume tomorrow as normal. My apologies for the interruption in service.
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
We hate to do this (as we suspect we'll be doing it recurringly for the next year or so), but once again the biggest political news of the week came from the legal system. Almost all the news was from the Republican side of the aisle, because of course it was. (And we promise that our subhead this week will be explained in due time, too... but not until the very end of the column.)
While most of the legal proceedings in the political world are going to be drawn-out affairs, this week we saw a truly speedy trial take place. Peter Navarro's trial began at the start of the week (after the holiday, even), took only two days from start to finish (with only three hours of witness testimony), and the jury then took a mere four hours to return with a guilty verdict. Navarro was found guilty of contempt of Congress, which was (quite obviously) an open-and-shut case. Navarro was prevented by the judge (before the trial began) of making his specious argument to the jury that he somehow had some sort of magic "executive privilege" that meant he was free to just blow off a congressional subpoena. In the first place, Donald Trump never backed up Navarro's claim of executive privilege -- which is not something that just anybody can claim (it requires the actual executive to claim it). Secondly, even if Navarro did have a legitimate claim to executive privilege (which he did not), he still would have been required to show up as a witness and claim executive privilege in person (which he did not do). So he really didn't have any defense at all and is pinning all his hopes that the Supreme Court will eventually just let him skate free. He now faces up to two years in jail, although even if he is sentenced to some prison time he will likely remain free until his appeals are all exhausted. Even so, it was good to see some actual legal consequences for a member of Donald Trump's White House.
Two Republicans went on trial this week. One of these trials just concluded while the other will stretch on for a while. The two aren't connected in any way, it was just a coincidence of the legal calendar that they both got underway this week. But both are important milestones, in different ways, so it bears taking a look at what is going on.
The first trial -- the short one -- had Peter Navarro facing a federal jury on charges that he defied a subpoena from Congress. And it didn't take long at all for the jury to decide that he was indeed guilty. The trial itself was only two days long. It featured fewer than three hours of witness testimony. The jury only needed four hours of deliberation to return a unanimous verdict.
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Mike Pence gave a speech today in New Hampshire, and it actually made some news (I know! I'm as astonished as you probably are...). Pence devoted the whole speech to an argument for the Republican Party to return to its conservative roots and move dramatically away from economic populism. Which is rather odd, since by "populism" he basically means "all that stuff Donald Trump said and did while I was serving as his vice president." Consistency has never been conservatism's strong suit, I suppose....
Snark aside, it was interesting to read what Pence had to say. It remains doubtful whether he (or any other Republican) can turn back the tide of populism that Trump unleashed on the GOP, but Pence is certainly making a full-throated attempt. Here are a few excerpts from his speech, from the New York Times review of it:
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I wrote about post-debate polling last week, but I may have drawn my conclusions too soon, if the latest two polls are any indication of movement. So I thought I'd revisit things today, since Labor Day traditionally kicks off the meat of the primary campaign season. (Plus, it'll get me back in the swing of talking about politics, after the 3-day holiday weekend.)
So let's start with the two polls. The first, in the field from August 24th through the 30th, is from the Wall Street Journal. Here are the results:
[Program Note: I went looking for an old column to re-run today, and started with last year's. It seemed perfect, so I decided to just go with it. Hope everyone's having a wonderful Labor Day!]
Originally published September 5th, 2022
There will be no column today, as I will be celebrating Labor Day by not doing any. Hope everyone else is having an equally unproductive day!
-- Chris Weigant
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant
It is rare in American politics when Democrats manage to win a political "messaging" war with Republicans, but it certainly seems like they've got a doozy of an opportunity to do just that, on the issue of lowering prescription drug prices. This messaging battle really began in earnest this week, and so far Republicans are losing badly.
This week President Biden announced the first 10 prescription drugs had been chosen for price negotiations with the pharmaceutical companies. Medicare will, for the first time, use its vast purchasing power to force the drug companies to lower their obscene prices. Americans pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs precisely because the government doesn't use Medicare's bargaining power to rein in the bottomless greed of the drug companies. The Inflation Reduction Act finally gave the government the power to bargain for prices -- but it was limited to only 10 drugs, at first. So Biden announced which drugs would be covered, and then (perfect timing) after a year of negotiations, the final prices agreed to will be publicly announced... right before the 2024 election. So of course Biden and the Democrats are going to use the issue politically. Especially since fighting for insanely-high profit margins for drug companies isn't exactly a very defensible thing, politically. But that's not going to stop Republicans from trying.
Could we finally be approaching the official end to the federal "War On Weed"? That possibility now exists thanks to the Department of Health and Human Services, who just made a recommendation to the Drug Enforcement Agency. And while it is not the unconditional surrender that pro-cannabis activists have been hoping for, it certainly would be the first major retreat in this metaphorical battlefield ever. If the H.H.S. advice is adopted by the D.E.A., the federal government would scale back a position that can only be described as "Draconian," and instead adopt a position that is a whole lot closer to reality.
In one month we may face yet another government shutdown crisis, if Congress doesn't act before then to pass some sort of federal budget. And from the vantage point of one month out, the possibility of chaos seems high no matter what eventually happens. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is going to be forced to act one way or another, and it seems every option he has is going to leave some portion of his own party very angry with him.
Congress, of course, is still enjoying their obscenely-long summer break and won't return for another week or two (the Senate returns next week, but the House will enjoy an extra week in the sun and won't be back until mid-September). The budget deadline is the end of the month. So far, the House has passed exactly one of the 12 appropriations bills that make up the federal budget, while the Senate has not passed any of them. The Senate, however, has passed all 12 of the bills through committee with bipartisan votes, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is going to hit the ground running when he returns. With such broad support for the compromise budget bills, they all stand a good chance of passing the full Senate.
Way back in 2015, late-night television's Stephen Colbert had a ritual bit he'd run every time a presidential candidate dropped out of the race. Using the impressive ceiling in his studio, he projected an image of the also-ran candidate à la how the deaths of each "tribute" in The Hunger Games were announced. He called it the "Hungry For Power Games." Of course, earlier this year, late-night television was the first to go dark when the Hollywood writers went on strike, so we can't expect this sort of thing in the current campaign until they are all back at work (and being paid better). Which is a shame, because the Republican presidential field is already beginning to narrow. Today, the mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, became the first to officially drop out of the race.
You might be thinking to yourself: "Who?" -- and you would not be alone. Suarez wasn't exactly a national name to begin with, and after spending a few months campaigning for the highest office in the land, he still isn't (not by a longshot). He was pretty obviously running to raise his own profile in Florida, perhaps to run for a higher office there one day. In other words, it was a good way to build a little home-state name recognition, even if it didn't work to any noticeable effect north of the Florida-Georgia line. Unless he goes on to bigger and brighter things one day, Francis Suarez won't even make the cut as a future answer on Jeopardy! (although he could conceivably show up in the toughest of political bar quizzes... probably as the answer to: "Which obscure Republican candidate in the 2024 race answered an interview question about China by asking: 'What's a Uyghur?' and then later in the interview exposed his ignorance even further with: 'What did you call it, a Weeble?'").
