McCarthy Leading Charge to Continue (Own) Public Flogging

After two days, Kevin McCarthy is well upon his quest to become speaker for a couple of months (before he is run out for the first deal he makes). He just needs to peel off a few members with more special favors because they are obviously negotiating in good faith (;)). And while your making deals, agree to random demands from seemingly heretofore uninvolved interest groups. All that, plus supporting Trump after January 6, to be able to say you were Speaker of the House with no coherent agenda. It is not an admirable existence to be known as one of the most wishy-washy interest group transactional craven sycophantic operators in Congress—and not even a talented one at that. Turns out being one of the dumbest members of Congress might actually be his best quality.

As a side note, the insurrectionist caucus leading the effort to deny him the speakership may soften McCarthy’s image in history, putting him in a conversation with John Boehner. As the two gents have both learned, they would attack whoever was sitting in that chair. But McCarthy thought he did everything to placate them, including using all his charm to get Marjorie Greene to fall in love with him (awwww). No interest in governance, but high theater and job losses have the cave dwellers salivating at the mouth. And I guess they want to promote their favorite sophomore in Congress, Byron Donalds while they are at it.

All signs point to more days of this, so enjoy while it lasts 🙂

Fuck the Left! Biden and DNC Go Full 1990s Third Way

Republican Kasich explicitly said Joe Biden will never cave to the left. Is this the RNC or DNC?

Up until a few weeks ago, it looked like Joe Biden’s campaign to unseat failed president Donald Trump might buck the conventional wisdom and be somewhat inclusive of progressive voices in the party and grassroots activists. This wasn’t based on Biden’s team doing anything, but instead Bernie Sanders’ support of Joe and Joe’s campaigns apparent lack of clear antagonization of the left.

Well, that shit is over now.

In the past few weeks, the Biden campaign has taken the following actions that serve as evidence for a swing voter only, persuasion-based campaign strategy, eschewing the left:

• Shutout Bernie’s GOTV team in favor of Republican Ana Navarro’s lucrative contract to win reactionary Cuban voters in FL at the detriment to Latinos in the western U.S.
• Pick median Democrat Kamala Harris as VP, creating a more diverse, but centrist ticket to replicate the great success of Clinton-Kaine in 2016
• Inexplicably limit AOC’s speaking time to a one-minute recording that they can edit/axe
• Elevate former Ohio Governor and Representative John Kasich–the lead author of welfare reform–as a major campaign surrogate with the eventual payoff of a cabinet appointment

By no means is this list exhaustive, but these moves alone suggest Biden’s team thinks unicorn swing voters and disenchanted Republicans are his path to defeating Trump. While that could be true, it is not immediately obvious that the way to attract them is to play up party ID and publicly shit on the left. Maybe swing voters want policy. Maybe these groups are already going to vote against Trump no matter what. Maybe encouraging the youth and minority vote is an investment in the future, even if you don’t need them now. And maybe you do need them know, but your fetishism of conservative-leaning bipartisanship is clouding your judgment. Who knows!?

And for anyone saying Kamala is progressive, you have fallen for her strategic positioning. Her instincts are not with the progressive wing of the party, but when she has felt that taking progressive positions could propel her career, she will adopt them. She’s the west coast Kirsten Gillibrand. There is some virtue in this since that makes her a malleable politician, which is better than a Third Way ideologue like Joe Biden, but that still requires surrounding her with progressives voices that push her in that direction. A liberal voting record in the Senate is not the same as being progressive because of how the legislative agenda works. Party devotees–like Harris–often appear more liberal for Democrats, or conservative for Republicans, simply because they support their parties positions on major wedge issues of the day in a reliable fashion. This is why super progressive members that vote against the Democratic Party appear more conservative, while far-right Republicans that buck the GOP appear more liberal on both cumulative and focus vote measures. Kamala Harris is a mushy corporate Democrat who has been plotting her ascendency to the presidency for over a decade. To do that, she wanted to appear progressive while secretly assuring vested interests that she will do what the party consensus dictates. Unfortunately, Barack Obama did the exact same thing, laying the groundwork for Kamala’s approach.  Sbe’s a competent political actor, but a progressive she is not. And she deserves continued scrutiny about her consistently crummy office morale at every stage in her political career. A boss who fosters the antipathy of their employees is clearly failing at a core task of leadership.

I hope this is all overblown kabuki for now, and that if Biden wants a fusion cabinet, that fusion is not just conservadems and RINOs, but has authentic representation from this nation’s progressives. Robert Reich or Elizabeth Warren at Treasury would go a long distance on this front, especially if Cory Booker will be at HUD and Susan Rice gets State. For a big tent party, the Democratic Party never fails to show how much they hate the left-wing activists that propel them into power year after year.

Ideological Heterogeneity, Preference Cycling or Turn-Taking Kabuki? Conservative Justices and the Supreme Court

The landmark decision in Bostock v. Clayton County extends Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which protects individuals from employment discrimination on account of sex—to prohibit discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation. The logic in this ruling is quite creative and simple: if a woman marries a man named Steve, and a man marries a man named Steve, the man cannot be fired for the choice of his life partner because the only difference between the permissible and impermissible behavior was the individual’s sex. In this way, sex, gender, and sexual orientation are all linked under the non-discrimination provisions of the CRA. Simple stuff!

But of course justice and equality are not guaranteed in society, and the shocking extension of civil rights protections to gender expression and sexual orientation goes against the efforts of generations of conservative activists. You know, the people that vote for Republicans to keep their marriage sacred. In this case, Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four Democratic-appointed justices (Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan) to author the 6-3 majority decision. Gorsuch follows the lead of his mentor Anthony Kennedy in pursuing a mostly libertarian tract on the court, the former now expanding LGBTQ+ rights as the latter had done with Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. Not to be ignored, John Roberts continues his haphazard explorations on the court, always entrenching economic elite power while periodically giving something to the masses.

In authoring the majority decision, Gorsuch applied the textualist approach espoused by Antonin Scalia during his years as the intellectual architect of conservative jurisprudence. In a stunning proof of concept, Gorsuch provides the best example yet that legal philosophy does not automatically lead to certain outcomes (like textualism favoring conservatism and living document favoring liberalism). Instead, the truth is these legal approaches are at best guidelines for how to arrive at a judgment, or at worst, fancy rationales to justify partisan hackery. In this case, Gorsuch used plain language meaning and legislative intent to establish the CRA as written was meant to cover sex, gender, and sexual orientation, since sex itself can serve as a proxy for the other two in the simple thought experiment. Of course, using textualism on a statute might already run afoul of arch-conservative jurisprudence, since purportedly the only document that matters is the U.S. Constitution. Statutes are just activism. Luckily Gorsuch is not dumb enough to think the country can rely on a single founding document, and has entered into the legislative intent zone. Ironically, legislative intent was something Scalia commonly engaged as well, but I don’t remember conservative activists up in arms with him over that. At the end of the day, all that matters to the public is that the decisions make sense and comport with their view of America. Gorsuch employed a “conservative” legal approach to come to a “liberal” outcome. Legal philosophies are generally just instruments to a goal, but here Gorsuch might have employed this approach as he understood it, and was led in this particular direction.

While the question of Gorsuch’s commitment to LGBTQ+ rights or textualism is still open, this decision and the behavior of the conservative justices on the court point to a larger pattern of behavior: the conservative members of the court cycle preferences on different issues. No one is consistently moderate except maybe Roberts in a far-right world. Instead, they are all consistently right-wing, save for one-offs on random issues over the course of their tenure. On occasional issue, Roberts will put the reputation and legitimacy of the court ahead of his policy preferences. These tend to be non-economic, although the decision in NFIB v. Sebelius definitely has economic components. But Roberts will never actually challenge aristocracy in America when they have give up wealth or power. Forcing several million people onto health care is not an attack on aristocracy; rich people have health care. The individual mandate just forced poor people, dislocated workers, and young people buy coverage. Then they cut medicaid, further hurting poor people. And he is supposed to be a moderate?

Other than the Chief Justice, the court’s conservatives seldom buck conservative orthodoxy, but when they do it is in an expected manner. Brett Kavanaugh sometimes sides with liberals on antitrust, environmental, and administration of law issues. Clarence Thomas will occasionally join the liberals on criminal due process violations. And Samuel Alito will find some fairly unimportant minutia to cross the aisle. And Gorsuch has a long track record of upholding the treaty rights of Native American, making his branching out into other civil rights areas not entirely surprising. But importantly, all conservatives agree that economic power should remain unchecked and the terms of democracy are malleable to fit the exigencies of maintaining political power. These one-offs may indicate authentic, deeply-held views, or might simply be a form of silencing critics about ideology determining court rulings. To the extent that they are consistent over time, it would suggest each of these members has some level of heterodoxy within their conservative jurisprudence. But when these decisions appear out of nowhere, a more likely explanation may be the justices creating the appearance of independence to maintain the legitimacy of the court. Each one will rise up, one at a time, to take turns doing the right thing (occasionally). I suppose that is better than nothing!