Not Gonna Happen Trump has a tremendous amount of power as the executive (some of it still subject to judicial interpretation.) But anything he wants to do that requires Congress is going to be an extremely heavy lift. Notus reports: But as Republicans try to shake off a close call with a government shutdown and prepare for Donald Trump’s first 100 days, lawmakers are starting to grapple with a simple reality: They may not be able to do much of anything. “They can’t even extend government funding,” a frustrated Sen. Josh Hawley told NOTUS in December, as the House GOP nearly imploded over a stopgap spending bill. “They’re going to do this all over again in March. There’s a debt ceiling fight coming up,” he said. “Good luck.” Before Trump even takes office on Jan. 20, House Republicans must elect a speaker — a delicate, historically difficult task given the mutiny currently on Mike Johnson’s hands. Republicans then had to agree to a rules package, which was released on Wednesday.
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Ernie Tedeschi, the director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab who in March wrapped up a three-year stint on the White House Council of Economic Advisers was asked by Business Insider, “was the “vibecession” fake? He replied: “The short answer is no. The vibecession was not fake. The long answer is no, but … ,” he said. Perceptions of the economy have to do with more than the economy itself. That doesn’t mean that people were lying or that their answers didn’t have some real economic motivation, but there’s clearly more to it than the material conditions in front of them — it’s also about their ideological leanings and how that shapes what they believe is ahead.”Perceptions of the economy are definitely deeply partisan,” Tedeschi said. That’s right.
More infighting in MAGAworld: Billionaire Trump surrogate Elon Musk defended his decision to strip critics of their ability to monetize content on X after cracking down on dissent on the social network. Responding to a supporter who defended “people getting demonetized for their inexcusable behavior,” Musk declared, “Exactly. The first amendment is protection for ‘free speech’, not ‘paid speech’ ffs.” He demonetized people who criticized him specifically. I don’t know why anyone would be too surprised by that. He’s essentially an employer of people making money on X and employers have every right to muzzle speech on the job. Of course he did that. All you have to do is read his Twitter feed to see what an onanistic, self-indulgent, narcissist he is. In any case, his “free speech” crusade is very contingent on whose speech should be protected, not what or where. He likes to have it both ways.
This is terrifying: This is even more terrifying: The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was one of President Joe Biden’s chief legislative victories and the largest investment to fight the climate crisis in U.S. history. Trump and congressional Republicans have taken aim at the law to unwind much of Biden’s legacy and spur domestic fossil fuel production. Among the moves that could raise revenue: revoking the law’s $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit, new vehicle emissions rules and other incentives for clean energy production. Trump and the GOP could also green-light a major expansion of energy production on protected federal lands. Together, the CRFB projected, that could produce $700 billion in cost savings and new revenue over the next decade. One step forward two steps back. It’s a terrible, terrible mistake but I’m fairly sure this will be a priority.
Chief Justice John Roberts is mad as a hornet about all the criticism: Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday blasted what he called “illegitimate activity” aimed at undermining the independence of the judiciary. While facing criticism of contentious court rulings is part of the job for judges, some recent actions have crossed the line, Roberts said in his annual end-of-year report. He outlined four areas of concern: violence, intimidation, disinformation and threats to defy court judgments. All four “undermine our Republic, and are wholly unacceptable,” Roberts wrote. It’s pretty clear from the report that what he’s really angry about is the criticism that some of the Justices are corrupt and partisan. But it’s also highly unlikely that he’s talking about Trump who calls them every name in the book if they rule in a way he doesn’t ‘t like.
He’s itching to do it The Republicans in Congress are also very, very thirsty for a shooting war. Normally, they’d be agitating for something in the middle east, maybe China, maybe even Ukraine. But since Trump took over they have to pretend that they’re pacifist isolationists. So Mexico it is, at least at first. I wrote about this earlier, based on a lot of reporting by Rolling Stone. They are taking about a “soft invasion” in which they drop in Special Forces to “take out” the leaders of the cartels. (The other option is an actual invasion force at the border.) They just published an update: Rolling Stone talked to half a dozen former special operations soldiers and intelligence agents to see what this saber-rattling might look like in practice. On paper, they argued it was an easy operation to dismantle the cartel leadership, something that our military — particularly units like SEAL Team Six and Delta Force — has mastered after two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. To a man, all said they’d volunteer for the mission.
Any more like Massie on the back bench? Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) is still working to secure enough votes to re-up his speakership despite the endorsement of the president-elect. The House votes to elect a speaker for the 119th Congress at noon today (Friday). With the GOP’s razor-thin margin, more than two defections can sink him. The Hill: Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) affirmed his decision to not support Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) in the Speaker’s race, even if his colleague Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) would land a top spot on the House Rules Commitee. Massie was asked by former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a new host on One America News Network, if he would vote for Johnson if Roy would become the chairman of the influential committee. “Oh no. You can pull all my fingernails out, you can shove bamboo up in them, you can start cutting off my fingers,” Massie responded late Thursday. “I am not voting for Mike Johnson tomorrow, and you can take that to the bank,” he told his former colleague.
Avarice and Artifice Since before the days of traveling medicine shows, Americans displayed a knack both for peddling bullshit and for buying it. Cultural touchstone: Dorothy’s Professor Marvel. Paradigm case: the 2024 presidential election. But the latter is simply a more visible instance of the phenomenon. Let’s look at two cases of Americans’ willingness to believe that private capitalism is always superior at delivering services over collective, government, not-for-profit programs. As with snake oil, it begins with a con man. With avarice and artifice. Timothy Noah this morning considers efforts to privatize Medicare. Donald Trump claims he won’t. (Trump also makes claims about his height, weight, and net worth.) Noah cites a Wall Street Journal report from Wednesday (I don’t have access) that shows that despite widely touted claims that the private sector is more efficient at providing health care, well, it does not.
The NY Times published a fun feature called “11 Data Points and Discoveries That Surprised Us in 2024.” I thought this one was particularly pertinent to Democratic navel gazing about the election: Special elections really were all about turnout, and thus meant little for November Why were Democrats doing so well in special elections, even though polls showed Joe Biden doing so poorly? I collected and analyzed data on who had been voting in special elections, and this chart was my “eureka” moment. On the y-axis: how well Democrats fared in a special election, compared with the 2020 election result. On the x-axis: our estimates for the 2020 vote choice of the same special electorates, based on exactly who voted and our previous estimates for the likelihood that registered voters backed Mr. Biden in 2020. As you can see, there’s a decent one-to-one relationship, implying that these election results were mostly a function of turnout, not persuasion. The biggest surprise, for me, wasn’t simply that there was a decent correlation between turnout and results.
I think we may have found out why Trump is suddenly talking about territorial expansion. Somebody mentioned a little history over dinner and YMCA at MAL and he got all excited. He thinks it will be his Louisiana Purchase and he’ll go down in history as bigger than Alexander the Great. Apropos of nothing: You’ll be glad to know that his minions are hard at work normalizing this lunacy: