newrepublic--2020-10-15--Inside the Republican Plot for Permanent Minority Rule

Here ’ s one all-too-plausible way that Election Night 2020 might play out .
It ’ s just after 11 p.m. , when Fox News cuts live to President Trump ’ s reelection party .
Millions of mail-in ballots remain to be counted in the swing states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin , but Trump claims victory based on the early tabulations from in-person voting .
“ We must go with the election night results , ” he tells a cheering crowd of Republicans sporting MAGA caps , and no more than a smattering of face masks .
“ This is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ says , insisting as he has countless times over the past year that mail-in and absentee ballots are fraudulent and corrupt .
He announces that his legal team will demand that courthouses nationwide end the counting of fake ballots .
“ Trump Reelected , ” the Fox News chyron obligingly blares .
Democrats urge patience as these key swing states continue the torturous tally ; the constitutional system strains and bursts .
In Pennsylvania , it ’ s clear that mail-in ballots have tipped the state blue .
Wisconsin ’ s conservative state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ count entirely , and , as lawyers battle , the state ’ s GOP-dominated legislature makes clear that it will use the constitutional authority reaffirmed in Bush v. Gore and appoint a slate of Republican electors .
It ’ s an entirely foreseeable outcome—and a completely preventable one .
If Pennsylvania ’ s and Wisconsin ’ s legislatures joined the nearly 40 states that allow election administrators to begin preparing mail-in ballots on receipt , or simply prior to Election Day , so much uncertainty—to say nothing of an epic constitutional struggle—could be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ these legislative majorities in each state choose to avoid it .
The story of why these legislatures , and dozens of others like them throughout the country , are ignoring the alarming enclosure of voting rights from on high is the story of the rise of the Trumpian right .
It ’ s a tangled saga stretching back to the early aughts , as enterprising political operatives on the right began experimenting with new , high-tech ways to marginalize and disenfranchise key constituencies of voters that were starting to emerge as the building @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It involves the militant weaponization of a landmark Supreme Court decision essentially rescinding the most substantive provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act .
But at its core , the Republican assault on open ballot access and fair legislative representation hinges on a simple offensive : wipe out competitive voting districts , and erect elaborate new requirements for voting , together with cumbersome new logistical obstacles to turning out on Election Day .
President Donald Trump bears daily testimony to the success of this multifront campaign against voting rights , not merely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ presidency on a minority of the 2016 popular vote , but in his many Twitter outbursts and campaign rally broadsides depicting the push to ensure widespread voting by mail-in balloting as a left-wing effort to “ rig ” the election ’ s outcome by engineering rampant voter fraud .
( This delusional assault on ballot access has also won the allegiance of Trump ’ s attorney general , William Barr , who has peddled entirely fabricated stories of voting-fraud prosecutions on national television . )
The spectacle of a sitting president seeking to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the expansion of access to the ballot , is unprecedented in our history , and a threat to the continued existence of our democracy should Trump win reelection .
But the Republican assault on voting rights has been a far more quiet and protracted effort , taking shape in closed-door campaign strategy sessions and state legislative lobbies ( or even secret hotel suites in Ohio called “ the bunker ” or a private “ map room ” in a Madison , Wisconsin , law office ) .
And it begins , strangely enough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bipartisan bid to secure the long-term future of the Voting Rights Act .
To understand how far the right-wing assault on voting rights has traversed in a comparatively short time , consider the late-career arc of retiring U.S. Representative James Sensenbrenner .
The Wisconsin Republican was first elected to his state ’ s assembly during the tumultuous year of 1968 , and he recalled in a 2017 op-ed how Black constituents in Milwaukee ’ s poorest neighborhoods had described to him the many obstructions that stood between them and the ballot box .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ again as a second-term congressman , during hearings before the constitutional rights subcommittee on the first reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act .
Powerful voices within his party , including Representative Henry Hyde and William Bradford Reynolds , the assistant attorney general who ran the Justice Department ’ s civil rights division , urged President Ronald Reagan to veto it .
One of the most robust voices inside the department arguing against Section 2 of the act : a 26-year-old Washington newcomer named John Roberts .
Sensenbrenner , whose relationship with Reagan dated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the 1960s , went to the White House and told the president that of all the civil rights legislation that emerged from that era , the Voting Rights Act had been the most transformative , but there was still much work to be done .
Reagan ultimately signed a reauthorization that not only extended but strengthened the act , and in a lavish ceremony hailed the right to vote as “ the crown jewel of American liberties , and we will not see its luster diminished .
”

This lethal combination is now lurching into gear alongside another deadly force: the Covid-19 pandemic. As the need for dramatically expanded mail-in voting became clear throughout the 2020 primaries, a fierce political and legal fight ensued over just how it would be done. Who could vote absentee? Would a pandemic qualify as an excuse to vote via mail? Would an absentee ballot need to be witnessed or notarized? Would states pay the return postage? Would registered voters automatically be sent an application for an absentee ballot, or would it need to be requested? When would a ballot need to be postmarked in order to be valid? Could they be returned to an official drop box, or must they enter the wobbly U.S. postal system? All too often, the answer would depend on where you lived, and how easy—or how difficult—your state legislature wanted the process to be. And the answer to that question, in turn, depended on how gerrymandered your district was—and how committed state Republicans were to making it as difficult as possible to cast a ballot.
Ten states and the District of Columbia decided to send ballots to all active voters. New England states, including Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut—all places held to be deeply traditional about voting laws—liberalized absentee ballot rules. In Texas, however, the attorney general brushed aside lawsuits that fought to let every Texas voter cast an absentee ballot during 2020 because of the pandemic. He went so far as to threaten prosecution for anyone who was healthy and under the age of 65 who used fear of Covid-19 as an excuse to vote remotely. Then, in October, Governor Abbott issued an executive proclamation that limited each of Texas’s counties, some of which are among the most sprawling and populous in the nation, to one ballot drop box. It was a breathtaking act of voter suppression in broad daylight. Harris County, which includes Houston, was forced to slash its dozen drop boxes down to one. In Iowa, where a Republican secretary of state sent every registered voter an absentee ballot application during the primary—generating record turnout and keeping 80 percent of Iowans from voting in person—the Republican legislature took action to stop him from taking the same step during November’s election, when a competitive U.S. Senate seat would be on the ballot. When Oklahoma’s state Supreme Court agreed with voters that leaving their homes to get absentee ballots notarized posed an unnecessary burden during a pandemic, the GOP legislature reinstated and toughened the requirement just days later. After nearly two-thirds of Floridians voted to amend the state’s constitutions and restore voting rights to 1.4 million state residents who had been convicted of a felony, the state’s gerrymandered legislature required all fines and fees to be paid before re-enfranchisement—essentially a poll tax—and a group of mostly Trump-appointed judges let them get away with it. At the height of the coronavirus outbreak, Wisconsin Republicans refused to waive a ballot-witnessing requirement for its April elections—which resulted in the rejection of almost 23,000 absentee ballots, disenfranchising citizens who were unable to properly supply that proof during a pandemic. “It’s hard to see how any sentient human being can conclude otherwise than the Republicans are going to do every single thing they can, on every single day, to try to stop people from casting a vote,” Sarbanes said. “And this election is going to be a referendum on whether that’s how the people of this country want to operate or be governed.”
All of which brings us back to the nightmare scenario haunting 2020 presidential balloting. In 2016, three of our most severely gerrymandered states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, tipped the Electoral College toward Donald Trump in 2018 by a slender margin of 80,000 votes.


newrepublic--2020-10-15--Jeff Bezos and the Golden Age of Climate Hypocrisy

Of course Jeff Bezos is giving money to Republicans .
On Tuesday , during Amazon ’ s annual sale event known as Prime Day , E & E News reported that the same month that Amazon announced a Climate Pledge to offset more carbon dioxide than it produces , Amazon ’ s Political Action Committee donated $ 20,500 to besieged Republican candidates .
Overall , from January 2019 through this August , 70 percent of the PAC ’ s Senate donations went toward supporting Republicans .
To state the obvious : Republican politicians tend to oppose serious policy that would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seem like rank hypocrisy , given the company ’ s Climate Pledge , and given that Bezos himself recently set up a $ 10 billion Bezos Earth Fund , calling climate change “ the biggest threat to our planet.
” But in fact this kind of hypocrisy is wildly common and makes a lot of sense from Amazon ’ s perspective .
A growing number of people in the U.S. and abroad are deeply concerned about the climate crisis , and are smart enough to know that the smiley packages that show up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ big carbon footprint to get there .
Amazon workers have been actively organizing for their employer to step up its game on that front , staging walkouts over Amazon ’ s climate impact , donations to climate deniers , and the company ’ s contracts with fossil fuel producers .
It ’ s in the company ’ s interest to make a good show of its climate commitments , including through flashy moves like buying up a “ Climate Pledge Arena ” in Seattle .
It might even save Amazon money in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ power gets cheaper .
And a good , green public relations strategy can help convince regulators that Amazon doesn ’ t need to be regulated .
Amazon , of course , desperately needs to be regulated , with its climate impact being just one example of where it could use more government oversight .
It reports that its operations emitted 51.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide last year , up 15 percent over the prior year to a years ’ worth of emissions from 13 coal fired power plants .
Notably , that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ support Amazon Web Services lends to the oil and gas industry , which uses Amazon ’ s algorithms to arrive at more efficient ways to unearth new fossil fuels .
Maintaining Republican control over the Senate , however , makes it more likely that Amazon ’ s greenhouse gas emissions along the length of its massive supply are never meaningfully regulated .
Its Climate Pledge is a way to make the public and liberal politicians feel okay about that .

Like his thoughts on Trump or the state of the GOP, whatever Bezos’s personal thoughts happen to be on the climate crisis don’t really matter. The mission of his sprawling logistics empire is to make money. As the richest man on earth, he’s done well on that front. This year, Bezos’s fortune has grown by at least $48 billion—by $13 billion in one day!—in a year when millions have been cast out of work as hundreds of thousands of people have died from a global pandemic.
But what powers Amazon isn’t the genius of Jeff Bezos so much as an army of underpaid workers scurrying about his warehouses; backdoor subsidies pushing the United States Postal Service to its limit; and a tax system that allows the company to pay $0 in federal taxes. Billionaires, in any event, don’t really earn money so much as pay people to park money in places where it can reproduce. This is a status quo Bezos, like most other plutocrats, would probably like to maintain. Republicans, in this regard, are a reliable investment.
This sort of ideological doublespeak is common. Fortune 500 companies and their CEOs tend to give generously on both sides of the aisle. Fossil fuel executives’ partisan penchant to give inordinately to Republicans is unique in that sense, with their wealth bracket tending to adopt a more balanced approach in trying to win over whoever’s in charge.


newrepublic--2020-10-15--What Did Carlos Lozada Learn From Reading 150 Trump Books?

Over the past four years , there have been dozens of books published about Donald Trump .
Some have recorded his numerous failures and general incompetence , others his Churchillian magnificence and world-historical accomplishments .
They have documented his real , imagined , and unverified ties to Vladimir Putin ; his mental state ( he is either a genius or suffering from a host of DSM-5 disorders ) ; his thuggishness and authoritarianism ; his role in the demise of the Republican Party ; and the various political and social movements that have emerged in response to his provocations .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ situate the president in American history , to explain the present , and to ensure this doesn ’ t happen again in future .
All of these books , in one way or another , aim to answer the question on everyone ’ s mind : Just what , exactly , is happening ?
And now , for some reason , we also have a book about all of those books .
Carlos Lozada ’ s What Were We Thinking aspires to be an omnibus volume , a mosaic composed of the best @ @ @ @ @ @ @ books about Trump ’ s presidency—an “ intellectual history ” ( to use Lozada ’ s subtitle ) of the last four years .
What Were We Thinking is , instead , not much more than the sum of its many quotations .
A mirror image of the vast majority of the 150 books under review , it is a muddled work that aspires to reckon with this strange , bewildering period but is instead swallowed up and contorted by it .
What Were We Thinking is most useful as an indication of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ overwhelmed by the Trump presidency—and how far we still have to go to make sense of the very recent past .
Much of the problem lies in the material .
As Lozada acknowledges , “ Individually , these books try to show a way forward .
Collectively , they reveal how we ’ re stuck.
” One can ’ t imagine a longer way around the barn than reading 150 nonfiction books to identify the very basic problem all of us are facing right now : We want to find a way out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of nonfiction a better guide to the present moment than , say , movies or speeches or TikTok videos ?
Well , because Lozada is the nonfiction book critic at The Washington Post .
Although he has a set of favorites—including Timothy Snyder ’ s Facebook post-turned-pamphlet On Tyranny , the Mueller Report , AEI scholar Yuval Levin ’ s A Time to Build , and Michael Lewis ’ s The Fifth Risk—few of the books on offer provide a great deal of insight .
“ If journalism is still history ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ first draft of how we think about that history , how we seek our place in it , ” he writes .
The confusing repetition of “ first draft ” here raises some questions .
If journalism is the first draft of history , shouldn ’ t the books be … second drafts ?
Third drafts ?
At any rate , what Lozada has given us is a rough draft about rough drafts .

In prose that channels the roundtable copy of a prize committee, he notes that the best books “enable and ennoble a national reexamination—one that Trump has attempted to carry out on his own and on our behalf. They are the books that show how our current conflicts fit into the nation’s story, that hold fast to the American tradition of always seeing ourselves anew.” What Were We Thinking plays out, in contrast to this ideal, as a series of capsule reviews. This approach calls to mind one of those Very Short Introduction books, and it is unclear why anyone would need to read a Very Short Introduction to the last four years when we have just lived them.
Lozada is a critical Goldilocks, searching for a Trump book that’s not too hot and not too cold. The works of Trump sycophants like Hugh Hewitt and Jeanine Pirro are embarrassments, he concedes. On the other hand, the anti-Trump works of Republican defectors and Lincoln Project types lack credibility—there is not enough introspection about the GOP’s pre-Trump drift into nativism and demagoguery.
Resistance literature, meanwhile, is too partisan. Lozada depicts writers such as Naomi Klein and, uh, the founders of Indivisible as mini-Trumps working to exploit this political moment for liberal causes. (Klein is condemned for urging a new kind of “shock doctrine”—for raising the minimum wage and fighting climate change. How unseemly!) In general, he plays Henry Higgins to the pussy hat–wearing Elizas. “To imagine that you can adopt the ruthlessness of Tea Party–style tactics yet stop short of pursuing them to your own political endgame is to be enormously confident about your self-control,” he chides.


newrepublic--2020-10-15--The Devastatingly Low Bar of “Official” Poverty

We now have new numbers to confirm what everyone who received a $ 1,200 stimulus check or extra unemployment benefits over the summer likely already knows : Additional government money is a good thing during an economic collapse .
As The New York Times reported this week , two recent studies have found that over the last few months , between six to eight million additional people officially fell below the poverty line , in the absence of renewed government aid , after several provisions in the Cares Act expired in July .
This , of course , suggests that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : As poverty researcher H. Luke Shaefer told the Times , “ It wasn ’ t perfect , but hands down it ’ s the most successful thing we ’ ve ever done in negating hardship.
” In July , for instance , 70 percent of people surveyed by the Fed said they could cover a $ 400 emergency expense , which was higher than the number of people who said the same even prior to the pandemic .
But it ’ s also the case that the official poverty numbers alone have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strain in this country , and that millions of people in the United States hover just above the poverty line or continually drift back and forth across it .
( The official label for the group that doesn ’ t quite make the poverty cutoff is “ near poor , ” a distinction that I suspect is little comfort to those who might be able to pay their utility bills one month but know they won ’ t the next . )
The weekly $ 600 unemployment supplement and no-strings checks supplied by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pull back people from the brink of disaster but also demonstrated that there ’ s little other than political inertia that keeps the government from providing every person with the resources needed not just to clear the low bar of the poverty line but to live a decent and dignified life .
Most of our existing measurements of poverty also raise the question of low expectation when it comes to how people live and what they deserve .
If the highest aspiration of our present policy regime is to lift people out of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , what kind of life does that guarantee ?
Shouldn ’ t we reach for more than whatever rests just above abject misery ?
Researchers have previously criticized the way the poverty rate is calculated , which is based on a theoretical household budget from more than half a century ago that fails to take into account a number of safety-net programs ( and also presumes that every household comes with a housewife who , as the late economist Molly Orshansky put it , “ will be a careful shopper , a skillful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will prepare all the family ’ s meals at home ” ) .

For a more accurate gauge of poverty, some economists have advocated using the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which includes benefits like food stamps when measuring income, and therefore better reveals the extent to which such programs help people—or, conversely, how dire things become when such benefits are slashed or shuttered. Yet even this expanded definition has its shortcomings; as Center for Economic Policy and Research fellow Shawn Fremstad recently wrote, under this measure, “two adults raising two children in 2019 needed only $28,881 to not be poor (assuming they rented and lived somewhere with average housing costs).” For context, the average cost of a full-time childcare program was $16,000 that year.
The poverty rate, in other words, is only one of many stark reminders of how difficult it is to make ends meet in an economy that’s set up to deliver spoils to the top at the expense of everyone else. Today, the bottom 50 percent of the country owns almost no wealth, and one estimate last year found that a staggering four out of five Americans, or around 78 percent, were living paycheck to paycheck. While not everyone in that group is technically living in poverty, their distance to that line is perhaps shorter than official poverty measures can capture.
And yet there’s a political contingent that astonishingly still seems to find any assessment of scarcity gratuitous. “I’m not as alarmed about poverty as I am about unemployment,” conservative policy adviser Jason Turner told the Times on Thursday. “Poverty is an arbitrary income threshold, and people who dip below it, they make adjustments.” That’s a particularly cruel way to describe the kinds of serious trade-offs that people who don’t have enough money are forced to make.


newrepublic--2020-10-15--The Mysteries of Emily in Paris

The Mysteries of Emily in Paris

The ruinous effect contracting Covid-19 has had on my short-term memory is , happily , not a problem when it comes to remembering the key plot points of Netflix ’ s soapy , flimsy sitcom Emily in Paris , each new episode being more or less a carbon copy of its predecessor .
Emily ( Lily Collins ) , a young Chicagoan who does not speak a word of French , invariably does something très Américaine and scandaleuse , like , for example , being pleasant to a co-worker , or eating carbs , or attempting to introduce a rigid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , inexplicably styled after the ten commandments .
Emily ’ s fellow employees , being French , are forced to take time out of their already hectic schedules of smoking , philandering , scowling , discussing sexual positions in the office , being perverts , pooh-poohing the general ideal of “ feminism , ” and shopping for lingerie to either disapprove of her or hit on her .
Eventually , it is agreed that Emily—despite being unbelievably uninteresting , gregarious to the point of irksomeness , and the author of such dazzling social @ @ @ @ @ @ @ = heart emoji ” —is an internet-literate luxury marketing wunderkind , the office savior , and perhaps the most alluring woman this side of the Seine .
She is a fetching worker bee , a sentient version of one of those grocery bags with “ Have a Nice Day ” printed on it .
“ I enjoy work and accomplishment , ” she says , smiling the most American smile .
“ It makes me happy.
” Emily in Paris has not , as it turns out , made viewers or critics very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Americans has made its message appear muddled , the result being a show that comes across as half-escapist , half-absurdist , all tooth-grindingly unpleasant .
Does it believe that Americans are corn-fed , flashy capitalist pig-dogs who could stand to learn restraint from their chill European cousins , that the French are pompous sex maniacs who need to be dragged into the present day by hip Americans , or some unholy mix of both ?
The synopsis “ Emily brings her can-do attitude to Paris ” is already off-putting enough for people like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ having a can-do attitude within a two-mile radius of their person : Throw in lines like “ the whole city looks like Ratatouille ” and “ you have to try my coq ” —mais oui , bien sûr , hon he hon !
—and Emily in Paris begins to look positively radioactive , a critical bomb engineered to be hate-watched in a single , wincing gulp .
It does not help that Emily , a purported social media visionary , uses Instagram as if she ’ s in her fifties , her bad @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that even factoring in her beauty , her rise to the status of an influencer seems implausible .
There may be no more obvious indication that this series is not the creation of an actual millennial than the plotline in which Emily , incensed that the French word for vagina is masculine and not feminine , goes viral with the statement “ the vagina is not male.
” In the show , her post ends up being shared by the wife of the president , Brigitte Macron ; in life , one hopes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about its presumably unintentional undertone of transphobia .
( There is , it turns out , no H.R .
department—when Emily ’ s male boss leaves a lingerie set on her desk with a note about sexism versus sexiness , it is written off as Parisian rather than as harassment . )
And yet : Emily in Paris is at present one of Netflix ’ s most popular new shows , the subject of innumerable articles and listicles and a plethora of commentary on Twitter .
The consensus would appear to be that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bad in the perfect mode for circa-2020 bingeing : lightweight and unchallenging enough to avoid being offensive , and absurd enough to allow viewers to poke holes in its logic .
Why would an American , greeting a new French neighbor who was born in Normandy , explain that they were familiar with the place from “ Saving Private Ryan—you know , D Day ?
” ?
Why would a couturier want his marketing to be handled by a girl who self-identifies as “ ringarde , ” which the show translates as “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a 27-year-old woman ’ s immediate reference for the architectural style of Paris ?
Looking for sensible answers to one ’ s questions about Emily in Paris is a pointless exercise , like trying to intellectualize one of those screen savers that looks like the interior of a fish tank .
Brainless , bright , and soothing , the monotony of its plotlines is near-meditative .
Where else , In These Frightening And Uncertain Times , can one guarantee an absolute lack of unpredictability ?
On her first day at the office , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in fashion marketing—to date , her biggest coup has been a social media campaign promoting a new diabetes medicine , increasing revenue by 63 percent .
“ So you create the disease , ” one of the Paris office ’ s employees asks her , “ and then you treat the disease , and then you market the treatment of the disease ?
” Americans , he tells her cruelly , are all “ fat ” ; they eat “ disgusting ” food , unlike the French , who develop their diabetes the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ meals with cigarettes .
Setting aside the discomfort inherent in watching an actress who has openly discussed her anorexia being dressed down about “ fat ” and “ disgusting ” Americans , it is interesting that the show brings up the idea of being addicted to unnecessary trash—there may be nobody more qualified to address the invention , manufacture , sale , and remarketing of compulsive , sugary indulgences than Emily in Paris ’ s prolific show-runner , Darren Star , who created both Beverly Hills 90201 and Melrose Place in the early @ @ @ @ @ @ @ produce this show ’ s most direct spiritual ancestor , Sex and the City .

Much like Carrie, the sex columnist and shopping addict at the center of that earlier series, Emily is a designer-label fiend, a clothes-horse whose seemingly inexhaustible supply of suitors all conform to very narrow, very white, traditionally masculine beauty ideals. The two women share a stylist, the eccentric, singular Patricia Field, and they share a peculiar prissiness in sexual matters, even as they try to act like libertines. They live in perfect, neat apartments, despite both places supposedly being shabby and low-cost. Still, where Emily seems to breeze through life as if nothing had consequences, Carrie at least sometimes suffered, behaved badly, and betrayed those she loved, and if her sex life was less piquant than it might have been, her friend Samantha’s added zest. A replacement for those suffering withdrawal from Sex and the City’s largely saccharine fantasy about four wealthy, high-powered, good-looking women with enough free time for weekly three-hour lunches, Star’s new show feels like a Snickers subbing in for a Ladurée macaron: still very bad for you but in a less sophisticated way.
Compared with Sex and the City, Star’s new show feels like a Snickers subbing in for a Ladurée macaron: still very bad for you, but in a less sophisticated way.
When Emily’s black-clad, chic, middle-aged boss, Sylvie (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), informs her that she “has no mystery,” she is correct: While we know relatively little about Emily’s inner life, “mystery” usually implies some hidden depth, some enigmatic quality. What Emily is is fairly hollow, all that sound and all those furiously clashing patterns signifying nothing. Accidentally, Emily in Paris functions as a critique of American self-centeredness, an extroverted tendency to see oneself as the protagonist in any situation. Egocentric New York women who hope to discover themselves through a brief sojourn in Paris are not an unusual occurrence in film, literature, and television. (A new novel out this month, The Superrationals by Stephanie LaCava, twists the American girl in Paris trope to do the same work by design that Emily in Paris does unintentionally—its brown-haired, quirky-gorgeous cipher of a heroine, adored by men and entrenched in an industry every bit as luxurious as high-end fashion marketing, is carefully written to be empty and evasive, the result less light and aspirational than it is coolly existential.) Carrie Bradshaw ended up in Paris, too, chasing her serious Russian boyfriend, whom she teased for being pretentious, and whom she eventually left for a man so American that she compared him to the Chrysler building.
It took Carrie two episodes to decide that she was not Paris material, the city boring her within two or three weeks of her arrival. It did not occur to me until a recent rewatch that the only time she appears to be happy on the trip is when she stumbles across what she describes as “my French fan base—all two of them” in a bookshop. “I love Sex and ze City!” one bookseller shrieks, fawningly. “I am, uh, ow you say, ze ‘single girl’?” “I have ze sex,” her gay co-worker cries, covering his mouth with ecstasy, “you have ze sex! We all have ze sex!” After an afternoon of sulking, Carrie is immediately reanimated. The resentment that she harbors toward Paris and Parisians is not because she does not speak the language, and her problem with her boyfriend is not that he happens to be busy with his exhibition: Her concern is that, in Paris, she is no longer the center of attention, merely another American girl who thinks the lighting display on the Eiffel Tower is charmant and not a hideous concession to tourism.


newrepublic--2020-10-16--“Over Half of the People Who Used to Grow Crops Here Can’t Do It Anymore”

Since 2017 , extreme drought has ravaged Canyon de Chelly , on the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona .
In normal years , the area receives an average of 12 inches of rain .
That ’ s not the case recently .
The problem is exacerbated by lack of water infrastructure .
State and federal government officials have sometimes withheld water or funding for water infrastructure from Navajo , or Diné , communities during disputes over water rights .
Sylvia Watchman is a farmer from Chinle , Arizona , a town of fewer than 5,000 inhabitants on the outskirts of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a member of the Navajo Nation , has lived all her life .
Chinle gets its name from a Navajo word meaning “ flowing out , ” referring to the water that once rushed down from the mountains to fertilize the valley .
Native farmers can ’ t count on that water anymore .
Since the 1990s , record drought has put both the farming and culture of the Navajo , or Diné , nation at great risk .
“ When I drive around the valley , all I see is this dry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Over half of the people who used to grow crops here can ’ t do it anymore .
If nobody plants on the land , it will continue getting even harder , making planting next year almost impossible.
” Thousands of years ago , the natural water resources and rich soil made the valley an ideal place to plant crops and raise families .
The melting snow from nearby mountains was another steady water source for fertilizing the land .

Since 2017, extreme drought has ravaged Canyon de Chelly, on the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona. In normal years, the area receives an average of 12 inches of rain. That’s not the case recently. The problem is exacerbated by lack of water infrastructure. State and federal government officials have sometimes withheld water or funding for water infrastructure from Navajo, or Diné, communities during disputes over water rights.
Sylvia Watchman is a farmer from Chinle, Arizona, a town of fewer than 5,000 inhabitants on the outskirts of Canyon de Chelly, where Watchman, a member of the Navajo Nation, has lived all her life. Chinle gets its name from a Navajo word meaning “flowing out,” referring to the water that once rushed down from the mountains to fertilize the valley.


newrepublic--2020-10-16--The Dishonesty of Amy Coney Barrett’s “Textualist” Pose

In their two days of interrogating Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett , Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats deftly executed Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ’ s messaging strategy : “ Health care , health care , health care.
” Over and over , they skewered Republicans for , as typified by Senator Kamala Harris , “ scrambling to confirm this nominee because they need one more Trump judge on the bench before November 10 to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act.
” That result , Democratic questioners constantly reiterated , would strip affordable insurance coverage from over 20 million Americans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Americans with preexisting conditions ” to denials of coverage or exorbitant premium charges .
By thus focusing on the real-world impact of terminating Obamacare and spotlighting Judge Barrett ’ s record of disparaging 2012 and 2015 Supreme Court decisions that upheld the law , they alarmed viewers and visibly rattled their Republican colleagues wary about the upcoming election .
Here ’ s the bad news : What the Democrats ’ strategy did not do was dent Barrett ’ s defense of the legitimacy of her approach to making her decision , whatever result @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that she simply “ applies the law as written , ” letting the chips fall where they may , in line with the “ textualist ” credo she espouses .
To that defense , Senate Judiciary Democrats , also predictably , did not respond at all .
Chronically , Democrats and liberals assume that , especially in political fora like a Senate hearing , the target audience—television and streaming viewers—care only about the real-world stakes in legal clashes .
They disdain messaging to show why they , and not their opponents , care @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as well as about real-world results .
In this conceit , Democrats and liberals are wrong .
Ordinary people tend to care most about threats to their welfare .
But when a legal dispute is on the table , experience shows that they also care about whose side the law is on , and why .
Republicans and conservatives do not make this mistake .
They come up with catchy lines to mass-market their legal claims .
When Democrats and liberals offer no response , conservatives win by default .
I know this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ months and years leading up to the ACA ’ s first encounter with the Supreme Court , in 2012 , I worked with ACA proponents in and out of the Obama administration , crafting strategies to build public support for upholding the law .
Around those conference tables , advocates consistently spurned suggestions to rebut ACA opponents ’ legal messaging .
Our opponents ’ attack lines stressed that the ACA individual mandate was unconstitutional because , “ if the feds can make you buy insurance , the feds can make you eat broccoli.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ bite cogently packaged their core legal argument—that the administration ’ s interpretation meant that there was “ no limiting principle ” to the intrusive reach of federal power under the Constitution ’ s interstate commerce clause .

The administration and its allies never surfaced a counter to ACA opponents’ legal messaging. It was hardly surprising, then, that two months before the oral argument, a Gallup poll on public attitudes toward the ACA litigation reported that 54 percent of respondents who supported the ACA thought it was unconstitutional. They had, after all, never heard anything to the contrary. In such an environment, conservative justices could have felt unconstrained by potential public backlash to an anti-ACA decision—as evidently did the four conservative dissenters, who stridently demanded wholesale invalidation of the law.
In the current constitutional debate over Obamacare, the embrace of “textualism” by anti-ACA conservatives like Judge Barrett serves the same function as the broccoli sound bite served in 2012: Endlessly repeated, that moniker attests to the bona fides of their claim that they scrupulously follow the law. Democrats need to pierce that balloon.
Democrats should not get ensnared in a wonky kerfuffle over whether “textualism” is a sound interpretational methodology. Their goal is not to titillate liberal legal scholars.
Democrats have, thus far, passed on a golden opportunity to impugn conservative claims to unique fidelity to the law “as written.” But there’s no reason why they couldn’t frame this critique during the remainder of Barrett’s confirmation battle and amplify that message after her expected accession to the court. Democrats should not get ensnared in a wonky kerfuffle over whether “textualism” is a sound interpretational methodology. Their goal is not to titillate liberal legal scholars. Instead, they should expose the “textualist” mantle flaunted by Barrett and her allies as a fluid, fair-weather pose; a catechism that’s been historically manipulated, or even ignored outright, in whatever measure is necessary on any given day to advance conservative political agendas from the bench. Conservatives’ undying zeal to ax the ACA is the matter before lawmakers today, but anything those lawmakers might want to do on behalf of the American people is equally at risk.


newrepublic--2020-10-16--The Democrats Aren’t Serious About Campaign Finance Reform

This week , Biden campaign manager Jen O ’ Malley Dillon announced that the campaign had $ 432 million in cash on hand .
This is a truly absurd amount of money for any campaign to have .
It is mental .
Biden ’ s campaign is sitting on nearly half a billion dollars in cash , and it only has three weeks left to make use of it , the horrible possibility of expensive litigation following the election notwithstanding .
And it ’ s not just the Biden campaign who has stacked that cheese : ActBlue , the site @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from donors , announced that campaigns have raised $ 1.5 billion through its platform in the last three months , almost as much as the site raised in the entire 2018 cycle .
Senate candidates like South Carolina ’ s Jaime Harrison ( $ 57 million ) and Iowa ’ s Theresa Greenfield ( $ 28 million ) have , in recent days , touted their own record-breaking amounts of campaign lucre .
This massive wave of small-dollar donations for Democratic candidates is good news for anyone who wants Democrats to win .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ up that Democrats are seeing the light and moving away from the other kind of campaign cash—the sort extracted from millionaires and billionaires at closed-door fundraisers , lobbyists with an agenda , and corporations with only future profits in mind .
No matter how many Regular People Bucks come in , campaigns will always seek cash from big donors too .
It is the opposite of Three Stooges Syndrome : The door will always get bigger to accommodate whatever sort of money wants to come in .
Small dollars will never crowd out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ campaign fundraising exploded in August , most notably after he named Kamala Harris as his running mate .
In the 48 hours after the pick was announced , according to The New York Times , the campaign raised $ 48 million , with 80 percent of that coming from online donors .
More than 50 percent of Biden ’ s fundraising total in August came from small-dollar donors , defined as those giving less than $ 200 .
But that leaves almost 50 percent that came from bigger donors , donors with more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their deep pockets .
Biden ’ s campaign has still taken in millions from big donors , some of whom have given amounts in the multiple millions to his allied super PAC , Priorities USA .
Like Hillary Clinton before him , Biden also has a joint fundraising committee with the Democatic party that allows donors to give more than $ 600,000 in one check , circumventing the limit of $ 2,800 on general election donations to his actual campaign .
More than 300 donors have given over $ 50,000 to the Biden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Those donors include James Murdoch , son of Rupert Murdoch ; Laurene Powell Jobs , the billionaire savior of media whose company Emerson Collective keeps cutting and shutting down publications ; Meg Whitman , who runs Quibi , the funniest company on Earth ; and David Zapolsky , the Amazon attorney who plotted to describe a rabblerousing Amazon warehouse worker as “ not smart , or articulate ” and to make him “ the face of the entire union/organizing movement.
” The sort of cool chums you ’ d love to hang out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ other words .
It is hardly surprising that there hasn ’ t been much discussion of big donors on either side in this election , save for random outbursts of “ SOROS ?
” from various members of the Republican party , which are de rigueur outcries among the party ’ s paranoiacs .
There ’ s a lot going on in the world , and the president is an increasingly aggressive and unmoored racist .
People feel strongly about getting him the hell out , and though the Republican party is obviously @ @ @ @ @ @ @ isn ’ t necessarily the most salient line of attack for Democrats when the Trump administration ’ s world-historical failure to contend with the Covid-19 pandemic is providing material .
Also , Bernie Sanders lost : Democrats signaled a lack of interest in getting money out of politics when it made that choice .

But this issue is not going away. It will remain as long as we have elections, which is hopefully something that will happen again in this country; it may become more pressing after the all-absorbing issue of Trump has gone. It is undoubtedly true that this huge surge in small donations is largely due to Trump and the searing fear of another four years of misrule and the plain, pure hatred of everything he does. Such is the power of the #Resistance mindset. Absent that spark, small-dollar fundraising may suffer in 2022—not universally, and not inevitably for any one campaign, but campaigns will have to work much harder to earn the same dollars they do this cycle. (Campaigns that invest in their lists, instead of sending their donors increasingly deranged or outright misleading emails that turn them off from donating in the future, will do better.)
The party’s progressive-to-left base has always valued campaign finance reform, even when its attention is taken up by more pressing issues.
Next cycle, Democrats will have to raise money to compete with the always well-funded Republican Party, with its built-in advantage with the capitalist class, but without the demonic Trump to fundraise against. Democrats may have to promise “policies” that “actually help people,” for example. The party’s progressive-to-left base has always valued campaign finance reform, even when its attention is taken up by more pressing issues. Nevertheless, it’s a difficult topic to maintain energy around, partly because few candidates actually care about getting money out of politics more than about getting themselves into office, and partly because it is hard to imagine overcoming the problem without massive reforms to our democracy, like getting a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. (Though the “massive reform” clause is true of almost every policy liberals want.)
This Congress, Democrats did propose a bill that would have addressed campaign finance. In fact, it was their first bill, HR 1, which sought to establish a small-dollar matching program, in which candidates could receive a six-to-one match for donations up to $200. But the act, even as passed in 2019 with no belief it would ever actually be enacted, limits the program’s effect on big money in politics. For presidential elections, candidates would only be able to receive a maximum of $250 million in public funds, which is nowhere near enough to compete in today’s elections: Joe Biden raised $365 million in one month this cycle; in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and allied super PACs raised over $1 billion. It would not limit donations to the national or state parties, or to super PACs, though it would ban the joint fundraising committees that Biden has used so effectively.


newrepublic--2020-10-16--The Media’s Obsession With the Mythical Republican Swing Voter

In September , as the presidential campaign entered its final weeks , a woman named Danielle Pletka published an op-ed in The Washington Post entitled “ I never considered voting for Trump in 2016 .
I may be forced to vote for him this year.
” In it , she explained that while she abhors Donald Trump ’ s “ chronic mendacity and general crudeness , ” what she fears even more than his “ erratic , personality-driven decision-making ” is the “ leftward lurch of the Democratic Party.
” Joe Biden would “ run a teleprompter presidency with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hard-left ideologues.
” “ With Donald Trump , ” Pletka sighed , “ I know what I am getting.
” We ’ ve seen this movie before : A wayward conservative , disgusted by Trump , implies that his or her vote is up for grabs in the coming election—but only if the Democrats swing right to accommodate her .
Except Pletka is no flyover-state swing voter : She ’ s an operative at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute and a former employee of the segregationist senator Jesse Helms .
As she herself @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an entirely Democratic-run Washington.
” Pletka is not the first dyed-in-the-wool conservative to cast herself as a tribune of moderate America .
Two years ago , the New York Post ’ s Salena Zito published a series of articles about swing voters in the Midwest who were reportedly as turned off as Pletka by the Democrats ’ fixation on social justice .
A few hours ’ sleuthing by other journalists revealed that these supposed swing voters included a number of longtime Republican operatives , donors , and committee members .
The fact that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was telling : The political media is irresistibly drawn to “ authentic ” voices from the heartland , to stories of Average Joes whom the Democrats may have left behind .
But it is puzzling that journalists would give any credence to the allegation that Biden is a puppet of “ left-wing ideologues.
” In the 30 years since Newt Gingrich inaugurated the era of party discipline , the Republican Party has shown itself to be far more the prisoner of its most extreme leaders than the Democratic Party has ever been .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ behind Mitch McConnell ’ s push to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’ s Supreme Court seat , trusting that voters disgusted by Trump would hold their nose and pull the lever , just as they did in 2016 .
The GOP , in other words , works like Pletka thinks the Democratic Party does : Some of its moderate members may pretend to distance themselves from the party ’ s most extreme leaders , but in the end they fall in line—even Pletka .

In September, as the presidential campaign entered its final weeks, a woman named Danielle Pletka published an op-ed in The Washington Post entitled “I never considered voting for Trump in 2016. I may be forced to vote for him this year.” In it, she explained that while she abhors Donald Trump’s “chronic mendacity and general crudeness,” what she fears even more than his “erratic, personality-driven decision-making” is the “leftward lurch of the Democratic Party.” Joe Biden would “run a teleprompter presidency with the words drafted by his party’s hard-left ideologues.” “With Donald Trump,” Pletka sighed, “I know what I am getting.”
We’ve seen this movie before: A wayward conservative, disgusted by Trump, implies that his or her vote is up for grabs in the coming election—but only if the Democrats swing right to accommodate her. Except Pletka is no flyover-state swing voter: She’s an operative at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute and a former employee of the segregationist senator Jesse Helms. As she herself says, her greatest fear is “an entirely Democratic-run Washington.”


newrepublic--2020-10-16--The Fiercely Despairing Fiction of Susan Taubes

A woman lies dead , decapitated by a passing taxi on a Paris street .
Or maybe she is just dreaming .
For a moment , she is window-shopping in Paris , but then she is in her lover ’ s bedroom in New York and her grandmother ’ s apartment in prewar Budapest .
Dead and alive , American and European , insightful and sightless , the woman is aptly named Sophie Blind : Sophia is the Greek word for wisdom , but the surname Sophie took from her tyrannical husband is a testament to her bleary vision .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ effort , ” begins Divorcing , the flustered 1969 novel that the Hungarian-Jewish philosopher Susan Taubes published scarcely a week before committing suicide .
The book , reissued by New York Review Classics this fall , is full of failures of sight .
Even when Sophie wrenches her eyes open , “ she doesn ’ t see a thing.
” Soon , she makes out soft flecks like “ stars , snow falling , blossoms , rows of wild chestnut trees in bloom.
” Then again : “ She can ’ t see @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much and too fast.
” A room dissolves into a medieval hunt depicted on a wall-hanging , which in turn dissolves into a rainy street .
Third-person description fractures into a love letter that is intimately second-personal , or Sophie ’ s narration collapses into her psychoanalyst father ’ s reminiscences of his father , a famous Hungarian rabbi .
The text streaks from Sophie ’ s memories of her childhood in Hungary to her drab days in drizzly Paris .
At one point , the prose fragments into a play .
We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and fantasies that flit through Divorcing in part because we know that it is a fiction , and a dizzyingly hallucinatory fiction at that .
And Sophie is equally suspicious of what she sees : After all , she has “ studied philosophy , epistemology , published papers on the problem of verification.
” Perhaps because of her philosophical tics , she remains unable to graduate from skepticism to full-blown belief in her life .
Thirty-five and dissociative , she is trapped in a soured marriage and saddled with three whiny children .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ an inveterate womanizer and a failed academic who makes a pass at every woman he meets , including the family ’ s teenage babysitter .
For her part , Sophie has a series of almost mechanical affairs with men who don ’ t really interest her ; for years , she feels , she has sacrificed her most central ambitions .
Divorcing , in contrast , is defiantly ambitious .
Intent on tallying the total of its protagonist ’ s many losses , it wheels from one tone and topic to another .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ bitter tussles with Ezra to the majestic Budapest of her childhood and back again , it can not quite decide what kind of book it wants to be .
At times , it reads like a second-wave feminist chronicle of domestic dissatisfaction , at times like a high modernist elegy for a Europe that no longer exists ( and may never have existed ) .
In neither mode does it wholly succeed in recovering the sight that Sophie forfeited when she became a Blind , but in both it evinces a fierce and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ its time not only because it dares to suggest that marriage blinds and blinkers , but also because it is an early exercise in something as anhedonic as autofiction .
Like the anesthetized narrators of Ben Lerner ’ s 10:04 and Rachel Cusk ’ s Outline trilogy , Sophie is more an observer than an occupant of her own desires .
She is so uninvested in her own pursuits that she is unfazed even by the news of her fatal accident .
“ I am dead .
It ’ s in the newspaper @ @ @ @ @ @ @ afterlife .
If she often switches between the first and third person , it is in part because she regards experience as something to be philosophized about , not something to be inhabited .

Though Taubes’s research focused on the incorporeal, she could not shed her own dashing physicality. When asked to describe her, one of her husband’s students responded, “What dark woman in what film noir?” In a letter to that same husband, she wrote in irritation, “I don’t know anybody who is not in love with me.” Her frustration is reminiscent of her alter ego’s. Throughout Divorcing, men are always insisting that Sophie’s beauty is incompatible with her intellect: In one viciously funny scene, a would-be seducer sneers, “You’ve got a fantastic problem between Spinoza and being a playgirl in Acapulco.” Sophie replies, “I swear to God I’ve never read Spinoza. As for my degrees and publications—ancient history. If you must know, my husband made me do it.” “How?” her interlocutor asks. “He screwed you so silly you wrote a dissertation?” “That’s right,” Sophie answers. “I wanted to live in a kibbutz and pick oranges. So he made me read Marx. I didn’t agree with Marx so he made me read Kierkegaard and all the German romantics and mystics—that’s how I got involved in philosophy.” The joke, of course, is that none of the men Sophie encounters want her to read anything: They would prefer her not just blind but as empty-headed as she becomes when she is decapitated.
To any careful reader of Divorcing, it is not surprising that Taubes’s own marriage was a disappointment. The philosopher and theologist Jacob Taubes was the darling of Leo Strauss and Gershom Scholem—as well as an infamous philanderer who had affairs with many women, among them the poet Ingeborg Bachmann. His cult following and notoriety notwithstanding, his dissertation was the only thing he published during his lifetime. (After his death, his admirers gathered his essays into a posthumous collection, and like Sophie, he spoke from beyond the grave.) By all accounts, Jacob was an enchanting talker who could not deliver on any of his grandiose promises. Taubes married him in 1949, had two children with him, and divorced him in 1963.
Six years later, she published Divorcing, originally titled To America and Back in a Coffin but renamed at the behest of her squeamish publishers. Soon after, she wandered out into the Atlantic and drowned herself in the waves. Sontag speculated that Taubes’s suicide was in part a response to harsh reviews of her debut novel, in part the almost inevitable fallout of her morbid disposition. We may never know for sure what drove Taubes to such a desperate measure, but we are at least well positioned to determine why her invention died: If Divorcing is any guide, it was Sophie’s marriage that slayed her.


newrepublic--2020-10-16--Diary of a Channel Surfer

Diary of a Channel Surfer

Donald Trump ’ s bumptious , boisterous , blustering performance in his first face-to-face debate with Joe Biden changed the trajectory of the presidential race—giving the former vice president a hefty lead .
So it was no surprise that Trump came up with an excuse to duck a rematch with Biden , claiming incoherently that a virtual debate would somehow upend the hallowed traditions of American democracy that the president respects so deeply , even though there is a precedent for a virtual debate .
( John Kennedy and Richard Nixon ’ s third debate in 1960 was conducted as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Los Angeles and the other in New York . )
Rather than go up against each other for a second time , Biden and Trump held two dueling town halls Thursday night , with Biden on ABC and Trump on NBC .
Playing Trump ’ s enabler , NBC allowed the president to counter-program Biden despite the biting criticism of the move from both outside and within the network .
But the real appeal of the town halls to both ABC and NBC was the advertising bonanza .
As Variety reported , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be looking less at headlines the two politicians will generate and more at the money they will draw.
” For those demanding headlines , the dominant one is that Biden did nothing to jeopardize his lead and Trump did nothing to expand his base .
Despite the vicious—and mostly ineffective—GOP attacks on Biden ’ s mental acuity , the former vice president gave listeners a level of detail Thursday night that bordered on the soporific .
As for Trump , he couldn ’ t even distance himself from QAnon , which he described @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” as though these nutcase rightwing conspiracy theorists are nothing more than an innocuous counterpart to Mothers Against Drunk Driving .
A dedicated political reporter might have watched one town hall and taped the other .
Instead , trying to replicate the experience of a twitchy voter , I clicked back-and-forth during the hour when the two town halls overlapped .
The Biden event went an extra 90 minutes , which provided an inadvertent tribute to the Democrat ’ s stamina .
But more than that , the two simultaneous town halls on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ example of the differences between a challenger who came out of three decades in the Senate and an incumbent president who came out of three decades in the tabloids .
Biden has a programmatic vision for America in 2021 ( not as bold as many Democrats might prefer , but probably more sellable to the voters ) and Trump offers , to put it charitably , four more years of presidential mania .

For those demanding headlines, the dominant one is that Biden did nothing to jeopardize his lead and Trump did nothing to expand his base. Despite the vicious—and mostly ineffective—GOP attacks on Biden’s mental acuity, the former vice president gave listeners a level of detail Thursday night that bordered on the soporific. As for Trump, he couldn’t even distance himself from QAnon, which he described as “very strongly against pedophilia,” as though these nutcase right-wing conspiracy theorists are nothing more than an innocuous counterpart to Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
A dedicated political reporter might have watched one town hall and taped the other. Instead, trying to replicate the experience of a twitchy voter, I clicked back and forth during the hour when the two town halls overlapped. The Biden event went an extra 90 minutes, which provided an inadvertent tribute to the Democrat’s stamina. But more than that, the two simultaneous town halls on rival planets—sorry, rival networks—provided a telling example of the differences between a challenger who came out of three decades in the Senate and an incumbent president who came out of three decades in the tabloids. Biden has a programmatic vision for America in 2021 (not as bold as many Democrats might prefer, but probably more sellable to the voters) and Trump offers, to put it charitably, four more years of presidential mania.


newrepublic--2020-10-16--NBC Did Joe Biden a Big Favor

NBC Did Joe Biden a Big Favor

Before Thursday evening ’ s dueling town halls began , the conventional wisdom was that , once again , Donald Trump , the greatest showman , had hoodwinked the news media .
The second presidential debate had been called off after the president caught Covid-19 and balked at participating in a virtual tête-à-tête ; Joe Biden scheduled a town hall with ABC ’ s George Stephanopolous in its place .
But , waving around a dubious doctor ’ s note , the president quickly secured his own town hall , with NBC News ’ Savannah Guthrie .
And there was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hall would not only be carried on several networks , it would go head-to-head against the Democratic nominee ’ s event , all but guaranteeing that Trump would emerge from this broadcast news duel with a ratings victory .
Wary skeptics warned of a trap , born from lessons that went unlearned in 2016 ’ s earned media giveaway to the then-Republican nominee .
And hadn ’ t NBC , whose The Apprentice is widely credited with presaging Trump ’ s rise , done enough harm ?
Once again , the television news @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from their addiction to the geek show—it remained at the president ’ s beck and call , jonesing for his presence .
Trump would not only ride a wave of attention , like he did in 2016 , he would be given an opportunity to claim victory the next day , when the ratings from both town halls were released .
Well , so much for the wisdom of crowds .
It is now abundantly clear that NBC News did Biden a favor by booking the president and forcing a comparison .
A @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like Patrick Ewing and screaming at voters who dared question him about his record .
He indicated he might have tested positive for Covid-19 before his debate with the former vice president and that X-rays may have shown coronavirus-related lung damage .
In a mirror image of his refusal to denounce the Proud Boys at the first debate , he refused to denounce the right-wing conspiracy group QAnon , instead praising it for its anti-pedophilia activism .
He said that people should “ decide ” whether a video he retweeted alleging that Barack @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” and that Osama bin Laden was still alive was real or not .
It was a disaster from start to finish .
Biden ’ s performance , given all that , is almost beside the point .
As with so much from his campaign , his own town hall performance will be largely forgotten almost immediately , swallowed in another deluge in news about the president .
Trump himself may tweet about Biden ’ s mealy-mouthed responses to questions about court packing for a day or two , but he will inevitably @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a combination of shouting about Hunter Biden and complaining that various natural disasters drowned out coverage of his Nobel Peace Prize nomination .
For those craving a bit of normalcy , however , Biden ’ s conversation with voters , moderated by George Stephanopoulos felt like a throwback to another era , at least when Trump wasn ’ t the topic of conversation .
The popular notion that Biden excels at town halls is an outdated one—he remains avuncular , but is not quite as sharp as his past self .
Biden can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was his calling card as vice president , but he ’ s not at the peak of his powers and is a little more labored .
But the town hall setting still suited him .
Biden ’ s town hall was perhaps the first policy-focused political conversation in a long while .
You ’ d probably have to rewind all the way back to March ’ s last big Biden-Bernie Sanders face-off to locate the last time actual political ideas got a hearing on a similar stage .
Biden was pressed on matters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vaccine production , the importance of international alliances .
Biden emphasized the importance of policing , that he wasn ’ t a “ fan ” of court-packing , that he wasn ’ t going to “ ban ” fracking , that somehow “ four to eight ” Republicans would help pass parts of his agenda .
Democratic politics as usual—a dollop of normalcy , for better or worse .

Biden’s performance, given all that, is almost beside the point. As with so much from his campaign, his own town hall performance will be largely forgotten almost immediately, swallowed in another deluge of news about the president. Trump himself may tweet about Biden’s mealy-mouthed responses to questions about court-packing for a day or two, but he will inevitably return to his preferred election message: a combination of shouting about Hunter Biden and complaining that various natural disasters drowned out coverage of his Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
For those craving a bit of normalcy, however, Biden’s conversation with voters, moderated by George Stephanopoulos, felt like a throwback to another era, at least when Trump wasn’t the topic of conversation. The popular notion that Biden excels at town halls is an outdated one—he remains avuncular but is not quite as sharp as his past self. Biden can still deploy that touch of humanity that was his calling card as vice president, but he’s not at the peak of his powers and is a little more labored. But the town hall setting still suited him. Biden’s town hall was perhaps the first policy-focused political conversation in a long while. You’d probably have to rewind all the way back to March’s last big Biden–Bernie Sanders face-off to locate the last time actual political ideas got a hearing on a similar stage. Biden was pressed on matters such as the racial wealth gap, vaccine production, the importance of international alliances. Biden emphasized the importance of policing, that he wasn’t a “fan” of court-packing, that he wasn’t going to “ban” fracking, that somehow “four to eight” Republicans would help pass parts of his agenda. Democratic politics as usual—a dollop of normalcy, for better or worse.


newrepublic--2020-10-16--Ben Sasse Is a Fraud

Ben Sasse Is a Fraud

Right on time , Senator Ben Sasse has done it again , and by “ it ” I mean the one thing he ’ s good at : generating positive media coverage for himself .
In a telephone town hall with his constituents this week , Sasse excoriated President Trump , saying he has “ flirted with white supremacists ” and “ kisse [ d ] dictators ’ butts.
” Step aside , The Troops : We have a new Bravest Man in America , and it is the Republican senator who criticized the president long after he accepted that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years of voting with him at almost every step , and after weeks of the president tumbling in the polls .
There might be no better example of the emptiness of the Never Trump Republican creed , at least among those actually elected to office , than Ben Sasse .
The Nebraska senator has his own particular shtick going , quite different from what you get from a Jeff Flake or a Mitt Romney , though it ’ s similarly rooted in a kind of humble , America ’ s Heartland–style dedication to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as well as the classic Constitution Guy exalting of “ civics.
” It works well for him : Journalists appear endlessly impressed by Sasse ’ s elite education and his supposed role as a “ good-faith guy ” in the party , in contrast to bad-faith guys like Trump or Ted Cruz .
But as Malcolm Harris wrote for this magazine in 2017 , Sasse is at the same time a completely orthodox Republican , who “ wants to force women to bring their pregnancies to term , put Christ back in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sure that ’ s all the government can do.
” He votes with Trump 86 percent of the time .
He voted against impeaching Trump , the most obviously crime-doing president in history , claiming it would damage the “ civic health ” of the country .
Among his criticisms of Trump this week were that his administration has spent too much ; Sasse voted for the Trump tax cuts that exploded the deficit .
I guess these minor details are just too hard for a good-faith guy to track .
Regardless , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an on-again-off-again affair , and whether it ’ s on or off seems to coincide suspiciously with Sasse ’ s own electoral needs .
As The Washington Post ’ s James Hohmann ably documented , Sasse made a big show of rebuking Trump in 2016 , comparing him to David Duke and vowing to write in Mike Pence ’ s name on the ballot .
But come September 2019 , Sasse was a reliable Trumpist .
He praised the president ’ s judicial picks and voted to uphold his national emergency declaration to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As Hohmann noted at the time , “ More significant than his voting record is the evolution in Sasse ’ s tone about Trump and his increasingly long periods of silence.
” It seems possible that Sasse , who had announced his reelection campaign in August , was staying mum on Trump with a strategic payoff in mind .
And sure enough , on September 10 , the president tweeted : “ Ben has my Complete and Total Endorsement !
” With that plaudit secured , it was inevitable that Sasse , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opponent earlier this year , would resume inveighing against the president ’ s excesses .
The ever-outsize interest in criticisms of Trump by Republicans like Sasse and his particular brand of faux-concern for civics and civility get to the heart of a noteworthy feature of the discourse in the Trump era : the idea that Trump ’ s flaws are , by several orders of magnitude , more severe or illiberal or even distinct than those of other Republicans .
It ’ s as if the Republicans who try to send women who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ off Medicaid are in a different category , those with whom liberals simply disagree .

Trump’s open corruption, his encouragement of violent racists, absolutely make him a top candidate for worst president ever, though his Republican predecessor gives him very stiff competition, at least on raw death tolls. But many of his worst decisions are only a little worse than we might have experienced under a different Republican president. The liberal mantra that This Is Not Normal may be correct, but it has a flip side: Previous examples of incredible Republican amorality and misrule were by this definition normal—and yearning for those times seems to render the wrong judgment of the pre-Trump era, as well as the potential post-Trump future. It would be to Ben Sasse’s advantage if you thought of Trump as just an aberrance between these two business-as-usual periods.
Take immigration policy, one area where Trump has been especially vicious and aggressively evil. Perhaps a different Republican president might not have pursued an explicit program of separating families at the border; Sasse made waves in 2018 for criticizing this policy. But in the same breath, Sasse used standard Republican talking points about the “catch-and-release” policy and asylum-seekers’ deployment of “magic words,” a way of getting racists mad that refugees aren’t locked up permanently if they have a “credible fear” of returning to their home country. The attack on this standard has been a key pillar of immigration policy under Trump; acting like it’s some secret code that immigrants use to get into this country might not be as bad as openly ginning up fears that Mexicans are rapists, but it’s a difference of degree, not kind. It leads to the same place, where asylum-seekers are turned away. And as my colleague Osita Nwanevu noted in 2018, Sasse opposes sanctuary cities and voted for increasing penalties for immigrants who repeatedly try to enter America. Ben Sasse is not the worst Republican on immigration, but being a Republican on immigration at all is extremely bad.
This is the central lie of the Sasse persona, whether that lie emanates from Sasse himself or the media coverage surrounding him: that a whole host of values like dignity and a public service mindset would fix the problem of the Republican Party being implacably and inherently horrific and inhumane. Against our current predicament, in which a demented and Covid-19-shedding billionaire threatens to abandon democracy to win the election at any cost, Sasse offers a fanfic counterfactual, in which everyone is honest about their disagreements and, even if this arrangement produces no material benefit to everyone, we can at least bask in the normalcy. This fevered dream is nonsense. What really needs to happen is for the Republican Party to be destroyed, from the brutish tyrants like Trump to the QAnon flirts; from the ideologues like Ted Cruz to the high-minded hucksters like Ben Sasse and Mitt Romney.


newrepublic--2020-10-16--Facebook and Twitter Have Made a Mess of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden Story

Twitter and Facebook knew this was coming .
For the last four years , they have ostensibly been preparing for foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election .
Pressed by lawmakers , executives from both companies insisted that they had learned their lesson .
“ In 2016 , we were not prepared for the coordinated information operations we now regularly face , ” wrote Mark Zuckerberg in a 2018 blog post .
“ But we have learned a lot since then and have developed sophisticated systems that combine technology and people to prevent election interference on our services.
” Both @ @ @ @ @ @ @ during this election cycle on Wednesday , and both stumbled out of the gates The trouble , once again , came from a set of emails .
On Wednesday , the New York Post published a story based on a tranche of emails it claimed had been recovered from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden , including one suggesting that he had set up a meeting between his father , Joe Biden , and a Ukrainian oligarch .
Joe Biden has long denied such a meeting ever took place , while President Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for making baseless allegations of corruption against the former vice president .
But everything about the story was fishy .
The emails themselves were acquired by Rudy Giuliani , the president ’ s lawyer .
Giuliani was a key figure in the Ukraine scandal that led to Trump ’ s impeachment .
Intelligence agencies had also recently warned the White House that they suspected Russian intelligence officers were using Giuliani “ as a conduit for disinformation aimed at undermining ” Biden ’ s campaign , per The New York Times .
Meanwhile , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ actually belonged to Hunter Biden .
The owner of a Delaware computer repair store who supposedly passed its contents on to the FBI and Giuliani said he couldn ’ t recall if Hunter Biden left the computer with him or not .
At this point , it ’ s not clear if all the emails recovered are authentic , if some are authentic and some ( including the claim that the former vice president had met with a Ukrainian oligarch ) are fake , or if the whole thing is an elaborate forgery @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was intended , as my colleague Matt Ford argued earlier in the week , as an October surprise to benefit Trump—and that it may have been the result of yet another foreign plot .

As The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out, Twitter’s rationale for blocking the spread of the Post story—which it said was based on “hacked materials”—would have led to the suppression of reporting on the Pentagon Papers, the Snowden leaks, and the Panama Papers, among others. An overbroad and unclear ban on “hacked materials” could have a chilling effect.
Furthermore, without a better understanding of their motives, it’s hard not to suspect that this was more of a public relations exercise for Facebook and Twitter, rather than a concerted effort to clean up their platforms. In 2016, both companies were killed for doing too little; in 2020 both clearly made the choice to risk doing too much. One could easily read the latest decision as a gesture of goodwill to Joe Biden, who is expected to win the election. It was only five months ago, after all, that Mark Zuckerberg was saying that Facebook had no interest in fact-checking “political speech.” And goodwill matters a great deal, given that both companies are under intense scrutiny from government agencies and are increasingly being targeted by lawmakers from both parties.
In the end, the actions taken by Facebook and Twitter are a fig leaf. They acted in such a way that no one can accuse them of not doing enough—the charge lobbed against them four years ago. But suppressing a lousy piece of journalism only reinforces the unprecedented power these platforms have. The underlying problem is the same now as it was in 2016: These companies have far too much power over the way that information is distributed.


newrepublic--2020-10-16--The Whiplash of Watching Two Town Halls From Different Planets

Donald Trump ’ s bumptious , boisterous , blustering performance in his first face-to-face debate with Joe Biden changed the trajectory of the presidential race—giving the former vice president a hefty lead .
So it was no surprise that Trump came up with an excuse to duck a rematch with Biden , claiming incoherently that a virtual debate would somehow upend the hallowed traditions of American democracy that the president respects so deeply , even though there is a precedent for a virtual debate .
( John Kennedy and Richard Nixon ’ s third debate in 1960 was conducted as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Los Angeles and the other in New York . )
Rather than go up against each other for a second time , Biden and Trump held two dueling town halls Thursday night , with Biden on ABC and Trump on NBC .
Playing Trump ’ s enabler , NBC allowed the president to counter-program Biden despite the biting criticism of the move from both outside and within the network .
But the real appeal of the town halls to both ABC and NBC was the advertising bonanza .
As Variety reported , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be looking less at headlines the two politicians will generate and more at the money they will draw.
” For those demanding headlines , the dominant one is that Biden did nothing to jeopardize his lead and Trump did nothing to expand his base .
Despite the vicious—and mostly ineffective—GOP attacks on Biden ’ s mental acuity , the former vice president gave listeners a level of detail Thursday night that bordered on the soporific .
As for Trump , he couldn ’ t even distance himself from QAnon , which he described @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” as though these nutcase right-wing conspiracy theorists are nothing more than an innocuous counterpart to Mothers Against Drunk Driving .
A dedicated political reporter might have watched one town hall and taped the other .
Instead , trying to replicate the experience of a twitchy voter , I clicked back and forth during the hour when the two town halls overlapped .
The Biden event went an extra 90 minutes , which provided an inadvertent tribute to the Democrat ’ s stamina .
But more than that , the two simultaneous town @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a telling example of the differences between a challenger who came out of three decades in the Senate and an incumbent president who came out of three decades in the tabloids .
Biden has a programmatic vision for America in 2021 ( not as bold as many Democrats might prefer , but probably more sellable to the voters ) and Trump offers , to put it charitably , four more years of presidential mania .


newrepublic--2020-10-17--The Media’s Both-Sides Brigade Is Wrong About the Covid-19 Stimulus Deal

One of the more irritating manifestations of both-sidesism in the political press in recent days has been the vilification of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to accept the compromises that the Trump administration has , thus far , been willing to offer on a second Covid stimulus bill .
Let ’ s review the story so far .
In May , the House passed the Heroes Act , which would add $ 3 trillion to the $ 2.2 trillion in Covid stimulus that Congress passed , and that the president signed off on , back in March .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Republicans belatedly put in a counter-offer , a proposed bill that would add only $ 1 trillion in additional stimulus .
The House subsequently passed a revised Heroes Act that would add $ 2.2 trillion in stimulus dollars , or $ 800,000 less than its previous bill .
The Trump administration then signaled it would be willing to go as high as $ 1.8 trillion ; that is , raise its bid to the same amount that the House had lowered its bid .
Pelosi , at this point , said no .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Wolf Blitzer , who scolded Pelosi on Tuesday for not being willing to meet Republicans in the middle .
“ Even members of your own caucus , Madame Speaker , want to accept this deal , ” Blitzer said .
Pelosi replied that she was trying to keep state and local workers from losing their jobs .
Blitzer , unimpressed , pointed out that Trump had just tweeted that he ’ d be willing to spend even more .
( As is his wont , his twitter account bellowed , “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ !
!
!
” ) “ Don ’ t let the perfect , as we say here in Washington , be the enemy of the good , ” Blitzer lectured .
Pelosi ’ s supposed intransigence was also too much for Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria , who wrote that Pelosi was being “ defensive and combative ” with Blitzer and that nothing she said “ added up to a coherent position in a time of national emergency .
”

You probably heard last summer that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell inserted into the Senate’s $1 trillion stimulus bill a measure that gave businesses five years’ worth of protection from Covid-related lawsuits provided that they made reasonable efforts to protect workers. That liability shield has been included in every Republican proposal for a follow-up coronavirus stimulus, including a supposedly “targeted” bill that Democrats filibustered in September. If you look at the text, you’ll see it’s the very first matter addressed in the bill. This isn’t just a stray item on the Republicans’ wish list. It’s the GOP’s top priority. And according to an October 15 letter Pelosi sent House colleagues, the Trump administration remains unwilling to remove this “poison pill.”
You’ve seen Trump publicly insist that he wants to “go big” on Covid spending, but you’ve never seen him say that he’s willing to give up the liability shield. That’s because he isn’t. And even if at some point Trump swallows hard and surrenders on liability, he’ll have a very hard time persuading McConnell to go along. The Senate majority leader has lately signaled that his interest in what Trump does or doesn’t want is diminishing rapidly as Election Day approaches.
Pelosi has assiduously been removing as many points of disagreement as possible in the course of her negotiations with Mnuchin, leaving the biggest obstacles for last. The Trump administration’s and McConnell’s insistence that employers be protected from Covid lawsuits is the biggest stumbling block of all, and unless the Republicans drop it there won’t likely be—and shouldn’t be—a deal.


newrepublic--2020-10-17--The Media’s Both-Sides Brigade Is Wrong About a Covid-19 Stimulus Deal

One of the more irritating manifestations of both-sidesism in the political press in recent days has been the vilification of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to accept the compromises that the Trump administration has , thus far , been willing to offer on a second Covid stimulus bill .
Let ’ s review the story so far .
In May , the House passed the Heroes Act , which would add $ 3 trillion to the $ 2.2 trillion in Covid stimulus that Congress passed , and that the president signed off on , back in March .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Republicans belatedly put in a counter-offer , a proposed bill that would add only $ 1 trillion in additional stimulus .
The House subsequently passed a revised Heroes Act that would add $ 2.2 trillion in stimulus dollars , or $ 800,000 less than its previous bill .
The Trump administration then signaled it would be willing to go as high as $ 1.8 trillion ; that is , raise its bid by the same amount that the House had lowered its bid .
Pelosi , at this point , said no .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Wolf Blitzer , who scolded Pelosi on Tuesday for not being willing to meet Republicans in the middle .
“ Even members of your own caucus , Madame Speaker , want to accept this deal , ” Blitzer said .
Pelosi replied that she was trying to keep state and local workers from losing their jobs .
Blitzer , unimpressed , pointed out that Trump had just tweeted that he ’ d be willing to spend even more .
( His twitter account bellowed , “ STIMULUS !
Go big or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Don ’ t let the perfect , as we say here in Washington , be the enemy of the good , ” Blitzer lectured .
Pelosi ’ s supposed intransigence was also too much for Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria , who wrote that Pelosi was being “ defensive and combative ” with Blitzer and that nothing she said “ added up to a coherent position in a time of national emergency .
”


newrepublic--2020-10-19--A Broken Census Can Break Democracy

A Broken Census Can Break Democracy

As the 2020 census winds down , it ’ s important to remember why it matters and what ’ s at stake .
Its primary purpose is to allocate seats in the House of Representatives and provide geographical population data for drawing congressional district lines .
The latter requirement is the main reason why rough population estimates will not suffice—it ’ s essential to know precisely where people reside , not just how many people live in a particular state , so that state lawmakers can draw accurate boundaries for House seats .
The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from states that have lost population relative to those that have gained population since the 2010 census .
Gaining states are Arizona ( one ) , Colorado ( one ) , Florida ( one ) , North Carolina ( one ) , Oregon ( one ) , and Texas ( two ) .
Losing states are ( one each ) : Illinois , Michigan , Minnesota , New York , Pennsylvania , Rhode Island , and West Virginia .
Losing states will concomitantly lose votes in the Electoral College , and gaining states @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in presidential elections .
The balance of power in the House and the Electoral College has changed considerably over time .
In 1910 , the last time the size of the House was increased , the states with the largest House delegations were Illinois ( 27 ) , Pennsylvania ( 36 ) , and New York ( 43 ) .
Today , Illinois and Pennsylvania each have just 18 seats and will likely have just 17 after reapportionment .
New York has 27 seats today , and that will probably fall to 26 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which went from 11 in 1910 to 53 now , and Florida , which had just four seats in 1910 and now has 27 .
The size of the House of Representatives was one of the most hotly debated issues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 .
The delegates initially proposed a figure of 40,000 people per congressional district .
But George Washington thought this number was too high ; on the only occasion in which he addressed the convention , he asked that it be reduced to 30,000 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ that is what Article I , Section 2 of the Constitution requires .
The Constitution is oddly silent on the question of whether the House would increase in size as the population of the United States grew .
James Madison was among those who worried that the House would not increase in size , leading to increasingly large districts .
He warned against the resulting imbalance in popular representation in Federalist 55 .
He therefore proposed that the first amendment to the Constitution be one that guaranteed an increase in the House proportional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ read :

After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one representative for every 30,000, until the number shall amount to 100, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than 100 representatives, nor less than one representative for every 40,000 persons, until the number of representatives shall amount to 200; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than 200 representatives, nor more than one representative for every 50,000 persons.
But this amendment was not ratified along with the others that we call the Bill of Rights. Fortunately, Madison’s fears proved unfounded for more than 100 years. The size of the House was increased, with additional states and rising population, from 65 members in the first Congress to 435 after the 1910 census. But under Madison’s formulation, the House today would have 6,600 members.
After the 1920 census, Congress failed either to increase the size of the House or change its apportionment, even though the country’s population had both substantially increased and significantly changed its geographical distribution. Not only had the relative populations of the various states changed, but the populations within states had also shifted, generally reducing the rural population and increasing the urban one. As a political matter, this was important because rural voters tended to support Prohibition, while those in the cities favored repeal.
By the end of the 1920s, malapportionment was severe, with states that had gained relative population since 1910, such as California, seriously underrepresented in the House, and those that had lost relative population, such as Missouri, overrepresented. There was also a constitutional question of whether the House was in fact legally chartered after it failed to fulfill its constitutional duty to reapportion. And since apportionment affects the Electoral College, there was fear that that malapportionment might call into question the legitimacy of the president.


newrepublic--2020-10-19--Is Ohio Still a Swing State?

Is Ohio Still a Swing State?

For most of the summer , downtown Columbus , Ohio , looked like the downtown of many other cities .
Depending on the day , protesters might secure some small victory against the ever-growing presence of police officers .
They ’ d take over an intersection , and the police would let them occupy it for a few hours .
There were a few days in which no protesters were harmed or arrested .
But , as things can go in the streets , the small victories gave way to bigger violences .
Police grew reckless as the city ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ginther , held press conference after press conference claiming that his office would be reviewing videos from the protests for evidence of bad behavior by law enforcement .
Videos of police officers pepper-spraying people indiscriminately , or dragging street medics across a sidewalk , or ramming their bikes into crowds .
There would be an independent investigator , Ginther said .
A review board .
In the long arc of uprising , there have been many so-called victories , thrust upon the masses in the hopes of quieting them .
In Columbus , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Columbus statues being ceremoniously removed ( a third still stands ) .
One might think that the city was trending toward a new understanding of the legacy of slavery and colonialism in this country .
Perhaps the state as well .
But when the marches began to spread into the city ’ s suburbs , the divide between Columbus and its surroundings was tangible .
Even homes with “ Black Lives Matter ” signs affixed to their lawns harbored concerned people behind screen doors , nervously watching noise-making marchers move down their streets @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their ears frantically , looking around .
Others gestured to the police lining the roads , as if to say , do something about this .
The question of what Ohio is , politically speaking , can be boiled down to this dynamic .
It used to be considered a swing state , carried by Barack Obama twice , but in a few short years it has moved more firmly into the Republican column .
Hillary Clinton was trounced here in 2016 .
The New York Times declared that Ohio was “ fading @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cause .

For most of the summer, downtown Columbus, Ohio, looked like the downtown of many other cities. Depending on the day, protesters might secure some small victory against the ever-growing presence of police officers. They’d take over an intersection, and the police would let them occupy it for a few hours. There were a few days in which no protesters were harmed or arrested. But, as things can go in the streets, the small victories gave way to bigger violences.
Police grew reckless as the city’s mayor, a Democrat named Andrew Ginther, held press conference after press conference claiming that his office would be reviewing videos from the protests for evidence of bad behavior by law enforcement. Videos of police officers pepper-spraying people indiscriminately, or dragging street medics across a sidewalk, or ramming their bikes into crowds. There would be an independent investigator, Ginther said. A review board.
In the long arc of uprising, there have been many so-called victories, thrust upon the masses in the hopes of quieting them. In Columbus, this took the form of two Christopher Columbus statues being ceremoniously removed (a third still stands). One might think that the city was trending toward a new understanding of the legacy of slavery and colonialism in this country. Perhaps the state, as well.


newrepublic--2020-10-19--Susan Collins and the Death of the Senate

The political epitaph for Susan Collins of Maine , who is in the fight of her career to keep the U.S. Senate seat she has held since 1997 , may well read : “ Susan Collins is disappointed.
” Collins ’ s perennial “ disappointment ” with the president has become the mocking refrain of super-cut-style political attack ads , New York Times opinion headlines , and a million or so tweets .
It also is shorthand for the kind of fecklessness that has defined the Republican Party in the Donald Trump era , in which congressional Republicans have prioritized @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the responsibilities of the legislature—and , especially , the norms of governance that a so-called moderate like Collins would have been expected to defend .
Since Trump assumed office , Collins has received an outsize share of coverage for her theatric deliberations , based on a decades-long mainstream media fixation on “ civil ” Washington .
This tendency both helped create her reputation as a moderate and perpetuated the fallacy of a predominant political middle .
For years , Collins benefited from this particular spotlight .
But in 2020 , in the midst @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and racial unrest—and now a confirmation battle to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that could consolidate Republican control over the Supreme Court for a generation or more—the spotlight is starting to burn .
The fallacy of the Senate moderate began to fall apart during the Obama administration , when politicians like Collins hemmed and hawed over what was once ideologically moderate legislation like the Affordable Care Act ( modeled on the ur-moderate Mitt Romney ’ s universal coverage plan in Massachusetts ) , before invariably voting against it along with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The fallacy now lies in tatters , as Collins ’ s empty words in response to Trump ’ s various offenses—from separating children from their families at the border to promoting fake science and conspiracy theories in the face of a virus that has claimed hundreds of thousands of American lives—are only matched in their cowardice by her critical votes in support of his agenda .
Collins most notably supported the controversial confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh , despite her long-standing claims of supporting the right to an abortion .
Her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this crucial test of her independence continues to haunt her in Maine .
This might explain why she has indicated that she opposes the preelection timing of a Senate vote on Trump ’ s nominee to replace Ginsburg , Amy Coney Barrett , who could very well help to overturn Roe v. Wade .
In typical Janus-faced fashion , Collins has made a process argument about a Supreme Court confirmation fight before the election , while affirming Trump ’ s right to nominate Ginsburg ’ s successor—a position that likely has no true @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her to join Republicans to fill the seat after the election , if necessary .

With Collins’s career in an apparent nosedive, it’s fair to ask: Do the voters of Maine feel that Collins has changed? Has she changed?
Joe Biden, perhaps the Senate’s biggest cheerleader in mainstream Democratic politics, likes to say that everyone in Washington should try to see what each state’s people see in the senator they send to Washington. In the case of Collins, this lens is proving instructive: She has hovered around 40 percent in publicly available polls for her upcoming election fight against Democrat Sara Gideon, after winning her last election in 2014 with nearly 70 percent of Maine’s vote.
With Collins’s career in an apparent nosedive, it’s fair to ask: Do the voters of Maine feel that Collins has changed? Has she changed? Or have the circumstances of the Trump administration just shed a different light on who she has been all along? These questions have been asked of other Republican politicians, and vanishingly few have come off well under scrutiny. But to focus strictly on Collins’s legacy is to miss the biggest question of all: Can the Senate, as an institution, remain viable after November, having been exposed under Trump as being as much a part of the moderate fallacy as she is?
Collins’s status as an archetypal moderate senator is in part informed by a kind of mysticism that surrounds the political figures of Maine. For more than 75 years, Maine has prided itself on being a cradle of effective, independent legislators, especially independent female legislators, beginning in 1940 with Margaret Chase Smith—the first woman elected to both chambers of Congress and an outspoken critic of McCarthyism at a time when most of her male GOP colleagues did not show the same backbone. This heralded lineage extends all the way down to Olympia Snowe, who also served more than three decades in Congress, including in the Senate for 16 years with Collins, and often bucked Republican leadership before retiring in 2013.