Craig Cheslog’s thoughts about politics, sports, and other stuff.
I spent a part of my Labor Day reading Jonah Furman’s Who Gets the Bird? Substack and learning what’s happening with unions across the country over the past few weeks.
Furman updates us on strikes, negotiations, politics, and legislation across the nation in every edition.
A bunch is happening as workers try to take back some control as workplaces find a new normal after the COVID pandemic. This newsletter is a great way to stay up to date on developments.
Dan Froomkin writes at Press Watch about the media’s latest failure to do its job and open the window to see if it is raining outside when providing analysis of President Biden’s latest speech about the threat MAGA Republicanism poses to our democracy.
Well before the actual speech, it was clear that Biden’s sounding of the alarm for American democracy would also be an implicit reproach of the mainstream media, for its failure to do so.
So instead of directly addressing the substance of his speech, our elite political reporters stuck to their way of doing things: They marginalized any mention of the threat to democracy as a purely partisan attack (political, yes, partisan, no); they cast the speech as a tired campaign move (see, e.g., Peter Baker); they raised quibbles about the optics (see, e.g., Brianna Keilar. They also downplayed it, like it didn’t really matter.
Whether the nation heard what Biden was saying has yet to be seen. But the nation’s most influential political reporters couldn’t hear it – they literally could not take it in — because it would have meant acknowledging how far from truth-telling they have fallen.
Jamelle Bouie writes in his latest newsletter about the latest examples of the GOP’s rejection of political norms.
One of the recurring points I make in my column is that the Republican Party, from the most junior state lawmaker to senators in Washington, has turned against many of the hallmarks of a functional political system, including a commitment to fairness and following the process. There are almost always new examples of Republican politicians rejecting any result or rule that doesn’t favor their interests, and this week we have two.
A democracy can’t work if one party decides that any loss is illegitimate. This isn’t new: it goes back at least to Newt Gingrich’s takeover of the House Republican Caucus in the 1990s. But understanding this dynamic is the first step in any effort to save our Republic.
Charlie Pierce asks an important question in his Esquire newsletter:
Why the hell would prosecutors wait until after November to bring charges against Donald J. Trump? He’s not running for anything. And if some people who are running are wounded by their association with him, that’s extremely tough beans. They should be. It should be all the reason you need not to vote for someone.
Justice shouldn’t depend on the number of days left until the next election. Trump is not a candidate. Not acting is also a political act. So the focus should be on the evidence and on what it indicates to the prosectors. Leave the political considerations to the politicians.
Adam Johnson writes at The Column Substack about how Democratic city leaders are relying upon increasingly inhumane tricks that don’t solve the homelessness problem.
What we are seeing in more and more cities is wrong. Instead of solving the problem, city leaders are creating Potemkin situations. As Johnson describes:
The goal, as I laid out in March, is to simply harass and arrest unhoused people from important areas into less important ones, while scooping up many for petty crime so they can languish in jail. This way electeds look like they’re Doing Something about “the homelessness problem,” but the underlying issue isn’t meaningfully addressed, much less solved. But police are kept busy and further legitimized while wealthy areas are less and less likely to have to look at the logical result of runaway inequality and soaring housing prices.
Corporate media, pandering to the all important “angry homeowner,” is concerned entirely with the aesthetics of “cleaning up” “homeless encampments,” not the long-term housing status and fortunes of the human beings who actually live there.
Johnson shows us examples of cities cutting down trees, adding rocks, and building internment camps rather than focusing on solutions that actually can help people. We have to do better, because this problem is going to continue to get worse.
And, we should remember when some of these politicians seek re-election or try to move up to a higher office.
Dan Moynihan takes a look at a potential future for the Republican Party by deciphering DeSantism in his Can We Still Govern Substack.
In his article, Moynihan makes the important point that the loss of our democracy happens in ways besides our elections. That is a reason why it is vital we examine how people like Governor DeSantis are manipulating government systems in ways that harm democratic values and norms.
As someone who studies public administration, I think about democratic backsliding as about more than just elections, but also about how government operates, how it uses its power, and the degree to which it is accountable to the public. Here, again, DeSantis has established his anti-democratic credentials. His is a record of culture war battles that are not just symbolic, but aggressively use state power to erode individual rights and freedoms, often in obviously unconstitutional ways.
Moynihan provides several examples about how DeSantis is turning Florida government into a state that supports not the people but his power. One glaring example is the treatment of felons seeking to regain their voting rights after the passage of a referendum in 2020.
Even if DeSantis insisted that former felons had to repay fines and fees before voting, the DeSantis administration failed to provide the most basic information to allow them to do so — what was owed, and to who. Instead, DeSantis invested state resources in stoking confusion, intimidation and fear. DeSantis recently went on a media blitz after 20 former felons were sent back to jail for voting. It seems clear that these citizens were not engaged in some conspiracy to engage in fraud: at least some genuinely believed that they were eligible to vote because public officials had told them that they were eligible when they approved their voter registration.
This is a preview of what a President DeSantis (or other MAGA Republicans) would do at the national level if they win the upcoming elections. They are turning the government against their political opponents. History demonstrates that this is a process that does not end in freedom.
Jonathan Katz does a great job of explaining why the right hates history today in his The Column Substack.
The real problem the most powerful people on the right and center have with the “new” history — and the humanities in general — is not that it practices identity politics, but that it rejects theirs.
John Stoehr of the Editorial Board asks us to check our assumptions about midterm elections as he examines what happens to the party holding the presidency over a longer time period.
While we hear so much about how the party holding the presidency loses Congressional seats during the midterm election, this “fact” is based only on recent elections and excludes data from much of the last century:
One is that the Congress did not change after the following midterm elections, according to my friend Bill Scher, who writes for Politico magazine, the Washington Monthly, RealClear Politics and others.
Since 1900, they are: 1902, 1906, 1914, 1922, 1926, 1930, 1934, 1938, 1942, 1950, 1958, 1962, 1966, 1970, 1974, 1978, 1982, 1990 and 1998.
That’s 19 midterms. There were 25 in the 20th century.
Six midterms flipped the Congress in 100 years.
There are other strong factors in play this year, starting with heavy partisan-based gerrymandering in Republican-held states. But we should be careful to base too much of our analysis on a small dataset.
I am editing the Democratic Party of Contra Costa County (DPCCC) monthly newsletter and wanted to share it with you. The August 2022 edition includes updates about:
Parker Malloy takes us back to the aftermath of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and examines the context of former President Donald Trump’s horrific comments about how there were “very fine people” on both sides.
It is important to recall what happened, and just what the former president tried to do to provide cover to white supremacists. As Malloy writes:
One of Trump’s strategies has always been to stake out every possible position on any given topic. That’s exactly what he did here. He talked himself into a knot.
But again, he went back to saying that he “looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.” That was not true. “The night before” was the tiki torch march. People were chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil.” There were “very fine people” within that group? No. There weren’t. Trump referred to some of the attendees of a neo-Nazi rally as “very fine people.”
Malloy will be breaking down and analyzing this important event in her The Present Age Substack. It’s a great reason to subscribe today.
