For more than a decade, dating back to the Republican triumph in the 2010 midterm elections, Wisconsin Republicans have held their State Legislature in an iron lock, forged by a gerrymander so stark that nothing short of a supermajority of the voting public could break it.
In 2012, the first year the maps were in effect, Republicans won 46 percent of the statewide vote but 60 percent of the seats in the state assembly. In 2014, Republicans won the governorship with 52 percent of the vote, which gave them 63 percent of the seats in the state assembly. And in 2016, Republicans and Democrats essentially split the statewide vote, but Republicans claimed 64 percent of seats in the state assembly.
In 2018, this gerrymander proved strong enough to allow Wisconsin Republicans to win a supermajority of seats in the state assembly despite losing the vote for every statewide office and the statewide legislative vote by 8 percentage points, 54 to 46. No matter how much Wisconsin voters might want to elect a Democratic Legislature, the Republican gerrymander won’t allow them to.
The gerrymandering alone undermines Wisconsin’s status as a democracy. If a majority of the people cannot, under any realistic circumstances, elect a legislative majority of their choosing, then it’s hard to say whether they actually govern themselves.
What makes the situation worse are the actions of Republican lawmakers. Using their gerrymandered majority, Wisconsin Republicans have done everything in their power to undermine, subvert or even nullify the public’s attempt to chart a course away from the Republican Party. In 2018, for example, Wisconsin voters put Tony Evers, a Democrat, in the governor’s mansion, sweeping the incumbent, Scott Walker, out of office. Almost immediately, Wisconsin Republicans introduced legislation to weaken the state’s executive branch, curbing the authority that Walker had exercised as governor.
Earlier this year, Wisconsin voters took another step toward ending a decade of Republican minority rule in the Legislature by electing Janet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee county judge, to the State Supreme Court, in one of the most high-profile and expensive judicial elections in American history.
The reason behind the flood of money and attention was straightforward. If she won, Protasiewicz would break the conservative majority on the court, giving liberal justices an opportunity to shape the state’s legal landscape until at least the next judicial election cycle. And Protasiewicz made no secret of her views. If elected, she said she would defend abortion rights and give a new look at the state’s legislative maps, which she criticized as “rigged” and “unfair.”
Protasiewicz won a double-digit victory, with record turnout. Wisconsin voters wanted her on the court to stand up for their reproductive and voting rights.
Wisconsin Republicans can’t strip a judicial officer of her power. But they can remove her, which is what they intend to do. “Republicans in Wisconsin are coalescing around the prospect of impeaching a newly seated liberal justice on the state’s Supreme Court,” my newsroom colleague Reid J. Epstein reports. “The push, just five weeks after Justice Janet Protasiewicz joined the court and before she has heard a single case, serves as a last-ditch effort to stop the new 4-to-3 liberal majority from throwing out Republican-drawn state legislative maps and legalizing abortion in Wisconsin.”
Republicans have more than enough votes in the Wisconsin state assembly to impeach Justice Protasiewicz and just enough votes in the State Senate — a two-thirds majority — to remove her. But removal would allow Governor Evers to appoint another liberal jurist, which is why Republicans don’t plan to convict and remove Protasiewicz. If, instead, the Republican-led State Senate chooses not to act on impeachment, Justice Protasiewicz is suspended but not removed. The court would then revert to a 3-3 deadlock, very likely preserving the Republican gerrymander and keeping a 19th-century abortion law, which bans the procedure, on the books.
If successful, Wisconsin Republicans will have created, in effect, an unbreakable hold on state government. With their gerrymander in place, they have an almost permanent grip on the State Legislature, with supermajorities in both chambers. With these majorities, they can limit the reach and power of any Democrat elected to statewide office and remove — or neutralize — any justice who might rule against the gerrymander.
It’s that breathtaking contempt for the people of Wisconsin — who have voted, since 2018, for a more liberal State Legislature and a more liberal State Supreme Court and a more liberal governor, with the full powers of his office available to him — that makes the Wisconsin Republican Party the most openly authoritarian in the country.
Of course, there is nothing yet written in stone. Wisconsin Republicans might, for the first time, show an ounce of restraint and refrain from taking this radical step against self-government. If they choose otherwise, Justice Protasiewicz could sue, citing her First Amendment right to free speech: the Republican case against her, after all, is that she disparaged their gerrymander in her campaign, making her “biased.” The scheme could also backfire; if Protasiewicz were to resign following an impeachment, the state would hold a new election next year. Wisconsin Republicans might then face an angry and mobilized electorate in a presidential year.
Regardless of how this specific incident plays out, it illustrates a broader problem in the structure of American political life. In the absence of national regulation — and against the backdrop of a federal Supreme Court that is, at best, apathetic on issues of voting rights — states are as liable to become laboratories of autocracy as they are to serve as laboratories of democracy. And without federal intervention to enforce a “republican form of government,” as the Constitution phrases it, the voters themselves have no other choice but to leave for greener pastures if they hope to govern themselves.
There are those who say that this — the states as semi-sovereign entities with broad discretion over their internal affairs — is the point of the American system. That this is the design, the framers’ intent. This is tenable when the difference between states is one of tax policy or the extent of the social safety net. It is not when the issues turn to fundamental questions of political and civil rights.
Wisconsin, it seems, is simply the latest flashpoint over a larger question being contested in different arenas across different areas of concern: What is the scope of the power of the states? What is the meaning of American citizenship? And what rights do we actually have, in theory and in practice?
China’s jobless college graduates have become an embarrassment to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The unemployment rate among the country’s youth has reached an all-time high, putting the country’s severe economic troubles on display at home and abroad. In August, Xi’s administration decided to act: Its statistics bureau stopped releasing the data.
But Xi can’t hide China’s economic woes—or hide from them. The problems are not just a post-pandemic malaise, or some soon-to-be-forgotten detour in China’s march to superpower stature. The vaunted China model—the mix of liberalization and state control that generated the country’s hypersonic growth—has entered its death throes.
The news should not come as a surprise. Economists and even Chinese policy makers have warned for years that the China model was fundamentally flawed and would inevitably break down. But Xi was too consumed with shoring up his own power to undertake the necessary reforms to fix it. Now the problems run so deep, and the repairs would be so costly, that the time for a turnaround may have passed.
Contrary to the assumptions of many commentators in recent years, China may never overtake the United States as the world’s dominant economy if current trends continue. In fact, it’s already falling behind.
A downward trajectory in China does not necessarily ensure the future of American global power, however. China may turn out to be a less formidable competitor than once imagined and offer a less attractive model of development for the rest of the world. But economic failure could also heighten Xi’s determination to overcome American dominance—if not by becoming richer, then through other, possibly more destabilizing means.
The demise of the China model is in many ways a function of its tremendous success. When China’s free-market reforms were just getting under way in 1980, the country was poorer, per capita, than Ghana or Pakistan. Today, China has an $18 trillion economy capable of devising 5G telecom networks and electric vehicles.
The motor of the China model is investment, and lots of it—into factories, highways, airports, shopping malls, apartment towers, you name it. China was destitute at the outset of its reforms, and much of the new infrastructure was necessary. Better transport systems helped to boost economic efficiency; new housing sheltered families migrating from farms to cities in search of opportunity. The investments turned China into the world’s factory floor and produced eye-popping rates of growth.
Over time, China developed a more advanced economy, but the state and companies nevertheless kept on building. The growth rate stayed high, but now the economy was generating wasteful excess that undermined its health. Logan Wright, a partner at the research firm Rhodium Group, estimates that China has 23 million to 26 million unsold apartments. That’s enough to house the entire population of Italy. Many of these apartments will never be purchased, Wright conjectures, because they were constructed in towns with declining populations. China’s automobile industry, figures Bill Russo, the founder of the consulting firm Automobility in Shanghai, has enough unused factory capacity to make more than 10 million cars (sufficient to supply the entire Japanese car market—twice). Beijing boasts about its extensive network of high-speed railways, already the world’s largest—but the state-owned company that operates it has racked up more than $800 billion in debt and posts substantial losses. The Cato Institute once described China’s rail-building bonanza as a “high-speed debt trap.”
The Chinese “continue to invest beyond what they can actually absorb,” Alicia Garcia-Herrero, a senior fellow and specialist in Asian economies at the think tank Bruegel, told me. “This is why their model went wrong.”
As a result of all this unproductive investment—much of it financed by borrowing—China’s debt has expanded much faster than its economy. A decade ago, China’s total debt was about twice the size of the country’s economy; now it’s three times as large. Michael Pettis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes that China has “among the fastest growing debt burdens in history.”
Politics have exacerbated the debt problem. The Communist Party has trumpeted high growth rates as proof of its legitimacy and competence, so when growth rates have slipped below targets, authorities unleashed credit to pump them back up. The International Monetary Fund estimates that China’s local governments have amassed $9 trillion in debt in the name of financing infrastructure projects.
China’s leadership has long known that its investment strategy carried risks. Back in 2007, Wen Jiabao, then China’s premier, said, “There are structural problems in China’s economy which cause unsteady, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable development.” And Chinese policy makers knew exactly how to repair these problems: China had to “rebalance,” as economists say, meaning that it needed to decrease its reliance on investment and foster new engines of growth, especially domestic consumption, which is abysmally low compared with that of other major economies. For that, economists agreed, China would need to liberalize its financial sector and relax the hand of the state on private enterprise.
Early in his tenure, Xi seemed to accept these imperatives. In 2013, he signed off on a Communist Party reform blueprint that pledged to give the market a “decisive” role in the economy. But the reforms never happened. Enacting them would have diminished the power of the state—and thus Xi’s own power. China’s leader was unwilling to trade political control for economic growth.
The more power Xi has commanded, the heavier the state’s hand in the economy has become. Xi has relied on state industrial policy to drive innovation, and he has imposed intrusive regulations on important sectors, such as technology and education. As a result, China’s private sector is in retreat. Two years ago, private companies accounted for 55 percent of the collective value of China’s 100 largest publicly traded firms, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics; in mid-2023, that share fell to 39 percent.
Now rebuilding the private sector’s confidence is perhaps the most urgent task facing China’s economic policy makers, the Cornell economist Eswar Prasad told me: “And on that score they don’t seem fully cognizant of what needs to be done, or maybe they’re just not willing to do it, and that I think has some fairly serious repercussions for China’s growth.” Prasad added that the chances of policy makers correcting course are “pretty slim” because they consider private enterprise a “necessary but not really ideal avenue of generating more growth.”
At a time when China sorely needed to juice domestic consumption, Xi’s draconian pandemic lockdowns delivered a devastating blow to incomes. The China model has cracked under the pressure: So little demand drives the economy that it has slipped into deflation, which, if it persists, could further discourage the investment and consumer spending that the economy needs to revive. The Peking University professor Zhang Dandan recently estimated that the unemployment rate among youth ages 16 to 24 could be close to 50 percent, more than twice the official figure. Real estate was once a major contributor to economic growth and a store of middle-class wealth. Now investment, sales, and prices in that sector are falling. The largest private developer, Country Garden, is teetering on the brink of default as its Hong Kong–listed shares have lost two-thirds of their value since the beginning of the year.
China’s economy isn’t beyond repair, but fixing it will be costly and painful. The government will have to write off bad debts, close up zombie companies, and introduce sweeping market reforms of a nature that policy makers have so far avoided. Taking these steps would reboot the economy for a new phase of growth—not at the lofty rates of the past, but at a pace that could sustain the country’s economic progress.
The Chinese government has shown no interest in adopting these reforms, however. Various authorities have issued multiple-point plans to support the economy that amount to little more than administrative tweaks and vague pronouncements. Xi’s confidence-inspiring message to the public is, essentially, “suck it up”: “We must maintain historic patience and insist on making steady, step-by-step progress,” he said in a speech recently published in the Communist Party’s top ideological journal.
Economists are not anticipating that China will soon collapse into a financial crisis akin to the 2008 Wall Street subprime meltdown. But their outlook on growth has turned somber. Daniel Rosen, a co-founder of Rhodium, says that if China were to make the proper reforms, it could endure very low growth during a period of adjustment, but then emerge with annual advances of 3 to 4 percent—not bad for an economy its size. But without those reforms, growth will likely slumber at 2 to 3 percent. Prasad expects that the Chinese economy will grow at 3 to 4 percent for the next several years, but that without more market-oriented policies, it will probably not sustain that pace.
None of these rates are alarmingly low, but they are probably not high enough to allow China to catch the United States from behind, or even to make it a close competitor in years to come. For China’s leaders, Prasad told me, “the question is whether that is going to be enough to accomplish what they want.”
Xi Jinping has spent the past decade amassing personal power. Now the yuan has to stop with him. In theory, the economy’s troubles should prod him into a rapprochement with the United States, to stop economic relations with the West from further deteriorating and keep foreign technology and capital flowing to aid the country’s development. But Xi is taking China in a different direction.
At the latest summit of the BRICS group of developing countries last month, the forum’s members—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—agreed to add six more, including Iran and Saudi Arabia. Xi appears to envision the BRICS as a counterweight against the West. Global Times, a news outlet run by the Chinese Communist Party, opined that “as more like-minded developing countries join BRICS, a stronger collective force will form, emitting a more resounding ‘BRICS voice,’ driving the world toward good governance.”
The language suggests that Xi remains undaunted in his quest to remake the world order, despite—or even because of—the economic troubles confronting him at home. The only thing he has changed is the strategy. “I think this is the plan: ‘My economy might not be bigger’” than America’s, Bruegel’s Garcia-Herrero said, “‘but my bloc will be bigger.’”
In other words, if China can’t overtake the U.S. on its own, perhaps it can do so in aggregate. But that plan may not work: The economies of the six new BRICS members combined are only a bit bigger than the United Kingdom’s.
The determination to compete with the United States has long been a central component of Xi’s economic agenda. In recent years, he has doubled down on industrial policies, including state financial support, specifically devised to put Chinese companies ahead of American rivals in such sectors as artificial intelligence and semiconductors. With a focus on “self-sufficiency,” he has sought to reduce Chinese vulnerability to U.S. sanctions by substituting homemade alternatives for foreign imports. And his Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure-building program, was designed to open avenues of trade and investment for Chinese business beyond the West. The BRICS are even talking about forming their own currency to decrease their dependence on the U.S. dollar.
China may not have the economic strength to attain all of these goals. The country remains relatively poor, with per capita income of $12,700—one-sixth that of the United States. It may not have the resources to support the continued expansion of its military capabilities, or to underwrite initiatives meant to bolster its influence abroad. State banks have already significantly scaled back development lending to low-income countries, for example.
The slowdown of China’s economy may undercut Xi’s ideological assault on the world order. By example, China has sought to demonstrate to the Global South that democracy and development are not inseparable, and that autocrats can have wealth, international respect, and political power. Those claims are harder to make with a faltering economy. If anything, China’s economic troubles suggest that authoritarian regimes cannot both tighten control and sustain economic progress—that, ultimately, political reform must accompany economic reform.
Xi is unlikely to embrace this inconvenient truth. Rather, he will pursue his anti-West agenda with even greater urgency. If he can’t point to rapid growth, then he’ll have to find some other way to justify his repression to his own people, and a march for global primacy against American imperialists could do the job. Maybe Xi can’t (or won’t) make China rich—but at least he’ll make China great.
For this reason, economic weakness could make China’s leaders all the more dangerous—more prone to champion nationalist causes and stumble into foreign adventures, such as a military grab for Taiwan. One can only hope that Xi will look to history and realize that a nation’s power can be projected only as far as its economic strength allows.
It turns out the special purpose grand jury of Fulton County, Georgia, created in May 2022 to investigate the attempt to disrupt the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, recommended criminal charges against more people than the 19 the traditional grand jury indicted in August. Their report, published today, shows that a majority of the 23-person special grand jury also recommended the state bring charges against South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham and the two Georgia senators in early 2020: David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
The special purpose grand jury also recommended charges against Trump lawyers Cleta Mitchell and Boris Epshteyn, Trump advisor Michael Flynn, and all the false electors.
In most of the votes, it appeared there was one staunch vote opposed to bringing charges against anyone associated with Trump.
Also today, U.S. district judge Steve C. Jones for the Northern District of Georgia denied the request of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows to move his prosecution to federal rather than state court. This is important. Meadows had argued that the crimes for which the Fulton County grand jury indicted him were part of his duties as a federal official. If the judge had agreed, the removal of his case to federal court would have enabled Meadows to argue that his case should be dismissed because his actions were part of his official duties. But the judge determined that Meadow’s actions were part of his work for the Trump campaign and thus could stay in state court.
To make his case, Meadows testified himself, a high-risk step that now leaves him, as legal analyst Harry Litman of the Los Angeles Times put it, “in a very bad place. He gambled heavily on winning & then getting immunity. Now his ability to cooperate w/ either Jack Smith or Fani Willis is a) of much less value & b) possibly even off the table. He is in a world of hurt.”
Meadows has already appealed.
Other defendants, including Trump himself, were hoping their cases would be removed to federal court, but the decision in Meadows’s case does not bode well for them.
It would be a shame if the growing legal troubles of the Trump conspirators overshadow the work of the Biden administration on the global stage this week as it seeks to counter the power and influence of China by supporting other countries in the region. Vice President Kamala Harris took the lead in a visit to Jakarta, Indonesia, where she participated in the U.S.–Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit.
ASEAN is a political and economic group of 10 countries that, combined, have more than 600 million people. Within that group, different countries seek stronger ties either with the U.S. or with China, and Harris has become a key figure in the administration’s attempt to bolster U.S. interests there. This was her third trip to Southeast Asia as vice president and fourth to Asia.
In Jakarta, Harris told Chris Megerian of the Associated Press: “We as Americans…have a very significant interest, both in terms of our security but also our prosperity, today and in the future, in developing and strengthening these relationships.” She said the government must “pay attention to 10, 20, 30 years down the line, and what we are developing now that will be to the benefit of our country then.” Southeast Asia has a young population, with two thirds of it under 35; makes up the fourth-largest market for U.S. exports; and is a passageway for one third of global shipping.
As Harris returned to the U.S., Biden left for New Delhi, India, for the Group of 20 (G20) Leaders’ Summit. On Friday he and Indian prime minister Narenda Modi had a bilateral meeting, and on Saturday and Sunday he will participate in the G20 summit. The G20 is a forum made up of 19 countries and the European Union that works to address issues relating to the global economy. G20 countries are responsible for 85% of the world’s economy and 75% of the world’s trade. The G20 is meeting September 8–10 in New Delhi.
On Tuesday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said that the U.S. focus at the G20 will be to emphasize the scaling up of development banks, especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which provide funding for developing countries. In August, Biden asked Congress to increase funding for the World Bank, and at the G20, Biden will call on G20 members “to provide meaningful debt relief so that low- and middle-income countries can regain their footing after years of extreme stress,” Sullivan said.
The U.S. will also emphasize the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGI), a collaborative effort by the Group of Seven (G7) put together in 2022 to fund infrastructure projects from rail to solar to supply chains in developing nations. The G7 is a political forum made up of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the U.S., and the European Union (EU).
At the center of the G20 meeting is the issue of money for developing countries. In 2013, China launched the so-called Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to invest in infrastructure development in more than 150 countries as part of its assumption of a greater role in world affairs. The U.S. and key allies, including Japan and Australia, saw the plan as an effort to tie world trade to China.
But now, economic troubles in the wake of the onset of the coronavirus pandemic have made BRI debt less attractive to borrowing countries, while China has tightened up lending to reduce its own risk in the midst of an economic downturn. China is planning a big celebration for the tenth anniversary of the initiative in October, but European leaders are not planning to attend. In August, Italy, which was the only G7 country to join BRI, announced it was withdrawing.
Meanwhile, China’s president Xi Jinping will not attend this week’s G20 for the first time since he took office in 2012, possibly signaling internal turmoil in China or Xi’s frustration with what he sees as its increasing orientation toward the U.S., especially the growing ties between the U.S. and India, which shares a contested 2,100-mile border with China. In his place, Premier Li Qiang, the second-ranking leader in the People’s Republic of China, will attend the meeting.
Xi appears to be focusing less on the G20 now and more on BRICS, a bloc of emerging economies that began in 2009 with four countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—and added South Africa in 2010. When the group suggested earlier this year that it might admit more member states, more than 40 expressed interest, and BRICS has invited six to join: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen is with the president in New Delhi, where today she told the press that the U.S. is “committed to supporting emerging markets in developing countries” and outlined the ways in which the U.S. hopes to increase access to funds, especially to address climate change. She said the administration is asking Congress for $2.25 billion for the World Bank and a loan of up to $21 billion for the IMF, and is looking to find a way to provide debt relief for struggling countries.
After attending the G20, Biden will travel to Hanoi, Vietnam, as part of what national security advisor Jake Sullivan called “a vision for facing the 21st century together with an elevated and energized partnership.”
Russia is also part of the G20, but Russian president Vladimir Putin will not attend, sending foreign minister Sergey Lavrov instead. While that absence can be attributed to the increasing isolation of Putin and Russia by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there might also be a different source of tension between the normally cooperative Russia and India. Last month, both countries launched lunar probes. India’s landed successfully and has been completing scientific studies.
Russia’s crashed.
The son of a prominent conservative activist has been convicted of charges that he stormed the US Capitol on 6 January 2021, bashed in a window, chased a police officer, invaded the Senate floor and helped a mob disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.
Leo Brent Bozell IV, 44, of Palmyra, Pennsylvania, was found guilty on Friday of 10 charges, including five felony offenses, after a trial decided by a federal judge, according to the federal justice department.
Bozell’s father is Brent Bozell III, who founded the Media Research Center, Parents Television Council and other conservative media organizations.
This name should ring a bell.
Leo Brent Bozell IV was convicted Friday after a bench trial of storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Bozell’s father, L. Brent Bozell III, is himself a longtime prominent conservative activist. He was the son of William F. Buckley’s sister Patricia.
The Jan. 6 rioter’s grandfather, L. Brent Bozell Jr., was best buds with Buckley and together they crafted a notorious defense of Joe McCarthy before Bozell ultimately joined McCarthy’s Senate staff.
If you were looking for evidence that Jan. 6 wasn’t an aberration but rather a culmination of the modern conservative movement, Bozell might be Exhibit A.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday that he is directing House committees to open an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, amid pressure from some hard-right members of the Republican caucus to do so.
The inquiry will center on whether Biden benefited from his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings, among other issues, McCarthy said.
Sorry for being gone for some time. Had to take care of some family stuff.
Anyway, McCarthy is officially investigating Biden for impeachment, in a very blatant move to win support from the far right Freedom Caucus during the government funding talks.
Kevin McCarthy directs House committees to open Biden impeachment inquiry
Quote:House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday that he is directing House committees to open an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, amid pressure from some hard-right members of the Republican caucus to do so.
The inquiry will center on whether Biden benefited from his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings, among other issues, McCarthy said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/12/mccarthy-biden-impeachment/
Members of the House of Representatives returned to work today after their summer break. They came back to a fierce fight over funding the government before the September 30 deadline, with only 12 days of legislative work on the calendar. That fight is also tangled up with Republican extremists’ demands to impeach President Joe Biden—although even members of their own caucus admit there are no grounds for such an impeachment—and threats to the continued position of Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as speaker of the House.
It’s an omnishambles, a word coined in 2009 by the writers of the BBC political satire The Thick of It, meaning “a situation, especially in politics, in which poor judgment results in disorder or chaos with potentially disastrous consequences.”
It fits.
In August, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed 12 spending bills covering discretionary funding—about 27% of the budget—by bipartisan votes, within limits set as part of the deal Speaker McCarthy made with President Biden to prevent the U.S. defaulting for the first time in history.
But the House left for summer break without being able to pass more than one of the 12 necessary bills. The extremists in the House Freedom Caucus oppose the spending levels Biden and McCarthy negotiated, insisting they amount to “socialism,” although with the exception of the Covid-19 blip, discretionary federal spending has stayed level at about 20% of the nation’s gross domestic product since 1954.
The Republican-dominated House Appropriations Committee has reneged on the deal McCarthy struck, producing bills that impose cuts far beyond those McCarthy agreed to. In particular, it cut Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding for programs to address climate change and the Internal Revenue Service, which has been badly underfunded since at least 2010, leaving wealthy tax cheats unaudited. The cuts are ideological: the bills have cut funding for food assistance programs for pregnant mothers and children, grants to school districts serving impoverished communities, the Environmental Protection Agency, agencies that protect workers’ rights, federal agencies’ civil rights offices, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the IRS (on top of clawing back funding in the IRA), and so on.
Although appropriations bills are generally kept clean, the extremists have loaded the must-pass bills with demands unrelated to the bill itself. They have put measures restricting abortion and gender-affirming care in at least 8 of the 12 bills. Even if such measures could make it through the Democrat-dominated Senate—and they can’t—President Biden has vowed to veto them.
Even fellow Republicans are balking at the attempt of the extremists to get their ideological wish list by holding the government hostage. Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters she doesn’t see how the Republicans are going to get the bills out of the committee, let alone pass them. “Overall, I think it's going to be very, very hard to get these bills forward,” she said.
Far from negotiating with McCarthy over the break, Freedom Caucus members appear to be increasing their demands as a shutdown looms. In August, the caucus announced it would not support even a short-term funding bill unless it also included their own demands for border policy, an end to what they call “woke” policies in the Department of Defense, and what they call the “unprecedented weaponization” of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They also oppose funding for Ukraine to enable it to fight off Russia’s invasion.
They have hinted they will use procedural votes to prevent any large spending bill from getting to the floor at all. One of the tools at their disposal is a challenge to McCarthy’s leadership, which thanks to the deal he struck to get the speakership in the first place, a single member can bring. Today, Florida representative Matt Gaetz threatened to “lead the resistance” if McCarthy worked with Democrats to fund the government.
They have offered McCarthy a way to avoid that showdown: impeach President Joe Biden, although there is no evidence the president has committed any “high crimes and misdemeanors” required for an impeachment.
Today, McCarthy availed himself of that escape clause. On the first day back from a 45-day August break, rather than tackling the budget crises, he endorsed an impeachment inquiry into President Biden.
This is a fascinating moment, as the Republicans have opened an impeachment inquiry into Biden with no evidence of wrongdoing. For all their breathless statements before the TV cameras, they have not managed to produce any evidence. Trump's own Department of Justice opened an investigation into Biden four years ago and found nothing to charge. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, Biden’s taxes are public, and a U.S. attorney has been scrutinizing Biden’s son Hunter for years; red flags should have been apparent long ago, if there were any.
Just yesterday, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tore apart the talking points far-right Republicans have been using to smear the president. He noted that none of the bank records Representative James Comer (R-KY) has referenced show any payments to President Biden, none of the suspicious activity reports the Oversight Committee has reviewed suggest any potential misconduct by Biden, none of the witness accounts to the Oversight Committee show any wrongdoing by Biden, Hunter Biden’s former business associates explicitly stated they had no reason to think President Biden was involved in his son’s business ventures, and so on.
This inquiry is not actually about wrongdoing; it is a reiteration of the same plan Trump tried to execute in 2019 when he asked Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Biden before the 2020 presidential election. By launching an inquiry, Republicans can count on their false accusations spreading through the media, tainting their opponents even without evidence of wrongdoing. See, for example, Clinton, Hillary: emails.
McCarthy insisted to reporters that an impeachment inquiry would simply give House committees leverage to subpoena officials from the White House, but during the Trump administration, the Department of Justice issued an opinion that the House must take a formal vote to validate an impeachment inquiry. It did so in reaction to then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s launch of an impeachment inquiry without such a vote, and the decision invalidated subpoenas issued as part of that inquiry. Pelosi went on to hold a vote and to launch an official inquiry.
It will not be so easy for McCarthy. He has not wanted to hold a vote because outside of the Freedom Caucus, even Republicans don’t want to launch an impeachment inquiry when there is no evidence for one. Senate Republicans today were quick to tell reporters they were skeptical that McCarthy could get enough votes in the House for an article of impeachment, and they were clear that a Senate trial was not an option. Representative Ken Buck (R-CO), himself a member of the Freedom Caucus, said: “The time for impeachment is the time when there’s evidence linking President Biden—if there’s evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor. That doesn’t exist right now.”
The attack on Biden is a transparent attempt to defend former president Trump from his own legal troubles by suggesting that Biden is just as bad. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin today also defended Trump, saying that his prosecutions show that the United States is fundamentally corrupt. His comment made former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) seem to wash her hands of the modern incarnation of her political party. “Putin has now officially endorsed the Putin-wing of the Republican Party,” she wrote. “Putin Republicans & their enablers will end up on the ash heap of history. Patriotic Americans in both parties who believe in the values of liberal democracy will make sure of it.”
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) summed up the day: “So let me get this straight: Republicans are threatening to remove their own Speaker, impeach the President, and shut down the government on September 30th—disrupting everyday people’s paychecks and general public operations. For what? I don’t think even they know.”
The center-right think tank American Action Forum’s vice president for economic policy, Gordon Gray, had an answer. Ever since the debt ceiling fight was resolved, he told Joan E. Greve of The Guardian, “there’s a big chunk of House Republicans who just want to break something. That’s just how some of these folks define governing. It’s how their constituents define success.”
Russian president Vladimir Putin met with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un today in Russia’s far east. His need to turn to North Korea’s isolated leader is a dramatic fall for Putin, who just four years ago was hobnobbing with then-president Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan. Now, thanks to his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin, too, is isolated, charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, and under an arrest warrant.
It is no wonder that shortly before he met with Kim, Putin said of Trump’s 2024 presidential run: “We surely hear that Mr. Trump says he will resolve all burning issues within several days, including the Ukrainian crisis. We cannot help but feel happy about it.” Trump has said he will end the war in a day if he’s reelected, and has called for withholding funds to Ukraine until the Department of Justice and the FBI investigate President Joe Biden.
At the meeting, Putin and Kim vowed to strengthen the ties between the two countries, and Kim expressed total support for Putin as Russia’s isolation grows, calling their stance a “fight against imperialism” and saying at a state dinner that he is “certain that the Russian people and its military will emerge victorious in the fight to punish the evil forces that ambitiously pursues hegemony and expansion.”
And yet it is Russia that is attacking other nations, including the U.S.: on September 7 the U.S. Department of Justice indicted 11 Russian men for their participation in cyberattacks against governments, businesses, and major hospital chains around the world. The U.S. Treasury Department and the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency say the hackers are associated with Russian intelligence services.
Russia is looking for artillery munitions from North Korea to continue its war against Ukraine; North Korea wants ballistic missile technology from Russia to develop its space and satellite program. Kim cannot get that technology elsewhere because of sanctions intended to keep him from developing nuclear weapons. Sergey Radchenko, a senior professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who studies Russian and Chinese national security, concluded that we might be seeing an alliance between North Korea and Russia that, among other things, is likely to increase North Korea’s assertiveness.
That Putin feels the need to cozy up to Kim indicates the war is not going as he would like. Indeed, last night Ukraine hit the main base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, in occupied Crimea, destroying two vessels and the port infrastructure. The Ukrainian military claimed responsibility for the strike, underlining its growing strength in Russian-occupied areas..
In a major speech today at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained the place at which the United States finds itself in both foreign and domestic affairs. He told the audience that the end of the Cold War, a period of competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, along with their respective allies, ushered in “the promise of an inexorable march toward greater peace and stability, international cooperation, economic interdependence, political liberalization, human rights.” That postwar period did, indeed, lift more than a billion people from poverty, eliminate deadly diseases, and usher in a period of historically low conflicts between nations, despite challenges such as the 2008 global financial crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, and regional conflicts like those in Rwanda and Iraq.
“But,” Blinken said, “what we’re experiencing now is more than a test of the post–Cold War order. It’s the end of it.”
The relative geopolitical stability of the post–World War II years has given way to the rise of authoritarian powers, he said. Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine is the most immediate threat to “the international order enshrined in the UN charter and its core principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence for nations, and universal indivisible human rights for individuals.” But the People’s Republic of China “poses the most significant long-term challenge,” he said, “because it not only aspires to reshape the international order, it increasingly has the economic, the diplomatic, the military, the technological power to do just that.”
As partners, “Beijing and Moscow are working together to make the world safe for autocracy,” Blinken warned.
As the competition between the two systems ramps up, many countries are hedging their bets, while the influence of nonstate actors—international corporations, public service nongovernmental organizations, international terrorists, transnational criminal organizations—is growing. At the same time, the sheer scale of global problems like climate change and mass migration is making cooperation across borders more difficult.
The international economic order of the past several decades is flawed in ways that have caused people to lose faith in it, Blinken explained. Technology and globalization have hollowed out entire industries and weakened workers, while laws protected property. Inequality grew dramatically between 1980 and 2020, with the richest 0.1% accumulating the same wealth as the poorest 50%. “The longer these disparities persist,” Blinken pointed out, “the more distrust and disillusionment they fuel in people who feel the system is not giving them a fair shake. And the more they exacerbate other drivers of political polarization, amplified by algorithms that reinforce our biases rather than allowing the best ideas to rise to the top.”
Democracies are under threat, Blinken said. “Challenged from the inside by elected leaders who exploit resentments and stoke fears; erode independent judiciaries and the media; enrich cronies; crack down on civil society and political opposition. And challenged from the outside, by autocrats who spread disinformation, who weaponize corruption, who meddle in elections.”
The post–Cold War order is over, Blinken said. “One era is ending, a new one is beginning, and the decisions that we make now will shape the future for decades to come.”
The U.S. is in a position of strength from which it seeks to reinforce a rules-based international order in which “goods, ideas, and individuals can flow freely and lawfully across land, sea, sky, and cyberspace, where technology is used to empower people—not to divide, surveil, and repress them,” where the global economy is defined by fair competition and widespread prosperity, and where “international law and the core principles of the UN Charter are upheld, and where universal human rights are respected.” Such a world would serve humanity’s interests, as well as our own, Blinken said; its principles are universal.
“[O]ur competitors have a fundamentally different vision,” he said. “They see a world defined by a single imperative: regime preservation and enrichment. A world where authoritarians are free to control, coerce, and crush their people, their neighbors, and anyone else standing in the way of this all-consuming goal.”
They claim that the norms and values that anchor the rules-based international order are imposed by Western nations, that human rights are up to nations themselves, and that big countries should be allowed to dictate to their smaller neighbors.
“The contrast between these two visions could not be clearer. And the stakes of the competition we face could not be higher—for the world, and for the American people.”
Blinken explained that the Biden administration has deliberately integrated domestic and foreign policy, crafting industrial strategy to rebuild the U.S. and to address the wealth disparities that create deep political resentment, while aligning that domestic strength to foreign policy. That foreign policy has depended on strengthening alliances and partnerships, building regional integration so that regions address their own interests as communities, closing the infrastructure gap between nations, and strengthening international institutions—rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization, working to expand the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and so on.
Blinken said that such investments will lead nations to stand up to “the Beijings and Moscows of the world” when they claim this system serves the West and try to tear it down, and answer back: “No, the system you are trying to change is our system; it serves our interests.” At the same time, such investments will offer new markets for American workers and businesses, more affordable goods for American consumers, more reliable food and energy supplies, more robust health systems to stop deadly disease, more allies to address global challenges.
Looking back from the future, Blinken said, “the right decisions tend to look obvious, the end results almost inevitable. They never are. In real time, it’s a fog.”
“We must put our hand on the rudder of history and chart a path forward, guided by the things that are certain even in uncertain times—our principles, our partners, our vision for where we want to go,” Blinken said, “so that, when the fog lifts, the world that emerges tilts toward freedom, toward peace, toward an international community capable of rising to the challenges of its time.”
If he runs for reelection or president, the Democratic senator has signaled he would probably leave the party and run as an independent
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) is having trouble making a decision about his political future.
During a series of private meetings in the Hamptons over Labor Day weekend, Manchin, his wife, Gayle, and their daughter, Heather, grappled with what the senator should do in 2024, according to two people familiar with the meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. One of the meetings was a private sit-down with former president Bill Clinton.
Manchin and his family said in the meetings that the senator was considering three options: running for reelection in West Virginia as an independent, running for president as a No Labels candidate or retiring from politics. Manchin has not decided what path to pursue, but it seemed clear to those he met with that he is likely to leave the Democratic Party if he chooses to stay in politics.
Manchin declined to comment through a spokesperson.
In some of the meetings, Democratic donors strongly urged Manchin to run for reelection in West Virginia, and Manchin said he believed he could win the race but only if he ran as an independent. Manchin has previously said he has considered leaving the Democratic Party, but people familiar with the meetings said Manchin was more adamant than he has been in public about his need to run as an independent to win.
But Heather Bresch, Manchin’s daughter who was the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, is strongly encouraging her father to run for president with the backing of No Labels, a bipartisan group recruiting a Democrat and a Republican to potentially run on a third-party ticket in next year’s presidential election. Manchin has long supported No Labels, once serving as an honorary co-chair of the group and headlining a July event sponsored by the group in New Hampshire.
Manchin has not ruled out a run for president and has supported No Labels’ message and proposition. No Labels declined to comment.
“We’re here to make sure that the American people have an option,” Manchin said at the No Labels event he headlined in July. “And the option is, can you move the political parties off their respective sides? They’ve gone too far right, too far left.”
In his meeting with Manchin, Clinton made an aggressive pitch that Manchin should absolutely not run for president, warning that his candidacy would only serve to bolster former president Donald Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination. Beyond that, Clinton largely listened as the family discussed the various options, one of the people familiar with the conversation said.
Manchin requested the meeting with Clinton after the senator heard the former president was in the Hamptons at the same time, the person said. Clinton often vacations with his family in the Hamptons, and he and Manchin have been in contact over the years. White House officials had asked Clinton to call Manchin when he was debating whether to support important pieces of legislation earlier in Biden’s presidency.
Clinton’s office declined to comment.
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If Manchin decides to leave the party, he would become the second Democrat to do so in the last year. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) announced in December that she was becoming an independent, though she has not publicly declared whether she will run for reelection in 2024. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) is running for the seat as a Democrat.
Democrats are optimistic Manchin will run for reelection in West Virginia, and even if he chooses to run as an independent, most expect the party will back his campaign.
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Still Democrats acknowledge that if Manchin does not run for reelection, a Republican is almost certainly going to win the Senate seat, and in the last Congress, Manchin voted with the president nearly 88 percent of the time.
“I believe he has as good a chance as anyone to win reelection as senator in West Virginia,” said Manchin ally Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. “He has been as good as senator as anyone in West Virginia. He also has a huge role in the United States in the position that he is in. His influence led to the final passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. So I think that the role he plays in the Senate gives him tremendous clout for his state and for the U.S.”
Weingarten added that she does not think Manchin “is going to put himself in the position that would in any way hurt Joe Biden’s prospects for reelection.”
