Today’s story is that in the negotiations to fund the government and pass the national supplemental security bill, MAGA Republicans appear to be losing ground. Biden appears to be trying to weaken them further by making it clear it is Republicans, not Democrats, who are preventing new, strict border security legislation.
The first of two continuing resolutions to fund the government for fiscal year 2024 will expire tomorrow. Fiscal year 2024 began on October 1, 2023, and Congress agreed to a topline budget, but it has been unable to fund the necessary appropriations because MAGA Republicans have insisted on having their extreme demands met in those measures. In this struggle, former president Trump has urged his loyalists not to give way, telling them in September 2023: “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!”
But a poll from last September showed that 75% of Americans oppose using brinksmanship over a government shutdown to bargain for partisan gain.
After kicking the can down the road by passing three previous continuing resolutions, House Republicans a week ago expected a shutdown. But today they backed off. The House passed a short-term continuing resolution that pushes back the dates on which the two continuing resolutions expire, from March 1 and March 8 to March 8 and March 22. The vote was 320 to 99 in the House, with 113 Republicans joining 207 Democrats to pass the measure. Ninety-seven Republicans opposed the bill, as did two Democrats who were protesting the lack of aid to Ukraine.
Tonight, the Senate approved the continuing resolution by a vote of 77 to 13. President Joe Biden is expected to sign it tomorrow. “What we have done today has overcome the opposition of the MAGA hard right and gives us a formula for completing the appropriations process in a way that does not shut the government down and capitulate to extremists,” Senate majority leader Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) said.
Trump opposes helping Ukraine in its fight to resist Russia’s invasion, and under his orders, MAGA Republicans have also stalled the national security supplemental bill, which contains Ukrainian aid, as well as aid to Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. The measure passed the Senate on February 13 by a strong bipartisan vote of 70 to 29, and is expected to pass the House if Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) takes it up, but so far, he has refused.
Today, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) told reporters that “several” House Republicans are willing to sign a discharge petition to force Speaker Johnson to bring a national security supplemental measure to the floor for a vote. A simple majority can force a vote on a bill through a discharge petition, but such a measure is rare because it undermines the House speaker. With Johnson refusing to take up the Senate measure, Fitzpatrick and his colleague Representative Jared Golden (D-ME) have prepared their own pared-down aid measure. Fitzpatrick told CNN’s Jake Tapper Tuesday that “[w]e are trying to add an additional pressure point on something that has to happen.”
Speakers from the parliaments of 23 nations wrote to Johnson yesterday and urged him to take up the Senate measure, saying that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has “challenged the entire democratic world, jeopardizing the security in the whole European and Euro-Atlantic area,” and that “the world is rapidly moving towards the destruction of the sustainable world order.”
On Tuesday, Johnson met with President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate majority leader Schumer, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) to discuss the importance of funding the government and passing the national security supplemental bill. There, he was the odd man out as the other five pressed upon him how crucial funding for Ukraine is for U.S. national security.
Yesterday, Johnson told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity that the leaders told him he was “on an island by myself, and it was me versus everyone else in the room.” He went on: “What the liberal media doesn’t understand, Sean, is that if you’re here in Washington and you’re described as a leader that’s on an island by themselves, it probably means you’re standing with the American people.”
But an AP-NORC poll released today shows that it is not Johnson but the others at that meeting who are standing with the American people: 74% of Americans, including 62% of Republicans, support U.S. aid to Ukraine’s military.
The struggle between Biden and Trump for control over U.S. politics played out starkly today as both were in Texas to talk about immigration. Both say the influx of migrants at the southern border of the United States needs to be better managed. But Trump blames Biden for what he compares to a war in which an “invasion” of criminal “fighting-age men” are pouring over the border. (NBC News noted that “there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the United States” and that, in fact, their review of crime data ”shows overall crime levels dropping in those cities that have received the most migrants.”)
Trump promises he would solve immigration issues instantly with executive orders, although his orders during his term faced legal challenges.
In contrast to Trump’s promise to dictate a solution, Biden emphasized that the government should work for the people. In Texas, he noted that the federal government has rushed emergency personnel and funds to the state to combat the deadly wildfires there that have burned more than a million acres, and he urged Congress to pass a law to address border issues, as he has asked it to since he took office.
Such a measure is popular, and earlier this month, Trump undermined a bill that was tilted so far to the right that it drew the support of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and the U.S. Border Patrol union. Senators from both parties had spent four months hammering the bill out at the insistence of House Republicans, who then killed it when Trump, apparently hoping to keep the issue open for his campaign, told them to.
Today, Biden urged Congress to pass the $20.2 billion bipartisan border bill that would, he said, give border patrol officers the resources they need: 1,500 more border agents, 100 cutting-edge machines to detect and stop illegal fentanyl, 100 additional immigration judges to deal with the backlog of cases, 4,300 more asylum officers, more immigrant visas, and emergency authority for the president to shut the border when it becomes overwhelmed.
Biden spoke directly to Trump: “Instead of playing politics with the issue, instead of telling members of Congress to block this legislation, join me, or I'll join you, in telling the Congress to pass this bipartisan border security bill. We can do it together…. Instead of playing politics with the issue, why don't we just get together and get it done. Let’s remember who the heck we work for. We work for the American people, not the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. We work for the American people.”
Trump may not share that perspective. Last night, Maggie Haberman and Andrew Higgins of the New York Times reported that Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has undermined democracy in Hungary, will visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago next week as Trump scrambles to find the more than half a billion dollars he needs to pay the fines and penalties courts have ordered. “We cannot interfere in other countries’ elections,” Orbán said last week, “but we would very much like to see President Donald Trump return to the White House.”
There are GOP politicians who simply fear being "primaried" and losing their seat if they don't go along with the MAGA program.
It's possible that some officials fear the threats of violence directed against them by MAGA thugs. As you know, there have been instances of this sort of behavior.
And there's a general, more existential fear, shared by many US citizens, fear of the consequences of a second Trump administration. Gutting the civil service, clawing back the Biden infrastructure appropriations, mass violations of civil rights, loss of reproductive choice, changing the renamed forts back to the former names that honored Confederate generals, irresponsible tax cuts, and the abandonment of climate goals in an orgy of petroleum extraction and deregulation. Those are just a few.
Every time chances begin to look good for Democrats, something like Gaza comes or the border crisis or the dismal situation in Ukraine. And I hear all these single-issue votes who don't care if Trump wins because Biden didn't address their one particular concern. I've heard interviews with minority voters extolling the economy under Trump and completely ignoring the global effects of the pandemic. I've heard people say they won't vote for Biden because Harris might become president. The fact that Trump's party controls the Supreme Court (which is no accident) makes it very difficult to see how anything short of anti-MAGA landslide can preserve this experiment in democracy.
WHAT is your point with addressing this to me?
I have not said I think they are acting out of fear...or favor. I frankly would be guessing if I did...and it might be that individuals might be motivated by different things.
Many people who acted in favor of Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Caligula...may have done so out of favor for policy of some sort. But many may well have acting supportingly out of fear.
WHAT is your point with addressing this to me?
Sometimes the law mandates delay and no one can do anything about it. But there is nothing mandatory at all about what the Supreme Court has done with Donald Trump’s appeal. On the contrary, the decision to hear his petition for presidential immunity and delay his criminal trial for the January 6 insurrection is an affirmative choice.
When Richard Nixon’s appeal of the order to turn over his presidential tapes was pending, the Supreme Court had a choice—and it chose to act quickly. The district-court decision requiring Nixon to produce the tapes was issued on May 31, 1974. The Supreme Court agreed with a motion to skip the appeals court altogether, taking the case directly from the district court, and heard the argument 39 days later, on July 8. Just three weeks later, on July 24, it issued its opinion. Total time from the district-court decision to the final decision of the Supreme Court: 54 days.
The district court’s decision denying Trump immunity was issued on December 1, 2023. Special Counsel Jack Smith asked the Supreme Court to follow the Nixon precedent and take the case directly. The Court chose not to. The appeals court issued its decision on February 6—already 66 days later. Immediately following, Smith asked the Supreme Court to avoid further delay and let the appellate decision stand. The Court waited 22 more days, until February 28, before choosing to take the case.
And then, perhaps most remarkable of all, the Court chose to set the oral argument for April 22—54 days from its decision to take the case. The same Court that took 54 days to hear and decide Nixon’s case from soup to nuts has just scheduled 54 days of mere waiting around for briefing before oral argument—briefing in a case that has been fully briefed twice before and in which appeal arguments could be filed within a week at most. Total time from district-court decision to argument in front of the Supreme Court: 152 days.
And then, of course, the Court will choose how long it waits before issuing its decision. If the Court waits until the end of its term, usually around the end of June, that will make for a grand total of more than 200 days of process, more than half a year, and roughly four times as long as the entire Nixon appellate process.
None of this is accidental. None of this is required by law. If the Court were of the view that it needed to weigh in but wanted to avoid delay, it could have, and should have, chosen to skip the appeals stage. If it was of the view that a unanimous, well-written, narrow appellate opinion would suffice, it could have denied the petition for a hearing after the District of Columbia circuit court had issued its determination.
And delay breeds more delay. When the district-court proceedings were paused, just over three months remained before the March 4 trial date. Assuming that Judge Tanya Chutkan holds to a similar timeline, a Supreme Court decision on, say, June 30 would mean a trial that starts at the end of September.
Judge Chutkan has proved to be a brave and resolute jurist so far, but it would nevertheless be an impressively bold move to start a six-week trial (that’s what is predicted) just five weeks before the election. Can you imagine the reaction if Trump were forced to spend the last five weeks in a D.C. courthouse instead of on the campaign trail? The tumult? The violence? The sheer craziness of the moment? No matter how resolute she may be, Judge Chutkan seems likely to delay the trial until after the election—and that means that if Trump wins the election, the trial will never happen. (As an aside, imagine the even crazier scenario where Trump wins the election and the trial goes forward in mid-November, with a conviction coming before the electoral votes are counted. The country does not need that sort of excitement.)
The costs of the Court’s delay are thus clear—the delay in justice makes it possible that Trump will never face federal criminal charges for his role in inciting the January 6 insurrection. The Supreme Court will have been complicit in affording him the delay he so desperately desires.
It is hard to think of a positive reason for doing so. One might offer the rosy spin that the justices have concluded that taking their time will improve their decision making. But this Court has not demonstrated that sort of concern before—on the contrary, the well-documented increase in the use of a shadow docket reveals a willingness to make consequential, divisive decisions (about immigration, COVID vaccines, gun rights, and abortion) without the benefit of lengthy consideration and comprehensive briefing.
What could possibly be different here—especially when it seems almost self-evident that the Trump criminal matter calls out, as no other case can, for prompt resolution? The Court must understand that its delay means the trial will likely not occur before the election, and the only reasonable conclusion is that a majority of the Court wants it that way.
And that, in the end, is the most terribly depressing part of this episode. Those who have seen the courts as the final guardrail against Trumpist authoritarianism now must face the prospect that they are not. Adjudication of law is becoming a Kabuki theater of politics masquerading as reason. The courts are no surcease. The only answer, if one exists, is at the ballot box. Perhaps even that will not suffice—after all, Trump has already been defeated once, and that brought no justice. But the alternative—that justice is to be permanently denied—is too grim a circumstance to contemplate.
Quote:WHAT is your point with addressing this to me?
Um...I don't understand your reaction; it seems almost defensive.
you wrote:I have not said I think they are acting out of fear...or favor. I frankly would be guessing if I did...and it might be that individuals might be motivated by different things.
We were discussing some of the possible motivations of Republican politicians. I'm not challenging anything you said.
you wrote:Many people who acted in favor of Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Caligula...may have done so out of favor for policy of some sort. But many may well have acting supportingly out of fear.
Right, and I amplified this by describing some of the kinds of fear that may be motivating both sides.
you wrote:WHAT is your point with addressing this to me?
What was the "point" of you addressing this post to me? Isn't that how a discussion works? I'm not arguing with you; I'm in agreement with you and furthering a discussion.
And there's a general, more existential fear, shared by many US citizens, fear of the consequences of a second Trump administration. Gutting the civil service, clawing back the Biden infrastructure appropriations, mass violations of civil rights, loss of reproductive choice, changing the renamed forts back to the former names that honored Confederate generals, irresponsible tax cuts, and the abandonment of climate goals in an orgy of petroleum extraction and deregulation. Those are just a few.
And I hear all these single-issue votes who don't care if Trump wins because Biden didn't address their one particular concern. I've heard interviews with minority voters extolling the economy under Trump and completely ignoring the global effects of the pandemic. I've heard people say they won't vote for Biden because Harris might become president. The fact that Trump's party controls the Supreme Court (which is no accident) makes it very difficult to see how anything short of anti-MAGA landslide can preserve this experiment in democracy.
You talk about the different fears that you’ve observed as being experienced by different groups.
“I hear all these single-issue voters”, like you’re talking about some species of Amazon jungle frog you’ve discovered exhibiting strange behaviors.
At every turn when I have challenged you to confront and honestly comment on (for example)Garland’s terrifying abdication of responsibility and how that may have crippled any efforts to hold Trump responsible for 1/6, you have not only refused to see that as a credible perspective, but have blatantly played apologist for the failed system of rich white men failing to hold rich white men to account.
I could make the case more clearly that your way of trying to hold yourself above the mere concerns of us mortals is objectively infuriating.
It truly seems like you think you’re just above it all...
Well, the big news is that after 24 hours of even more expert analysis, nothing’s going to save us. Certainly not the Supreme Court. They’re in the tank for Donald Trump, full stop. It doesn’t matter which way they will eventually rule on his claim of absolute immunity, hell, it doesn’t even matter whether they’ll rule at all. They’re going to toss the 14th Amendment’s insurrectionist ban in the garbage, and then they’re going to dilly dally until presidential immunity is a moot point.
But even if the Supreme Court were to hurry up the case and rule against Trump’s claim of immunity, that wouldn’t save us, either. Even Jack Smith getting a conviction before election day wouldn’t save us.
Donald Trump has to be beaten at the ballot box, and beaten badly, and we can do it.
Trump’s performance in the Republican primaries so far has been abysmal. In three of the primaries, 40 percent of the voters in his own party didn’t vote for him. In the fourth, about 30 percent didn’t want him. Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, and significant numbers of Republican voters have rejected him every chance they’ve gotten. This can’t be emphasized enough. Those were Republican votes he didn’t get.
Every time you read a story about Trump, the political pundits are saying he has remade the Republican Party in his own image, he’s turned it into the MAGA party, he owns the party’s base. Really? Trump wasn’t running against Joe Biden in those primaries. With the likes of Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley on the primary ballot, Trump didn’t have an opponent that anybody in his party thought could actually win the nomination. Those weren’t votes for DeSantis or Haley as much as they were protest votes against Trump.
I’m not making an argument that those Republicans who voted against Trump in the primaries are going to vote for Biden in November. A few of them might, and most of them will vote for the Republican nominee, who will be Donald Trump, because that’s what Republicans do. But some of them are going to stay home.
That means Donald Trump is beatable. It won’t be easy, it will be closer than it should be, but he is not going to get as large a number of the popular vote as he got last time.
Sure, the MAGA people love him, they buy the red hats and they fly the flags from their pickup trucks and some of them turn out for his rallies. But not as many as in 2020, and certainly not as many as in 2016.
He’s bleeding. His fund raising is in the basement. A massive percentage of the money he’s raised through Super Pacs has gone to pay for his legal defense in the trials he has already faced and lost in New York and will face again in three weeks, and to the lawyers he’s hired to file the flurry of appeals briefs they’ve been cranking out. The New York Times reported last week that Trump committees had spent $50 million on legal expenses last year, “and those costs are likely to balloon as he prepares for potential trials this year.”
Why isn’t this a bigger story? Why has so much of the political coverage of Trump emphasized how he “trounced” his opponents in the primaries, when he lost between 40 and 30 percent of the vote in each of them? Reading the coverage of Joe Biden’s win in Michigan, you’d have thought that 80 percent of the vote was a loss, and a 12 percent vote for “uncommitted” was a disaster. President Obama got a 10 percent uncommitted vote when he was running for reelection. Where was that number in the mainstream coverage of the Michigan primary?
The Washington Post reported this morning that an analysis of Republican primary results showed that “voters 65 or older were the age group most likely to support Trump in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. They made up more than a third of his voters, increasing from a quarter eight years ago.” How is that good news for Donald Trump? It’s not.
I’m going to keep reporting on Trump’s legal woes because it’s an important story and because I just love it that he is finally being held to account for at least some of the crimes he has committed. But what I’m going to be paying the most attention to is the nuts and bolts of beating his sorry ass in November.
We can do it. The first thing we’ve got to do is get over the idea that this is somehow a different country than it has been because Donald Trump is running for president again. It’s not. He’s not a superman. Owning a corrupt Supreme Court does not give him the political power to win an election that depends on the votes of American citizens.
With abortion and IVF scaring the **** out of voters all over the country, we know we’ve got the issues. We know there are more of us than there are of them. What we’ve got to do is turn out and vote.
He pinched a little girl's nipple on camera.
Let's put a name on that.
What do you suggest?
