How is it that you, apparently alone, know the future so well?
Unlike you, I don't claim certainty in all of this...
However, the evidence indicating widespread and growing public dissatisfcaction with left-leaning "liberal" governments is abundant and growing.
The widespread dissatisfaction is with incumbency. There were more liberal democracies among the developed nations, thus more liberal governments to get thrown out. Remember, at one time they all got voted in! In order to prevent the seesawing between left and right every election cycle authoritarians like Orban emerge and work to limit the power of voters. It will be interesting to see how the Republicans approach voting rights now that they believe themselves to gain from larger voter turnout. But I'm not making any predictions.
It appears that Europe is not so much " dissatisfied with incumbency as looking for a new direction.
Almost ten weeks after the 2024 election, North Carolina remains in turmoil from it. Voters in the state elected Donald Trump to the presidency, but they elected Democrat Josh Stein for governor and current Democratic representative Jeff Jackson as attorney general, and they broke the Republicans’ legislative supermajority that permitted them to pass laws over the veto of the current governor, Democrat Roy Cooper. They also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the state supreme court.
Republicans refuse to accept the voters’ choice.
In the last days of their supermajority, under the guise of relieving the western part of the state still reeling from the effects of late September’s Hurricane Helene, Republican legislators stripped power from Stein and Jackson. They passed a law, SB 382, to take authority over public safety and the public utilities away from the governor and prohibited the attorney general from taking any position that the legislature, which is still dominated by Republicans, does not support.
The law also radically changes the way the state conducts elections, giving a newly elected Republican state auditor power over the state’s election board and shortening the amount of time available for the counting of votes and for voters to fix issues on flagged ballots.
Outgoing governor Cooper vetoed the bill when it came to his desk, calling it a “sham” and “playing politics,” but the legislature repassed it over his veto. Now he and incoming governor Stein are suing over the law, saying it violates the separation of powers written into North Carolina’s constitution.
There is an important backstory to this power grab. North Carolina is pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. In 2010, Republican operatives nationwide launched what they called Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project. The plan was to take control of state legislatures across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census.
It worked. In North Carolina, Republicans took control of the legislature for the first time in more than 100 years. They promptly redrew the map of North Carolina’s districts so that the state’s congressional delegation went from a split of 7 Democrats and 6 Republicans in 2010 to a 9–4 split in favor of Republicans in 2012 despite the fact that Democrats won over 80,000 more votes than their Republican opponents. By 2015 that split had increased to 10–3.
The same change showed in the state legislature. North Carolina’s House of Representatives has 120 seats; its Senate has 50 seats. In 2008, Democrats won the House with 55.14% of the vote to the Republicans’ 43.95%. And yet in 2012, with the new maps in place, Republicans won 77 seats to the Democrats’ 43. The North Carolina Senate saw a similar shift. In 2008, Democrats won 51.5% of the vote to the Republicans’ 47.4%, but in 2012, Republicans held 33 seats to the Democrats’ 17.
When they held majorities in both chambers, Democrats passed laws that made it easier to vote, and voter turnout had been increasing with more Black voters than white voters turning out in 2008 and 2012. But in 2012, Republicans used their new power to pass a sweeping new law that made it harder to vote.
When courts found those maps unconstitutional because of racial bias, the state legislature wrote a different map divided, members said, not according to race but according to political partisanship, despite the overlap between the two.
“I’m making clear that our intent is to use the political data we have to our partisan advantage,” said state representative David Lewis, who chaired the redistricting committee. “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage of 10 Republicans and three Democrats because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” Lewis declared: “I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country.”
That map, too, skewed representation. Although Democrats won a majority of votes for both the state House and the state Senate in 2018, Republicans held 66 out of 120 seats in the House and 29 of 50 seats in the Senate. Although they had lost the majority of the popular vote, Republican leaders claimed “a clear mandate” to advance their policies.
The fight over those maps went all the way to the Supreme Court, which said in Rucho v. Common Cause that the federal courts could not address partisan gerrymandering. Plaintiffs then sued under the state constitution, and in late 2019 a state appeals court agreed that the maps violated the constitution’s guarantee of free elections. A majority on the state supreme court agreed.
The court drew a new map that resulted in an even split again in the congressional delegation in 2022 (North Carolina picked up an additional representative after the 2020 census). But Republicans in that election won two seats on the North Carolina Supreme Court. In late spring 2022 the new right-wing majority said the state courts had no role in policing gerrymandering. The state legislature drew a new congressional map that snapped back to the old Republican advantage: in 2024, North Carolina sent to Congress 10 Republicans and 4 Democrats.
But they also reelected Justice Allison Riggs, a Democrat, to the North Carolina Supreme Court, by 734 votes. Her challenger, Republican Jefferson Griffin, has refused to concede, even after the two recounts he requested confirmed her win. He is now focusing on getting election officials to throw out the ballots of 60,000 voters, retroactively changing who can vote in North Carolina.
There has been a fight over whether the case should be heard in federal or state court; Griffin wants it in front of the state supreme court, which has a 5–2 majority of Republicans. Last Tuesday the state supreme court temporarily blocked the state elections board from certifying Riggs’s win while it hears arguments in the case.
As Will Doran of WRAL News explains, Republicans currently have a court majority, but three of the seats currently held by Republicans are on the ballot in 2028. Taking a seat away from Riggs would ensure Democrats could not flip the court, leaving a Republican majority in place for redistricting after the 2030 census.
The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gives North Carolina an “F” for its maps. In states that are severely gerrymandered for the Republicans, politicians worry not about attracting general election voters, but rather about avoiding primaries from their right, pushing the state party to extremes. In December, Molly Hennessy-Fiske of the Washington Post noted that Republican leaders in such states are eager to push right-wing policies, with lawmakers in Oklahoma pushing further restrictions on abortion and requiring public schools to post the Ten Commandments, and those in Arkansas calling for making “vaccine harm” a crime, while Texas is considering a slew of antimigrant laws.
This rightward lurch in Republican-dominated states has national repercussions, as Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in December sued New York doctor Margaret Daly Carpenter for violating Texas law by mailing abortion pills into the state. Law professor Mary Ziegler explains that if the case goes forward, Texas will likely win in its own state courts. Ultimately, the question will almost certainly end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the United States today, a political minority has used the mechanics of government to take power and is now using that power to impose its will on the majority. The pattern is exactly that of the elite southern enslavers who in the 1850s first took over the Democratic Party and then, through it, captured the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House and tried to take over the country.
The story of the 1850s centered around the determination of southern planters to preserve the institution of human enslavement underpinning the economy that had made them rich and powerful, and today we tend to focus on the racial dominance at the heart of that system. But the political machinations that supported their efforts came from the work of New York politician Martin van Buren, whose time in the White House from 1837 to 1841 ultimately had less effect on the country’s politics than his time as a political leader in New York.
In the early 1800s, van Buren recognized that creating a closed system in the state of New York would preserve the power of his own political machine and that from there he could command the heavy weight of New York’s 36 electoral votes—the next closest state, Pennsylvania, had 28, after which electoral vote counts fell rapidly—to swing national politics in the direction he wanted. Van Buren’s focus was less on reinforcing enslavement for racial dominance—although he came from a family that enslaved its Black neighbors—but on money and power.
Van Buren set up a political machine known as the Albany Regency, building his power by taking over all the state offices and judgeships and by insisting on party unity. He opposed federal funding of internal improvements in the state, recognizing that such improvements would disrupt the existing power structure by opening up new avenues for wealth. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1820, he used his machine to elect Andrew Jackson to the White House on a platform promising “reform” of the federal government calling for economic development, a government the Democrats claimed had fallen into the hands of the elite. Once in power, Jackson used the federal government to benefit the enslavers who dominated the southern states.
That focus on preserving power in the states to keep political and economic power in the hands of a minority is a key element of our current moment. After the 1950s, as federal courts upheld the power of the federal government to regulate business and promote infrastructure projects that took open bids for contracts, they threatened to disrupt the economic power of traditional leaders. While state power reinforces social dominance as a few white men make laws for the majority of women and racial, gender, and religious minorities, it also concentrates economic power in the states, which in turn affects the nation.
When a Republican in charge of state redistricting constructs a map based on his idea that “electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats,” and when a Republican candidate calls for throwing out the votes of 60,000 voters to declare victory in an election he lost, they have abandoned the principles of democracy in favor of a one-party state that will operate in their favor alone.
Republicans refuse to accept the voters’ choice.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”
The incoming Trump administration is working to put its agenda into place.
Although experts on the National Security Council usually carry over from one administration to the next, Aamer Madhani and Zeke Miller of the Associated Press today reported that incoming officials for the Trump administration are interviewing career senior officials on the National Security Council about their political contributions, how they voted in 2024, and whether they are loyal to Trump. Most of them are on loan from the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency and, understanding that they are about to be fired, have packed up their desks to head back to their home agencies.
The National Security Council is the main forum for the president to hash out decisions in national security and foreign policy, and the people on it are picked for their expertise. But Trump’s expected pick to become his national security advisor—his primary advisor on all national security issues—Representative Mike Waltz (R-FL) told right-wing Breitbart News that he wants to staff the NSC with people who are “100 percent aligned with the president’s agenda.”
Ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Representative Gerry Connolly (D-VA) warned that the loyalty purge “threatens our national security and our ability to respond quickly and effectively to the ongoing and very real global threats in a dangerous world.”
But during Trump’s first term, it was Alexander Vindman, who was detailed to the NSC, and his twin Eugene Vindman, who was serving the NSC as an ethics lawyer, who reported concerns about Trump’s July 2019 call to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to their superiors. This launched the investigation that became Trump’s first impeachment, and Trump appears anxious to make sure future NSC members will be fiercely loyal to him.
With extraordinarily slim majorities in the House and Senate, Republicans are talking about pushing through their entire agenda through Congress as a single bill in the process known as budget reconciliation. Budget reconciliation, which deals with matters related to spending, revenue, and the debt limit, is one of the few things that cannot be filibustered, meaning that Republicans could get a reconciliation bill through the Senate with just 50 votes. If they can hold their conference together, they could get the package through despite Democratic opposition.
House speaker Mike Johnson and Republican leaders have said that the House intends to pass a reconciliation bill that covers border security, defense spending, the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, spending cuts to social welfare programs, energy deregulation, and an increase in the national debt limit.
But Li Zhou of Vox points out that it’s not quite as simple as it sounds to get everything at once, because budget reconciliation measures are not supposed to include anything that doesn’t relate to the budget, and the Senate parliamentarian will advise stripping those things out. In addition, the budget cuts Republicans are circulating include cuts to popular programs like Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (more commonly known as Obamacare), the Inflation Reduction Act’s investment in combating climate change, and the supplemental nutrition programs formerly known as food stamps.
Still, a lot can be done under budget reconciliation. Democrats under Biden passed the 2021 American Rescue Plan and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act under reconciliation, and Republicans under Trump passed the 2017 Trump tax cuts the same way.
A wrinkle in those plans is the Republicans’ hope to raise the national debt limit. As soon as they take control of Congress and the White House, Republicans will have to deal immediately with the treasury running up against the debt limit, a holdover from World War I that sets a limit on how much the country can borrow. Although he has complained bitterly about spending under Biden, Trump has demanded that Congress either raise or abandon the debt ceiling because the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the tax cuts he wants to extend will add $4.6 trillion to the deficit over the next ten years, and cost estimates for his deportation plans range from $88 billion to $315 billion a year.
Republicans are backing away from adding a debt increase to the budget reconciliation package out of concern that members of the far-right Freedom Caucus will kill the entire bill if they do. Those members want no part of raising the national debt and have demanded $2 trillion in budget cuts before they will consider it. Tonight, Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) told Jordain Carney of Politico that Senate Republicans expect the debt limit to be stripped out of the budget reconciliation measure.
So Republicans are currently exploring the idea of leveraging aid to California for the deadly fires in order to get Democrats to sign on to raising the debt ceiling. Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported that Trump met with a group of influential House Republicans over dinner Sunday night at Mar-a-Lago to discuss tying aid for the wildfires to raising the debt ceiling. Today, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) confirmed to reporter Hill that this plan is under discussion.
Indeed, Republicans have been in the media suggesting that disaster aid to Democratic states should be tied to their adopting Republican policies. The Los Angeles fires have now claimed at least 24 lives. More than 15,000 firefighters are working to extinguish the wildfires, which have been driven by Santa Ana winds of up to 98 miles (158 km) an hour over ground scorched by high temperatures and low rainfall since last May, conditions caused by climate change.
On the Fox News Channel today, Representative Zach Nunn (R-IA) said: "We will certainly help those thousands of homes and families who have been devastated, but we also expect you to change bad behavior. We should look at the same for these blue states who have run away with a broken tax policy.... Those governors need to change their tune now.” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) blamed Democrats for the fires and said of federal disaster relief: “I certainly wouldn't vote for anything unless we see a dramatic change in how they're gonna be handling these things in the future.”
Aside from the morality of demanding concessions for disaster aid after President Joe Biden responded with full and unconditional support for regions hit by Hurricane Helene (although Tennessee governor Bill Lee is still lying that Biden delayed aid to his state, when in fact he delayed in asking for it, as required by law), there is a financial problem with this argument. As economist Paul Krugman noted today in his Krugman Wonks Out, California “is literally subsidizing the rest of the United States, red states in particular, through the federal budget.”
In 2022, the most recent year for which information is available, California paid $83 billion more to the federal government than it got back. Washington state also subsidized the rest of the country, as did most of the Northeast. That money flowed to Republican-dominated states, which contributed far less to the federal government than they received in return.
Krugman noted that “if West Virginia were a country, it would in effect be receiving foreign aid equal to more than 20 percent of its G[ross] D[omestic] P[roduct].” Krugman refers to the federal government as “an insurance company with an army,” and he notes that there is “nothing either the city or the state could have done to prevent” the wildfires. “If the United States of America doesn’t take care of its own citizens, wherever they live and whatever their politics, we should drop “United” from our name,” he writes. “As it happens, however, California—a major driver of U.S. prosperity and power—definitely has earned the right to receive help during a crisis.”
Today, Biden announced student loan forgiveness for another 150,000 borrowers, bringing the total number of people relieved of student debt to more than 5 million borrowers, who have received $183.6 billion in relief. This has been achieved through making sure existing debt relief programs were followed, as they had not been in the past.
Establishment Republicans continue to fight MAGA Republicans, and MAGA fights among itself: former Trump ally Steve Bannon yesterday called Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk “truly evil” and vowed to “take this guy down.” But even as their enablers in the legacy media are normalizing Republican behavior, a reality-based media is stepping up to counter the disinformation.
Aside from the many independent outlets that have held MAGA Republicans to account, MSNBC today announced that progressive journalist Rachel Maddow will return to hosting a nightly one-hour show for the first 100 days of the Trump presidency.
And today journalist Jennifer Rubin joined her colleagues who have abandoned the Washington Post as it swung toward Trump. She resigned from the Washington Post with the announcement that she and former White House ethics lawyer Norm Eisen have started a new media outlet called The Contrarian. Joining them is a gold-star list of journalists and commentators who have stood against the rise of Trump and the MAGA Republicans, many of whom have left publications as those outlets moved rightward.
“Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission—defending, protecting and advancing democracy,” Rubin wrote in her resignation announcement. In contrast, the new publication “will be a central hub for unvarnished, unbowed, and uncompromising reported opinion and analysis that exists in opposition to the authoritarian threat.”
“The urgency of the task before us cannot be overstated,” The Contrarian’s mission statement read. “We have already entered the era of oligarchy—rule by a narrow clique of powerful men (almost exclusively men). We have little doubt that billionaires will dominate the Trump regime, shape policy, engage in massive self-dealing, and seek to quash dissent and competition in government and the private sector. As believers in free markets subject to reasonable regulation and economic opportunity for all, we recognize this is a threat not only to our democracy but to our dynamic, vibrant economy that remains the envy of the world.”
In what appears to be a rebuke to media outlets that are cozying up to Trump, The Contrarian’s credo is “Not Owned by Anybody.”
X · BenFRubinstein
8 likes · 1 day ago
Occasionally on this app it is appropriate to repeat yourself so let me be clear Israel has no right to exist Israel should not exist.
Benjamin Rubinstein@BenFRubinstein
Who cares if Trump is a felon when Bloody Blinken and Genocide Joe have the blood of so many innocents on their hands?
8:38 AM · Jan 14, 2025
"Trump appears to be bending Israel over and shoving a ceasefire down their throat while he’s at it."
Democrats have a terrible habit, during moments of right-wing backlash, of voting for Republican legislation that they don’t seem to truly believe in and eventually live to regret.
The most glaring example is the 2002 resolution authorizing military force against Iraq, passed amid the explosion of jingoist groupthink that dominated American politics after the Sept. 11 attacks. Democratic presidential candidates who’d backed the resolution — John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — would later tie themselves in knots trying to rationalize votes that were almost certainly motivated by political expediency, and which put their imprimatur on a catastrophe.
Another shameful episode was the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which barred the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. It passed at a time when Democrats were on the defensive; Bill Clinton’s attempt to let gay people serve openly in the military had fallen apart, Newt Gingrich’s Republicans took the House in the 1994 midterms, and the Republican Bob Dole seemed poised to make gay marriage an issue in the coming election. In a weirdly apologetic signing statement, Clinton wrote that the law should not be “understood to provide an excuse for discrimination, violence or intimidation against any person on the basis of sexual orientation.” But as Clinton would later acknowledge when calling for its repeal, it did something worse, writing discrimination into law.
A bill called the Laken Riley Act, which overwhelmingly passed the House and could soon pass the Senate, is destined to be another entry in this archive of legislative shame. Given that anger over mass migration contributed to Democrats’ defeat in November, it’s perfectly understandable that some Democrats would tack right on border issues. The Laken Riley Act, however, is the wrong vehicle for proving their moderation. This sweeping bill will upend our immigration system in ways that will outlast Donald Trump’s presidency, ruining lives and handcuffing future Democratic administrations. Democrats who vote for it may dodge right-wing attacks in the next election, but once its true scope becomes clear, they’ll be answering for it for years to come.
The bill is named after a Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by Jose Ibarra, an undocumented migrant from Venezuela who had previously been apprehended for crimes including shoplifting and child endangerment. Due in part to Ibarra’s arrest history, the case became a cause célèbre on the right. “The more they get away with and the more we let these criminals go, it just emboldens them, and they step it up,” said Mike Collins, the Georgia Republican who introduced the measure in the House.
If all the bill did was mandate the deportation of migrants convicted of petty theft, it would make sense for many Democrats to back it, if only because there’s so little political upside in defending the rights of undocumented shoplifters. But the bill goes much further than that. It mandates federal detention without bail for migrants who are merely arrested for any theft-related crimes, with no provision to free them if the charges are later dropped. (According to Axios, ICE is worried that to make room for those accused of theft, it would have to release others in its custody, including some considered “public safety threats.”)
The bill applies to many immigrants who are authorized to be here, including Dreamers and those with temporary protected status. And the legislation contains no exemption for minors. As Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, told me, the Laken Riley Act could mandate the indefinite detention of a juvenile child of asylum-seekers arrested for swiping a candy bar, even if he or she didn’t do it.
One of the act’s other provisions would give state officials unheard-of power over immigration policy. If the bill passes, a state attorney general could sue to block all visas to people from “recalcitrant countries” that don’t fully cooperate with the United States in accepting deportees, a list that includes China, India and Russia. This section of the Laken Riley Act may not matter much when Trump is in office; Republican attorneys general probably won’t want to challenge the president, and Democrats are unlikely to demand harsher immigration crackdowns. But if we ever have another Democratic president, it’s easy to picture the most conservative state prosecutors suing to block the issuance of visas to, say, people from China. Immigration policy would be subject to a chaotic fight in the federal courts.
Though the measure passed the House overwhelmingly last week, Democrats could still block it in the Senate, where it needs 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. Alas, that seems unlikely to happen. Last week, only nine Senate Democrats voted against proceeding to debate the bill on the Senate floor. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Ruben Gallego of Arizona are co-sponsors of it, and several other swing-state Democrats have already announced plans to vote for it. Fetterman told reporters last week that fellow Democrats had experienced a “blinding flash of common sense.”
But the Democrats’ failure to muster opposition to this bill isn’t common sense, it’s cowardice. Given the lessons of the last election, it’s wise for Democrats to defy pro-immigrant interest groups when those groups make politically insupportable demands like abolishing ICE or decriminalizing illegal border crossings. That’s very different, however, from completely capitulating to Republican demagogy with little evident concern for the long-term consequences.
Someday, when public opinion on immigration shifts again, Democrats who voted for this cruel and misguided bill will have a hard time justifying it. If only they could save themselves and us the trouble.
Quote:X · BenFRubinstein
8 likes · 1 day ago
Occasionally on this app it is appropriate to repeat yourself so let me be clear Israel has no right to exist Israel should not exist.
Quote:Lefties agree that Israel has been torturing and murdering Palestinians with impunity, increasingly for 75 years; that this must end immediately, and no Palestinian should be asked to live near an Israeli again. I agree with Ben. Most lefties do.
Quote:Benjamin Rubinstein@BenFRubinstein
Who cares if Trump is a felon when Bloody Blinken and Genocide Joe have the blood of so many innocents on their hands?
8:38 AM · Jan 14, 2025
Quote:This is undeniably true. What’s wrong with YOU?
Quote:"Trump appears to be bending Israel over and shoving a ceasefire down their throat while he’s at it."
Fer sure. Trump and the MAGA/GOP crowd are well known for despising Israeli/Likud policies re their neighbors and for their deep, long standing and abiding sympathies for Palestinian suffering. They are famous for it.
Findings suggest ‘weakening of west’ as relations become more transactional, say report’s authors
European anxiety about Donald Trump’s return to the White House is not shared in much of the world, a poll has shown, with more people in non-western powers such as China, Russia, India and Brazil welcoming his second term than not.
The 24-country poll, which also included Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Indonesia and Turkey, found that Switzerland, the UK, 11 EU nations surveyed and South Korea were alone in feeling Trump 2.0 would be bad for their country and for peace in the world.
“In short, Trump’s return is lamented by America’s longtime allies but almost nobody else,” stated the report by the European Council on Foreign Relations thinktank, adding that his re-election left Europe in particular “at a crossroads” in its relations with the US.
The report also found that many people outside Europe believed the incoming president was committed to ending wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and saw a Trump-led US as just one leading power among several – including the EU.
... ... ...
Summary
• A new survey for ECFR reveals people in many countries around the world are upbeat about the second Trump presidency.
• Many think Trump will not just be good for America but that he will bring peace or reduce tensions in Ukraine, the Middle East and US-China relations.
• In contrast, US allies in Europe and South Korea are notably pessimistic about the incoming president—suggesting a further weakening of the geopolitical “West”.
• Ukrainians are slightly more positive than not about the impact Trump might have on ending the conflict with Russia. But they are deeply conflicted about what could be an acceptable compromise settlement with Moscow.
• Europeans will struggle to find internal unity or global power in leading an outright resistance to the new administration. But the survey reveals that many in the world regard the EU as a player equal to the US and China—a strength European leaders should draw on as they enter the turbulent new presidential term.
• Rather than harking back to a post-cold war liberal order, Europeans should focus on understanding and seeing opportunities in the new world.
