The Gaetz Report

Our next book will examine Trump's return to power.  He actually wanted to make this guy attorney general.

Sarah Ferris and Jeremy Herb, CNN:

The House Ethics Committee found evidence that former Rep. Matt Gaetz paid tens of thousands of dollars to women for sex or drugs on at least 20 occasions, including paying a 17-year-old girl for sex in 2017, according to a final draft of the panel’s report on the Florida Republican, obtained by CNN.

The committee concluded in its bombshell document that Gaetz violated Florida state laws, including the state’s statutory rape law, as the GOP-led panel chose to take the rare step of releasing a report about a former member who resigned from Congress.

“The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” panel investigators wrote.

The panel investigated transactions Gaetz personally made, often using PayPal or Venmo, to more than a dozen women during his time in Congress, according to the report. Investigators also focused on a 2018 trip to the Bahamas – which they said “violated the House gift rule” – during which he “engaged in sexual activity” with multiple women, including one who described the trip itself as “the payment” for sex on the trip. On the same trip, he also took ecstasy, one woman on the trip told the committee.

Earlier this month, the House Ethics Committee secretly voted to release its report after initially voting against doing so. The vote to put out the report – which was opposed by panel Chairman Michael Guest, a Mississippi Republican – was the culmination of a years-long probe into allegations surrounding Gaetz. He was President-elect Donald Trump’s first pick to be attorney general but dropped out amid opposition from GOP senators and after CNN reported key details of this same ethics report.

Blue Dogs

 In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.   Our 2024 book will discuss the Democratic Party's weakness among rural and working-class voters.  Some House Democrats are clear on the concept.

meet the Blue Dogs. we're just getting started. pic.twitter.com/Ajv7gWrjMm

— Blue Dog Bark (@BlueDogBark) December 21, 2024

Our service members can face restrictions on whether they can fix their equipment – so we've seen situations where engines are shipped off for repair, or authorized contractors have to be flown out to sea.

I introduced a military right to repair bill since this isn't only… pic.twitter.com/NnEUpSOLaz

— Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (@RepMGP) December 21, 2024

A Limit to Trump's Power

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.  Our next book will discuss 2024,

Why did dozens of House Republicans feel free to defy Trump this week? His power over them depends mainly on primary voters. And those voters are unlikely to punish members for not raising the debt limit.

Of course, cutting taxes will increase the debt, but those same voters would punish Republicans who opposed tax cuts.

Catie Edmondson and Andrew Duehren at NYT:

Something unusual happened this week after President-elect Donald J. Trump ordered House Republicans to back legislation raising the debt limit: Dozens refused.

It was a rare breach by a group of Republicans who have traditionally backed Mr. Trump’s policy preferences unquestioningly and taken pains to avoid defying him.

And it laid bare a disconnect between Mr. Trump and his party that could upend their efforts next year to pass transformative tax and domestic policy legislation with the tiniest of majorities. Even as Mr. Trump has displayed a laissez-faire attitude to the federal debt and a willingness to spend freely, a number of lawmakers in his party fervently adhere to an anti-spending philosophy that regards debt as disastrous.

In this week’s spending bill fight, Mr. Trump was intent on trying to absolve himself of responsibility for dealing with the debt ceiling, which is expected to be reached sometime in January. Raising it while President Biden was still in office and Democrats still held the Senate, he apparently believed, could avoid a messy internal Republican fight over the issue next year when Mr. Trump is in the White House and his party in full control of Congress

Instead, he only accelerated that clash, which unfolded on the House floor on Thursday night when 38 Republicans refused to suspend the borrowing limit without spending cuts.

They tanked a spending plan that would have deferred the debt cap for two years, and by Friday, when Speaker Mike Johnson advanced a third proposal to avert a shutdown to the House floor, they had jettisoned the debt limit measure entirely, promising instead to deal with it next year.

...

 A New York Times analysis of votes on spending bills since 2011 found that hard-right lawmakers associated with the Freedom Caucus have voted in favor of government funding bills less than 20 percent of the time. A smaller group of ultraconservative members has almost always voted against appropriations bills — in an average of 93 percent of cases.

It was that group of lawmakers that revolted against Mr. Trump's call this week to raise the debt limit without any cuts in exchange.

Biden's Decline and Fall

 Our most recent book is Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book will describe how Biden had to exit the race after his disastrous debate performance. Less than 48 hours after Biden's withdrawal, Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee. 

 Annie Linskey, Rebecca Ballhaus, Emily Glazer, and Siobhan Hughes at WSJ:

Presidents always have gatekeepers. But in Biden’s case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers, donors and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations. There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed.

Throughout his presidency, a small group of aides stuck close to Biden to assist him, especially when traveling or speaking to the public. “They body him to such a high degree,” a person who witnessed it said, adding that the “hand holding” is unlike anything other recent presidents have had.

The White House operated this way even as the president and his aides pressed forward with his re-election bid—which unraveled spectacularly after his halting performance in a June debate with Donald Trump made his mental acuity an insurmountable issue. Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him on the Democratic ticket and was decisively defeated by Trump in a shortened campaign—leaving Democrats to debate whether their chances were undercut by Biden’s refusal to yield earlier.

...

The president’s team of pollsters also had limited access to Biden, according to people familiar with the president’s polling. The key advisers have famously had the president’s ear in most past White Houses.

During the 2020 campaign, Biden had calls with John Anzalone, his pollster, during which the two had detailed conversations.

By the 2024 campaign, the pollsters weren’t talking to the president about their findings, and instead sent memos that went to top campaign staff.

Biden’s pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him, according to the people.

People close to the president said he relied on Mike Donilon, one of Biden’s core inner circle advisers. With a background in polling, Donilon could sift through the information and present it to the president.

Bates said that Biden stayed abreast of polling data.

But this summer, Democratic insiders became alarmed by the way Biden described his own polling, publicly characterizing the race as a tossup when polls released in the weeks after the disastrous June debate consistently showed Trump ahead. They worried he wasn’t getting an unvarnished look at his standing in the race.

Those fears intensified on July 11, when Biden’s top advisers met behind closed doors with Democratic senators, where the advisers laid out a road map for Biden’s victory. The message from the advisers was so disconnected from public polling—which showed Trump leading Biden nationally—that it left Democratic senators incredulous. It spurred Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) to speak to Biden directly, according to people familiar with the matter, hoping to pierce what the senators saw as a wall erected by Donilon to shield Biden from bad information. Donilon didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Early Authoritarian Moves

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Our next book looks at the return of Donald Trump.

He is planning an authoritarian agenda and would take care to eliminate any internal dissent.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Maggie Haberman, David Enrich and Alan Feuer at The New York Times.

President-elect Donald J. Trump sued The Des Moines Register for running a poll before the election that showed him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris, escalating his threats to seek retribution against the mainstream media and his political enemies.

Mr. Trump has long said that people he claims have wronged him should be prosecuted, including President Biden and his family; Jack Smith, the special counsel who charged Mr. Trump with trying to overturn the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents; and Liz Cheney, the former representative from Wyoming who helped lead the House investigation into Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power in 2020.

...

Just this week, Mr. Trump’s allies in Congress moved to support his efforts to seek retribution against Ms. Cheney, a chair of the House committee that investigated the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and recommended criminal charges against Mr. Trump.

On Tuesday, a House oversight subcommittee issued a report recommending that Ms. Cheney herself face criminal investigation for some of the work she did while investigating Mr. Trump. The report accused Ms. Cheney of secretly communicating with one of the committee’s star witnesses, Cassidy Hutchinson, without Ms. Hutchinson’s lawyer knowing.

Ms. Hutchinson gave significant but disputed testimony at one of the committee’s public hearings, describing, among other things, how Mr. Trump was warned that his supporters were carrying weapons on Jan. 6 but expressed no concern because they were not a threat to him.

By recommending that Ms. Cheney be investigated — including for possibly violating the same federal obstruction count that the congresswoman recommended against Mr. Trump — the House Republicans appeared to be laying the groundwork for a potential criminal prosecution. Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that Ms. Cheney and other members of the Jan. 6 committee should face charges and jail time.

In Mr. Trump’s own telling, winning his civil legal actions isn’t always the point.

Mr. Trump, who has often attacked journalists publicly for details in news accounts that he hasn’t liked, famously lost a libel case that he brought against the writer Timothy O’Brien over Mr. O’Brien’s description of Mr. Trump’s net worth as much less than he claimed it to be.

The case played out over the span of years. But during the 2016 election, Mr. Trump told The Washington Post that it was worth it, even with the loss.

“I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more,” he said of Mr. O’Brien and his book publisher. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

 

At 3 o'clock in the morning, Trump called for Liz Cheney to "be investigated by the FBI." pic.twitter.com/wcGMtpz2Ba

— Republican Voters Against Trump (@AccountableGOP) December 18, 2024

Lloyd Green at The Guardian:

Then there is ABC News. The network recently agreed to pay $15m to settle a Trump defamation suit. Last spring George Stephanopoulos, its Sunday talkshow host, repeatedly said Trump was liable for rape when a jury had actually found him liable for abuse.

But there is more to it than that. In August 2023, Trump lost his counter-claim for defamation against Carroll. Dismissing the Trump counter-claim, a judge in New York, Lewis A Kaplan, said that when Carroll repeated her allegation that Trump raped her, her words were “substantially true”. Kaplan also set out in detail why it may be said that Trump raped Carroll.

In May, Stephanopoulos said he would not be “cowed out of doing my job”. This weekend, however, he and ABC expressed collective “regret” over his choice of words. However you look at it, the network caved. With ABC having folded under pressure, expect the president-elect to be emboldened.

Trump has also filed a $10bn action against CBS for purportedly doctoring its 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Pending in a federal court in Texas, that lawsuit too is predicated upon alleged violation of a state consumer fraud law. Earlier this month, CBS moved to dismiss the case.

For Trump and his allies, however, overturning New York Times v Sullivan, the US supreme court’s unanimous 1964 landmark ruling on press freedoms, is the ultimate prize. In their view, public figures facing off against the press should be aided by a lower burden of proof. They should no longer be required to demonstrate “actual malice”. The fact that more than half a century has passed since the decision means little.

Justice Clarence Thomas has branded Sullivan and its progeny as “policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law”. Justice Neil Gorsuch more subtly contends that the emergence of cable television, the internet, and the 24/7 news cycle warrant re-examination of the “actual malice” standard.

Gerrymander?

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Mike Johnson blames gerrymandering for the Republicans' failure to win more seats in 2024.  In fact, their seat share matches their vote share.

 Ben Cohen at Factcheck.org:

Jonathan Cervas, assistant teaching professor in political science at Carnegie Mellon who was a nonpartisan consultant on redistricting in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New York, told us in an email that he agreed with Niven and the Brennan Center’s findings. While “the net effect of gerrymandering is difficult to gauge,” partisan redistricting “created a substantial advantage for Republicans nationwide,” making it “pretty clear that the Republicans have the advantage in terms of how the districts lines were drawn to favor a party,” he said.

Cervas, Nevin, and the Brennan Center’s report all pointed to North Carolina as an example of partisan gerrymandering affecting the 2024 election. In 2023, the state Supreme Court reversed an earlier ruling that had prevented the implementation of a Republican-drawn map in the 2022 election, with the court now concluding that they could not rule on cases concerning partisan redistricting. As a result, the Republican-controlled state legislature redistricted the state to favor their party. In what Cervas termed “textbook gerrymandering,” the Democrats lost three congressional seats in North Carolina between 2022 and 2024 under the newly drawn map, despite what he says were similar statewide Democratic vote shares in both elections.

However, Cervas also argued that the Republican advantage through gerrymandering has decreased in recent election cycles. The “Great Gerrymander of 2012,” as experts called it, created significant partisan advantages for Republicans in the aftermath of the 2010 census. But Cervas told us that shifting political control and interventions to courts and independent commissions have lessened the Republican Party’s advantage in recent election cycles. For example, Niven and Cervas both said that recent court rulings enforcing redistricting changes in Alabama and Louisiana favored Democrats over Republicans.

Alternatively, other experts used differing methodologies to quantify the effects of gerrymandering and found a smaller net effect from partisan redistricting.

In a 2023 study, Kosuke Imai, professor of government and statistics at Harvard University and the leader of the Algorithm-Assisted Redistricting Methodology Project, found — along with his team — that Republicans possess a net advantage of only two congressional seats from partisan gerrymandering.

Similar to Cervas, Imai told us in an email that partisan redistricting efforts largely favored Republicans over Democrats after the 2010 census. However, he said that “in the 2020 redistricting cycle, some states had a partisan bias toward Democrats. As a result, even though there was widespread gerrymandering in 2020, the partisan biases were mostly canceled out at the national level.”

Informal Checks and Balances: Stocks and Media

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Our next book looks at the return of Donald Trump.

He is planning an authoritarian agenda and would take care to eliminate any internal dissent.

Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman at NYT:

When Donald J. Trump rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with news cameras rolling, the moment perfectly captured two of the president-elect’s biggest obsessions: the stock market and television.

Mr. Trump’s fear of falling markets and bad imagery on TV may serve as more formidable checks on some of his more aggressive policies, like mass deportations and sweeping tariffs on trade with China, than any institutional restraints he may face in Washington.

Those guardrails are not foolproof, of course: Mr. Trump has proved himself willing to shatter longstanding political and legal norms in Washington while enduring the crush of condemnation from his adversaries at home and abroad.

But more than a dozen people close to Mr. Trump say he sees the market as a barometer of his success and abhors the idea that his actions might drive down stock prices. And they say he is so obsessed with how he comes across on television that a barrage of negative coverage can make him hesitate, or even reverse course.

...

The old guardrails from his first term have rusted away. The kind of people who saw themselves as the “adults in the room” who needed to protect the country from Mr. Trump — like John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief of staff, and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — will not be hired again.

 The old guardrails from his first term have rusted away. The kind of people who saw themselves as the “adults in the room” who needed to protect the country from Mr. Trump — like John F. Kelly, the former Marine general who was his longest-serving chief of staff, and former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — will not be hired again.