The president pardoned a motley crew of thieves, crooks and liars Tuesday with a crush of pardons aimed at … no one knows. Perhaps Donald Trump is planning to pardon Roger Stone, Paul Manafort and the other grifters and goons ensnared in Robert Mueller’s investigation, but honestly, he probably just wanted to act kingly.

All presidents have the authority to grant “Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States,” according to the US Constitution. (A president can pardon only for federal offenses, not state and local offenses.) But just because something is constitutional doesn’t mean it’s lawful or moral. One state legislator voted against impeaching former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. One state senator voted against convicting him. Everyone thought he was guilty. Everyone, that is, except Trump.

That said, the president is indeed establishing a precedent future presidents can follow if they choose to. I don’t suggest making pardons personal and arbitrary, as Trump has. But I do think a future Democratic president could be less constrained than they have been in the past. By that, I mean avoiding any hint of ideology and partisanship.

If this Republican president can pardon Blagojevich for selling Barack Obama’s former Senate seat, then the next Democratic president can pardon 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country who have left everything behind for a better life. Crossing the border once, or overstaying one’s visas, are misdemeanors and civil infractions, respectively, crimes far less severe than Blagojevich’s. Pardoning 11 million people might not be lawful, but it would be moral. And it would result in more than that.

One result would be enormous backlash. That alone would be neither surprising nor sufficient reason for not pardoning unauthorized immigrants. The Republicans decided a decade and more ago that the Democrats were not the loyal opposition but instead the enemy. The next Democratic president will weather blowback merely for being a Democrat. The only question would be the blowback’s size and intensity.

A more important result would be taking the air out of the immigration debate.

For years, the Democrats accepted the Republican demand that the US spend billions militarizing the southern border to “secure” it. Over time, however, it became clear the Republicans were bargaining in bad faith. For them, the border would never be secure enough. They would therefore never agree to comprehensive immigration reform.

Meanwhile, all those billions being sent to the border were creating a bureaucracy dedicated to treating border-crossing immigrants as a subspecies of humanity. Trump did indeed order border agents to confiscate babies and set up internment camps to warehouse them. But the capacity for doing that was developed long before Trump.

Moreover, a federal bureaucracy swimming in cash and directed by an authoritarian executive appears to be developing a dangerous internal culture. Customs and Border Protection, or border patrol, is starting to think of itself as the president’s gestapo, according to former border agent Jenn Budd. “They say they will become a ‘national police force’ to be used by a president to enforce laws even among citizens,” she wrote.

All of this — the Republicans’ obstruction, the president’s sadist policies toward border-crossers and a budding fascist bureaucracy at the CBP — all of this is anchored on the fact that crossing the border is a crime demanding “justice.” Remove the crime and you remove the rest. There’d be no need for billions in border security, no need for a militarized southern border, and no need for deportations or even “sanctuary cities.”

A mass pardon would change the entire debate.

Again, there will be blowback, but blowback might be worth it if the next Democratic president can take the national focus away from “criminals” threatening our “way of life,” and toward the new legal status of 11 million exonerated human beings. The Republicans will find some way to balk, but at least it won’t be “securing the border.”

Speaking of which, there won’t be a need for a border wall. Pardoning 11 million people would send a clear signal: the world’s tired, poor and huddled masses won’t be hunted down like animals and removed from the lives they have worked so hard to build for themselves and their children. A border wall was never going to keep people out anyway. It is a Republican fetish. Well, they’ll have a new fetish after a pardon: preventing 11 million people from gaining voting rights and rewarding Democrats.

A mass pardon would in effect open the southern border without the Democrats having to make the argument for opening it. That would be a boon to deindustrialized cities, to farmers in need of labor, and to the national economy as a whole. Would it be lawful? I don’t know. Reckless? Maybe. But it would indeed be the right thing to do.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 February 2020
Word Count: 795
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I’m not sure what congressional Democrats are thinking. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said her caucus will pivot from investigating the president to “health care, health care, health care.” I suppose, as Sheryl Gay Stolberg said in Sunday’s New York Times, the Democrats are indeed “recovering from their failed push to remove President Trump from office.” But this president continues to prove the arguments against him. Why stop now?

Donald Trump pushed for preferential treatment in the federal criminal sentencing of Roger Stone, his garrulous goombah. US Attorney General Bill Barr, the president’s favorite fixer, is trying to suppress a rebellion at the Department of Justice while weathering outside criticism from more than 2,000 former federal prosecutors who served presidents from both parties. They are calling for his immediate resignation.

Furthermore, the president maligned the integrity of the foreman of the jury that convicted Stone. Stone has since asked for a retrial. Then Trump did, too. Now a national association of 1,000 federal jurists has scheduled “an emergency meeting” to “address growing concerns about the intervention of Justice Department officials and President Donald Trump in politically sensitive cases,” according to USA Today.

Sure, the House Democrats must protect their majority, and that means protecting freshmen now representing conservative districts. But if soliciting foreign interference was enough for those Democrats to join the impeachment effort, surely a president behaving as if he were the embodiment of the nation-state is enough to continue investigating his administration. I mean, the least they could do is impeach Barr!

Perhaps, as she has before, Pelosi is being coy. Stolberg said oversight will continue even as the Democrats move on to health care and economic issues. “They plan in particular to press Attorney General William P. Barr over what they say are Mr. Trump’s efforts to compromise the independence of the Justice Department.” And last week, Pelosi herself said — in no uncertain terms — Trump’s intervention in the Stone case was “abuse of power,” the first charge against the president in his Senate trial.

Perhaps Pelosi is playing both sides, as she did leading up to impeachment. But I don’t think so. This is an election year, and she really does believe the conventional wisdom.

The conventional wisdom is that people who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016 due to “economic anxiety” and feeling “left behind” in the global economy. Given this understanding of 2016, pocketbook issues — “health care, health care, health care” — makes sense. But the conventional wisdom is wrong.

The people who voted for Trump were not working class. Not if you measure class by money. Two-thirds of his supporters earned above-average incomes — which is to say, annual household earnings of more than $50,000. Yes, they were white. Yes, many of them didn’t go to college. But many of them did, and they still voted for the president. Meanwhile the real working-class voters, many of them white, voted for Hillary Clinton. It wasn’t a working class revolt at all. It was a revolt of the petite bourgeois.

The phenomenon is international, wrote Simon Kuper in the Financial Times. The “middle-classness of populism,” he said, is evident across the west. The middle-class populist “isn’t keen on positive discrimination for women or people of colour, or on high taxes. In fact, he doesn’t want anyone to get ‘handouts.’ In a NatCen Social Research study of the Brexit referendum, ‘affluent Eurosceptics’ were the segment of the electorate least likely to have financial troubles, and most likely to be anti-welfare.”

[The middle-class populist’s] advance has been slow. He has never been invited into the fast lane of life: the top universities, the biggest firms, the major corporations. He feels, with some justification, that his exclusion has been unfair — based on his accent, schooling, clothes and unfamiliarity with trendy conversational topics.

They believe they are better than the real working class, and they yearn to be among their “betters.” But in the end they are victims of their own ideology, because their “betters,” who benefit from the same ideology, don’t want anything to do with them.

If this sounds like the president’s attitude toward New York’s cultural and business elite (think: Michael Bloomberg), it is. In this light, you can see why Donald Trump is the perfect vessel into which the petite bourgeoiscan pour their anti-democratic bile.

The president wants us to believe his base is populated with “Reagan Democrats.” That wouldn’t be so bad if everyone else, including the House speaker, didn’t accept that as true. The leader in the race for the Democratic Party’s nomination is a self-identified “socialist” while an oligarch has bought his way to the next debate. The real left-behind aren’t the working class. The real left-behind are liberal Democrats.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 February 2020
Word Count: 790
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A long time ago, before September 11, 2001, the right-most flank of the Republican Party tolerated the establishment’s compromise with racial liberalism, by which I mean “the basic consensus that existed across the mainstream of both political parties since the 1970s, to the effect that, first, bigotry of any overt sort would not be tolerated, but second, that what was intolerable was only overt bigotry — in other words, white people’s definition of racism.” (I’m using here Nils Gilman’s helpful definition.)

After 9/11, that basic consensus began to break down. The GOP’s right-most flank refused to recognize its political legitimacy, even though it was white-centered. They refused, because they believed the basic consensus on race, and on other areas of political difference, permitted “radical Islamic terrorists” to attack God’s country. The Republican elites were no longer partners to be tolerated. They were now the enemy.

While the rest of America focused on terrorism, the disastrous occupation of Iraq and the endless “war on terror,” the right-most flank of the Republican Party focused on “illegal immigration.” This is not as random as it appears. Brown people threatened America’s covenant with God. Brown people were “breaching” the southern border. That these brown people were worlds apart was a distinction with zero difference.

The Republican establishment, by which I mean people wielding real power, did not realize how diametrical the GOP’s right-most flank had become until after 2004. George W. Bush won reelection in part using this strategy — scare the bejesus out of everyone. The liberals were coming for your guns. The gays and feminists were coming for your sons and daughters. The heathens and atheists were for coming for your God. After the election, Bush thought he had political capital to burn. Then things changed.

The cause of change was partly Bush’s failure in Iraq. But failing was not what most polarized the right-most flank of the Republican Party. What most polarized them was President Bush stoking their white rage and then turning around to try privatizing Social Security and reforming federal immigration law. To put it one way, they wanted freedom and “entitlements,” but only for them. Put quite another way, the government was trying to “take away their money” and “give it to the illegals.” After 2007, when both reform attempts failed, Bush was a lame duck. The GOP became something else.

We didn’t know what it would become until after the 2008 election. And even then, racial liberalism still prevailed. No one, not even the GOP’s right-most flank, dared use explicit language with respect to Barack Obama commonplace in public discourse prior to 1970. (John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 were committed to racial liberalism.) But the upward pressure was building. Obama’s victory, according to Arthur Goldwag (a subscriber to this newsletter!), brought “hidden feelings to light”:

Viral, Photoshopped images of President Obama in an African witch doctor’s getup, of Mrs. Obama with her face morphed into an ape’s, of watermelons growing on the White House lawn, and of the president and first lady dressed like a pimp and a prostitute have been popping up in in-boxes everywhere — some of them sent by political activists who would describe themselves as conservative and mainstream.

The party’s margins were taking over the party’s center. By 2010, the GOP’s right-most flank had a name, the Tea Party. By 2015, the seal broke entirely when a candidate referred to Mexicans as rapists, and called for a total ban on Muslims entering the country. Now, after more than three years of sadistic policies aimed at purging the body politic of brownness, all that remains of the “racial liberalism” is ceremonial lip-service, as when Donald Trump is forced to say something nice. Otherwise, there’s no more consensus. There’s no more conservatism. Only leftism, liberalism and fascism.

Sept. 11 had two other outcomes — the militarization of civil society and the over-criminalization of minor crimes. “Illegal entry” is a misdemeanor (the first time), something as socially injurious as reckless driving. But a rapid evolution from the margins to the Tea Party to a fascist White House over 20 years has turned it into a crime threatening to destroy our values, economy and “way of life.” That’s what happens when there’s no difference between brown immigrants and brown terrorists.

Under Donald Trump, the militarization of civil society is enmeshed with the over-criminalization of illegal entry. The administration decided to confiscate babies as a deterrent to unlawful border crossing. It created apparent “concentration camps” for immigrants and their families. Now, according to the New York Times, US Customs and Border Protection, or Border Patrol, is deploying 100 officers to so-called “sanctuary cities.”

The official goal is increasing deportations by 35 percent. But intimidation appears to be the real goal. Among agents, the Times said, are “members of the elite tactical unit known as BORTAC, which acts essentially as the SWAT team … With additional gear such as stun grenades and enhanced Special Forces-type training, including sniper certification, the officers typically conduct high-risk operations targeting individuals who are known to be violent, many of them with extensive criminal records.”

Before the Times broke the news, Jenn Budd, a former Border Patrol agent turned civil rights activist, reported a conversation she had with a former senior agency official:

Border Patrol does not believe they are a civilian law enforcement agency. They believe they are kin to the Marine Corps. They do not believe they are accountable to Congress, which is why they have no issues lying to them even while under oath.

They believe they are only accountable to … presidents like Trump. Border Patrol believes it is not required to answer to local police, FBI, CIA or any other law enforcement agency. They claim to be the “premiere” law enforcement agency, superior to all others. They say they will become a “national police force” to be used by a president to enforce laws even among citizens. (Italics are emphatically mine.)

None of this is getting the attention it deserves. Democracy dies in darkness.

And in secret.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 February 2020
Word Count: 1,008
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The United States Attorney General went on ABC News Thursday to “rebuke” the president, “attack” the president, “push back” against the president, or whatevs. The Washington press corps can be more problematic than it’s worth. It loves conflict, and it loves giving senior government officials an endless supply of benefit-of-the-doubt.

Bill Barr is under fire. He meddled with the sentencing recommendations for Roger Stone, Trump’s friend convicted last year for lying to the US Congress, among other things. Prosecutors said he deserved as many as seven years in federal prison, per Justice Department guidelines. Barr reined them back, instead recommending three to five years. Turns out this was the second time Barr got into the way. Michael Flynn received the same preferential treatment. The judge in Stone’s case has the final say.

Barr undermined prosecutors the day after the president said on Twitter his friend was getting a raw deal. Trump suggested, moreover, that the real criminals were the people prosecuting Stone, particularly Robert Mueller. On Tuesday, all four prosecutors associated with the special counsel’s office quit en masse. The New York City Bar demanded Thursday an investigation by the inspector-general. Nancy Pelosi said the president “abused his power” again. In extremely-Nancy-Pelosi-voice, she said: “The attorney general has stooped to such levels. What a sad disappointment to our country.”

So Barr went on ABC News. In short, the attorney general said, I am my own man. I do not take direction from the president. But then he said something perplexing. “I’m going to do what I think is right. And you know … I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me,” he said.

He meant the president’s tweeting.

Now, there are two ways of looking at this. Each interpretation of “I cannot do my job here” depends on how much of the benefit of the doubt you are willing to give Barr.

If you give the attorney general 100 percent of the benefit of the doubt, as the press corps is wont to do, that could mean Barr “really is angry,” as Charlie Sykes said. “Perhaps his institutionalist instincts really did finally kick in, the vestiges of his conscience stirred — and dammit, he just had to take a stand for the rule of the law.”

But, if you give the attorney general zero percent of the benefit of the doubt, as most of the president’s critics are wont to do, you come to a different conclusion. As Charlie Sykes said: “Or maybe he was just annoyed that Trump was giving away the game.”

Let’s put this another way.

“I cannot do my job here” could mean Barr can’t administer neutral justice and equal protection under the law while Trump creates the appearance of unethical conduct. Cue headlines saying Barr “rebuked,” “attacked” or “pushed back” against Trump.

Or! “I cannot do my job here” could mean Barr can’t continue to get away with covering up the president’s crimes while the president is crowing about it.

I say pick Door No. 2.

There’s more at stake than the president’s criminality, though. In response to Barr’s TV appearance, Trump said, again on Twitter, that while it’s true he never asked Barr to get involved in a criminal case, he nevertheless has the “legal right” to do just that. To translate this from the original Trumpese: “This is how I ask without asking.”

More serious, however, are the implications of this claim. When a president claims the “legal right” or, as he did Wednesday, “the absolute right” to interfere with the neutral administration of justice, that means something all Americans should worry about.

One, it means equal treatment before the law isn’t equal. It can’t be. Not when friends of the president get off easy for crimes everyone else would be punished for. Two, it means the president isn’t bound by the law or even above it. He is the law. He is the embodiment of justice itself. That means the administration of justice and the rule of law are anchored in the whims of the president. Three, and most worrisome, is that he can solicit, without appearing to, federal crimes beneficial to him and his friends.

Claiming the “absolute right” to undermine justice is the start of turning the federal government into a criminal syndicate. That is, after all, what government is in nations like Russia. The line there between government official and mobster is no line at all.

We are a long way from that, of course, and we may never get there.

Not if we stop giving people like Bill Barr the benefit of the doubt.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 February 2020
Word Count: 774
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When Senate Republicans acquitted Donald Trump of abusing power and obstructing the US Congress, they established the precedent that the president is the nation-state and the nation-state is the president. His interests are the national interest. His friends are our friends. His enemies our enemies. We’re a nation of men, not laws.

In the hours and days after acquittal, the Republicans in the Senate pretended they were doing no such thing, just as the Republican majority of the US Supreme Court pretended in 2000 the invasion of one branch of the federal government into another branch did not establish any sort of legal precedent. But just as Bush v Gore set the Republican Party on a new course toward minority rule through the force of law, Trump’s acquittal set the GOP on a new course toward elevating themselves above it.

The result has been a president unleashed from normal constraints and pursuing objectives that — again — show contempt for the US Constitution and the rule of law. Trump is now free to abuse his power and profane virtually whatever he wants, tempting the House to impeach him again and the electorate to send him packing.

He fired administration officials who testified against him. Goombahs at the Treasury Department expedited to Senate Republicans financial documents related to Hunter Biden while sandbagging House Democratic requests for the president’s tax returns.

Trump, moreover, seems to be preparing for what would ordinarily be unthinkable in a democratic republic: prosecuting federal prosecutors for their love of this country.

Yes, I’m talking about Robert Mueller.

Recall the two main takeaways of his report to the Congress. One, Trump did indeed obstruct justice — nearly a dozen times, Mueller hinted. The special counsel wouldn’t say so, though. Only the Congress could say so, he said. Two, the Russians sabotaged Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, because the Kremlin wanted Trump to be the president.

The second takeaway got less attention, but it evidently scarred Trump for the public to know his presidency is the product of covert cyberwarfare directed by the Kremlin, not a legitimate election. We have known since the beginning Trump’s greatest fear is being seen as illegitimate. Newly acquitted and newly married to the American national interest, Trump seems ready to “prove” he’s a legitimate president even if it means investigating, prosecuting and jailing the man who discovered the truth.

It wasn’t clear until this morning that Trump had Mueller in his crosshairs. We already knew the president told Bill Barr, the US attorney general, to go easy on Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime goon. Stone was convicted late last year for lying to the Congress, among other things. Four prosecutors associated with Mueller’s team said Stone deserved as much as seven years in prison. Barr intervened, saying his sentence should be three to four. A federal judge has the final say. Expect to hear more about that soon.

All four prosecutors quit last night. Some are calling it the “Tuesday Night Massacre” in homage to the “Saturday Night Massacre” in which Richard Nixon’s went through two Justice Department heads before the special counsel investigating him was fired.

But the massacre has been in slow-motion. Turns out the president told Barr to go easy on Michael Flynn, too. Another facet of the president’s revenge, post-acquittal, is apparently making sure the crooks, liars and traitors caught up in Robert Mueller’s investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign receive a special kind of equal justice.

Some say Trump’s next move is pardoning Stone and Flynn, but that thinking suffers from lack of imagination. We now know Barr has taken control of all “legal matters of personal interest” to Trump, according to NBC News. We also know, as of this morning, the president isn’t going to settle for pardons. He wants blood. He said:

Congratulations to Attorney General Bill Barr for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought. Evidence now clearly shows that the Mueller Scam was improperly brought & tainted. Even Bob Mueller lied to Congress!

Trump yesterday denied interfering with the free and fair prosecution of justice. But, he said, if he had, he has “the absolute right” to. No, he doesn’t. To interfere is to explicitly obstruct justice, which is a crime and yet another impeachable offense.

That he believes he does makes sense, though. His interests are now the national interest. His friends are our friends. His enemies our enemies. A president can’t break the law when the president is the law. He can’t obstruct justice when he is justice.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 February 2020
Word Count: 762
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The latest Q Poll came out Monday. It was seriously good news. Last week had been called the president’s best ever. The Washington press corps likes to measure success in “wins” and “losses.” The Senate acquitted Donald Trump. So that meant he “won.”

But even as the president and confederates were high-fiving each other (and plotting vengeance against the patriotic men and women of honor who spoke the truth), the electorate was less celebratory. The new poll by Quinnipiac University, considered to be a superlative survey, has Trump losing to every one of the Democratic candidates.

Josh Jordan, a well-known numbers guy, said: “If these are Trump’s numbers after his ‘best week ever,’ he’s going to have a really bad time in November. Absolutely brutal poll for Trump.” Historian Aaron Astor said: “There is no scenario where a Democrat wins the popular vote by 6-plus points and doesn’t win the Electoral College. So either this poll is just wrong or Trump is losing to every possible Dem after his ‘best week.’”

I don’t mean to pick on Jordan or Astor. They know the Q Poll is just one. But I do think it’s important to bear in mind a couple of things. One: States vote for presidents, not people. Two: We are living in abnormal times. Politics isn’t what it used to be.

If people voted for presidents — i.e., if the popular vote mattered — the Q Poll would be devastating. It measures the nation’s mood, not a state’s. If the president is losing to every Democrat now, given his “best week ever,” yes he should be well and truly freaked. (To some extent he is, according to Saturday’s New York Times; his campaign strategists are trying to reclaim white suburban voters lost to Hillary Clinton in the last cycle.)

People do not vote for president, however. States do — i.e, only the Electoral College matters. More accurately, a handful of states do. In recent times, one or two or three states determined the outcome (Florida in 2000; Ohio in 2004; Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania in 2016). Polls measuring the nation’s mood can have a distorting effect absent in state-based polling. So please don’t start high-fiving each other just yet. We need to know what voters are thinking and feeling in, say, Pennsylvania.

Astor is right in arguing that a six-point margin in the popular vote would virtually guarantee an Electoral College victory. But that presumes we live in normal times.

The president was acquitted of involving a foreign leader in a global conspiracy to rig the 2020 election. That was after having gotten away with inviting interference in 2016. There’s no way Trump isn’t going to repeat himself. The only question is how.

Unlike the last the two times, the Republicans are fully on board this time. Lindsey Graham and two other Senate leaders are gathering “evidence” against Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, in case the former vice president takes the Democratic nomination. They are preparing to pick up where the Ukrainians left off in smearing Joe Biden into oblivion. (If Biden isn’t the nominee, don’t worry; the Republicans will smear any Democrat.)

Worse, the US Department of Justice has created an “intake process” by which the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, can feed federal investigators “information” about the Bidens gathered in Ukraine. The official rationale is anti-corruption, but in essence, this process sets the stage for criminalizing politics.

Bear in mind, a real crime need not be committed. All that’s required to smear any Democratic opponent is the public announcement of an open investigation into an alleged crime. It was an open investigation by the FBI into alleged fraud and corruption at the Clinton Foundation that hurt Hillary Clinton. It was an open investigation into alleged fraud in Ukraine that Trump hoped would hurt Biden.

The “intake process” also has potential to turn a Kremlin lie into reality: that the Ukrainians attacked in 2016, not the Russians, and that the Democrats conspired with foreigners, not Trump’s campaign. Rudy Giuliani’s goal has always been twofold — to smear Biden and legitimize Trump. He might be seen as a legitimate president if more people believed Ukraine attacked America. When Attorney General Bill Barr created an “intake process,” he made room for the institutionalization of a malicious lie.

We tend to think about national politics as if voters are working with the same quality of information and as if voters know what to do with it. That’s a political fiction. Moreover, the boundaries that used to restrain our politics have disappeared. The contest is no longer between two teams fighting according to the same “rules.” Election Day is now a flash-point in an ongoing asymmetric information war.

Let’s not presume these or any polling numbers reflect anything normal.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 February 2020
Word Count: 793
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We don’t know the outcome of the Iowa Democratic caucus. The app required for reporting the results of over 1,700 precincts malfunctioned. Precinct captains resorted to calling a hotline that was quickly overwhelmed. Here are a few initial thoughts.

First and foremost: Technological and human error are to blame, not some secret bad-faith scheme to deny a candidate the glory of victory. When the stakes are high, and emotions run as high, bone-headed mistakes can take on the face of conspiracy. While I understand the temptation to identify malevolent actors, Occam’s Razor says structural flaws or incompetence are the correct analysis. Importantly, let’s remember this is a democracy. Let’s not sow doubts and foment suspicions about a system of republican government we all want to see endure.

Everyone needs to chill. Each precinct captain knows the results of his or her precinct. They are written down, on paper, with witnesses available to verify them. That’s the upside to caucuses. Everything is public. The only unknown is what the aggregate statewide caucus results are. That’s just a matter of time. So everyone, please take a time-out. That goes double for a national press corps that has made a fetish of Iowa and its quirky ways of doing the people’s business.

Don’t believe the hype. The candidates have good reason to declare victory, or hint at declaring victory, before the official results are known. But don’t make too much of it. Those reasons are political. They are not empirical. They are not an indicator of the health of a certain kind of democratic process. Each candidate wants to give the impression that he or she has “the momentum” going into New Hampshire, the first-in-the-nation Democratic primary. Each candidate wants the national press corps to talk about them as if they really did have momentum.

No one is going to have “the momentum.” Unless the winner prevails by double-digit percentage points, all talk of momentum is fictional. That, however, doesn’t prevent people from talking about it. There is something about the American brain that desires a clear leader in the race for the presidency. We want clarity for what is an inherently messy democratic process the way we want instant gratification after buying sneakers on Amazon Prime. If anything is an indicator of the ill health of our democracy, it’s this obsession with knowing right now.

Amanda Carpenter said the Democrats did what the Russians would have done, creating conditions ripe for conspiracy theory. “Donald Trump couldn’t have asked for better circumstances to weave a conspiracy theory if he tried,” she wrote today in The Bulwark. That sounds convincing, another reason the Democrats are in disarray. But come on. We know this president doesn’t predicate public statements on the truth or falsehood of news events. Indeed, we all know this president would invent some conspiracy theory out of whole cloth even if the Iowa caucuses ran like clockwork.

This isn’t to say the Iowa Democrats shouldn’t be embarrassed. They should sooper embarrassed. But we should be honest, too. Caucuses are relics of 19th century America. They exclude modern voters more than they include them. I think Senator Dick Durbin is right: “The Democratic caucus in Iowa is a quirky, quaint tradition which should come to an end. As we try to make voting easier for people across America, the Iowa caucus is the most painful situation we currently face for voting.”

But let’s not stop there. Let’s get rid of all caucuses and single-state primaries. My friend David Perry recommends the following and I think he’s just about right:

1. National primary in July with ranked choice voting to ensure a winner.
2. Conventions in September.
3. General election in November.

These are drastic reforms, but they have much to offer. One primary would mean:

• Iowa and New Hampshire, which are very white, would not have as much national influence on a multi-racial and multi-cultural political party.
• The sequence of states would no longer be relevant. Imagine all the talk of “momentum” just disappearing! Imagine “electability” being forgotten!
• Adversarial nations, like Russia and China and Iran, would have fewer opportunities to spread disinformation during that sequence. The impact of their propaganda and lies would be limited to one day’s outcome, not several in a row.
• It would be truly democratic in that people would be voting for their presidential nominee, not states. “One person, one vote” would be well and truly realized.

Most importantly, the national press corps would focus on a single day that mattered, instead of hyping the run-up to a state that usually doesn’t matter.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 February 2020
Word Count: 765
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Lamar Alexander is a Republican senator from Tennessee heading for retirement. His last decision, the one perhaps to be memorialized on his tombstone, was voting against calling witnesses for the president’s impeachment trial in the US Senate.

More accurately, Alexander’s final act was doing his friend, Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, a big favor. With his vote, Collins, unpopular and facing reelection, could safely vote yes. She can now campaign at home with her moderate reputation intact.

With this vote, expected later today, the Senate Republicans will have acquitted the president of two articles of impeachment without hearing first-hand accounts from administration officials, subpoenaing new records, and entering new evidence. The Senate will have neutered itself as an effective check on executive power. It will have declared its complicity in covering up Donald Trump’s conspiracy against the people.

But it has done more. It has unleashed a president already dramatically unhinged. Trump welcomed foreign sabotage in 2016. He demanded it for 2020. Make no mistake: he’ll get it. As Nancy Pelosi said: “The Russians are coming, the Russians are coming.”

Worse, Trump will be emboldened to act with even more impunity. By acquitting Trump, the Senate will have established a precedent by which a president can do whatever he wants, because his interests are now one with the national interest. If that means investigating political opponents, so be it. If that means jailing them, fine.

He’s doing it for the people.

It’s difficult to imagine what Dear Leader the Unlimited might do. We have some inkling, though. Trump praised Saudi Arabia after it literally butchered a Washington Post columnist. The press, to this president, is the enemy of the people. Since the people’s interests are the same as his interests, and vice versa, what’s stopping an authoritarian president from following suit and making his problems just “go away”?

After all, he’s doing it for the people.

The Senate will clear Trump today but it will not have exonerated him. As Pelosi said, exoneration demands a legitimate process of deliberation — a due process that’s being denied. “He will not be acquitted,” she said. “You cannot be acquitted if you don’t have a trial. And you don’t have a trial if you don’t have witnesses and documentation.”

Because they denied the nation a legitimate process of deliberation, Republican Senators increased their burden many times over. As I wrote recently, the drip-drip-drip of incriminating evidence will not stop with acquittal. It will continue in ways we can’t predict. Every senator who voted to shield Trump from accountability will have to prove day after exhausting day that they were right. As Rahm Emanuel put it today, they have burdened themselves with becoming Trump’s “full-time exonerators.”

Another consequence of denying due process is that even if Trump wins the election in November, he will not be seen by a majority of Americans as a legitimate president. That was already the case for lots of people due to his losing the popular vote in 2016. That will pale, however, compared to knowing that he’s guaranteed to cheat in 2020. (Even if he didn’t cheat, which is unlikely, who would believe him but GOP partisans?) If his illegitimacy wasn’t certain before the Senate’s acquittal, it will be afterward.

Lest there be any doubt, the president will prove the point when he tries to get even. You know he will. Trump is widely known for returning insults at ten times the original force. The Democrats wounded his ego the moment they impeached him. Acquittal without exoneration can’t stop the bleeding. He’s going to find a way of seeking vengeance and when that too is exposed, it will add to the incriminating evidence and political illegitimacy that will trail Senate Republicans till November.

Illegitimacy doesn’t mean, of course, that a president can’t do great damage. Trump has already done so much already I don’t need to enumerate each injury. That’s why it’s so important for the Democratic Party to compete hard to take control of the Senate. Fortunately, the Republicans have given them a gigantic vise with which to squeeze incumbents between loyalty to the president and duty to the Constitution.

The best way we can fight back is making sure the House stays in Democratic hands (which I think it will) and flipping the Senate. The president will seek revenge, and he will commit impeachable and criminal acts in the process. Once those, and all the others, come to light, the stage will be set for a second round of impeachment.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 31 January 2020
Word Count: 753
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Things feel different today from what they felt like three days ago.

On Monday, we learned that John Bolton witnessed the president’s bribing of a foreign leader into interfering with the 2020 election. The former head of the National Security Council, in a forthcoming book, says he saw Donald Trump cheating.

That seemed like “a smoking gun.” Four Republicans, who had been vacillating between calling and not calling witnesses for the president’s trial, seemed to be tipping to one side. The Democrats had the advantage. Witnesses appeared inevitable.

Today feels quite different. Mitch McConnell said Tuesday he did not have 51 votes block of effect to call witnesses, but the Senate majority leader was not admitting defeat. He and others were admitting they had more work to do. No one, not even the four holdouts, wanted to hear from witnesses. They just needed reasons to say no.

I don’t know what those reasons are, but it looks like they found them. Witnesses now seem unlikely. If so, the president’s trial will conclude Friday. By acquitting Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of the Congress, the Republicans will be saying the president can do anything he wants as long as he can hold more than a third of the Senate. By clearing him of wrongdoing, they will be making Richard Nixon’s dream finally come true: “Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

In other words, the president is above the law.

Not all presidents, of course.

Some of the same Republicans protecting Donald Trump from the consequences of conspiracy, bribery, and election-rigging are the same Republicans who supported Bill Clinton’s removal from office for perjury, a vastly less serious crime. Indeed, no one should expect the Republicans to give future Democratic presidents the imperial powers they are giving the current president. Make no mistake: They will hold the next Democrat to impossible standards, and prosecute brutally with the thinnest rationale.

That looks like it would be hypocrisy, and indeed, that’s what it would be. But if we are going to stop the Republicans from behaving treacherously, we need to look deeper. Indeed, if we stop at hypocrisy, we will be giving the Republicans too much credit.

To act hypocritically, one must genuinely believe in the civic, moral and legal virtue of acting in good faith. One must believe there is a shared set of laws, rules, values, institutions and norms applicable to all of us equally. If we believe this but act in a contrary manner, we are then hypocritical. That is not what the Republicans are doing.

The best way to understand Republican behavior is to imagine two sets of values systems. There’s one for them. There’s one for everyone else. Republicans are the exception to the rule, because they do not believe in rules having equal application. “Justice,” therefore, may or may not be equal justice. It depends. It’s conditional.

If a Democratic president breaks the law, even a minor one, then that president deserves the full force of Congressional investigation, prosecution and removal. But if a Republican president breaks the law, even with corrupt and treasonous intent, then that president deserves protection from accountability, the Constitution and the law.

The first outcome is just. So is the other.

They are separate but not equal.

Republican virtue is moreover conditioned on the opposition’s virtue. If the Democrats act out of bounds, it’s not occasion, from the Republican point of view, to demand the Democrats act in accordance with the values applicable equally to all. It is occasion, instead, to allege the Democrats don’t mean it when they say values are applicable to all. They believe this, because the Republican can’t believe the Democrats can act morally. And they believe that, because they believe the Democrats are the enemy.

The common view is that the Republicans are so partisan they are willing to follow Donald Trump to hell. But that explanation is unsatisfying. Partisanship is one thing. Surrendering to the enemy is another. That, to me, explains why Ted Cruz said, “If we call John Bolton, I promise you, we are calling Hunter Biden.” Cruz isn’t voicing ordinary partisanship so much as the political desperation of a suicide bomber.

I said yesterday the Republican Party is best understood as an insurrection. Perhaps “separatist movement” is a better phrase. That would communicate the binary thinking of the Republican value system. There are two, separate but not equal.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 30 January 2020
Word Count: 743
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Let’s talk about what we’re really talking about when it comes to the president’s impeachment trial. Fixating on the details can often obscure what’s going on. Fixating on conflict, as the press corps is wont to do, can blur what might otherwise be clarity. Yes, no one knows precisely what’s going to happen, but there’s a lot we do know.

In theory, Donald Trump could be removed from office, but that would require two-thirds of the Senate. That’s 66 out of 100 senators. We already know, thanks to Rand Paul, that 45 Republicans are ready to acquit. The numbers don’t add up for conviction.

Try imagining removal from a practical GOP point of view. Removing a president during a presidential election year means what precisely? Running the vice president?

I suppose it’s possible. But even if the Republicans could gin up enthusiasm for Mike Pence, they’d face a lethal backlash from Donald Trump diehards. Removing a president would be a form of political suicide. Let’s be real, and not expect that.

This is irrespective of the question of whether he should be removed from office. The practical considerations are so fierce that Republicans like Lindsey Graham aren’t bothering to ask the question. Indeed, he doesn’t need to. He’s from South Carolina. His seat is safe (for now). The GOP has long been southernized. The Confederate States of America were home to the original domestic fascists. Republicans there don’t mind abuse of power and obstruction, as long as they’re doing it, not the enemy.

So what are we talking about?

Again, from the Republican point of view, especially from the point of view of safe Republicans, the impeachment trial is an opportunity to turn the tables on the Democrats. At least they think it is. They tried convincing the public Joe Biden was so corrupt the president was justified in asking the Ukrainians to investigate him. The subliminal message here amounts to a smear campaign of Trump’s most worrisome rival. There was, in fact, no corruption on Biden’s part. The Republicans were lying.

You’d think lying of such magnitude and in such a coordinated fashion would result in some kind of accountability so the Republicans would be deterred from lying again. But there are currently no consequences for lying among Republicans. Rick Scott, senator of Florida, made a video in which he complains of being held “hostage” at the Capitol. He also accuses the Senate Democrats of covering up Biden’s “corruption.”

You’d think hypocrisy of such magnitude and in such a coordinated fashion would result in some kind of accountability so the Republicans would be deterred from acting hypocritically again. But there are currently no consequences for hypocrisy among Republicans. Graham in particular led the charge in 1998 to impeach Bill Clinton for perjury. He and others now say even if Donald Trump did abuse his power, by exacting a quid pro quo from Ukraine’s government, that isn’t a removable offense.

Lying is grounds for removal — if you’re a Democrat.

Bribery isn’t — if you’re a Republican.

What are we talking about then when we talk about the impeachment trial? The GOP won’t removal Trump, but the Democrats can force vulnerable Republicans to choose between loyalty to the president and duty to constituents. The Republicans hate the idea of calling witnesses. The public hates the idea of not calling witnesses. The Democrats, from the start, have been putting the GOP in a vice-like squeeze play.

The vice got tighter after John Bolton, the former head of the National Security Council, was determined this week to have witnessed the president’s bribery of Ukraine. That won’t compel the Republicans to remove Trump. Remember that removal is suicide. But the trial was never about that. For Democrats, the trial is about wearing down the GOP one senator at a time in the hope of regaining the majority. If squeezing the Republicans results in wounding the president, so much the better.

I can’t end my explanation here, though. Losing the Senate wouldn’t change Republican behavior. Losing the presidency wouldn’t either. The only thing that can change GOP behavior is widespread recognition of what the party is: an insurrection.

The Republicans long ago decided the Democrats and democracy itself were not only impediments to getting what they want. They had become the enemy. When fighting an enemy, you are willing do anything, because failure means extinction. That means lying as if there are no consequences. That means acting hypocritically as if there are no consequences. That means protecting a president even if he betrayed his country.

There are two solutions to a party that has become an insurrection.

First, stop giving it the benefit of the doubt. Second, start seeing it as the enemy.

John Stoehr is the editor and publisher of The Editorial Board, a contributing writer for Washington Monthly and the former managing editor of The Washington Spectator. He was a lecturer in political science at Yale where he taught a course on the history of modern campaign reporting. He is a fellow at the Yale Journalism Initiative and at Yale’s Ezra Stiles College.

Copyright ©2020 John Stoehr — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 January 2020
Word Count: 787
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