The Road to Impeachment

I have friends who have been calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump since the day he was elected. As a practical matter, impeachment would generally require a president to take office, and then commit an impeachable offense, in that order. Still, I share the sentiment. This is a man who settled fraud charges against himself out of court in December, without admitting wrongdoing, but still. This is also a man who had a twenty year old rape charge disappear when his accuser once again dropped the case when faced with new death threats. So I have believed since Election Day that Trump could not possibly finish his first term. He has a long history of contempt for our laws, suggesting that he is simply incapable of behaving as if they apply to him. He regards out of court settlements not as penalties for wrongdoing, but simply as costs of doing business. Having said all of that, there was still a certain sequence of events that would be needed to actually get us to an impeachment. The first of those events finally happened this week. Robert Mueller unveiled criminal charges against those in Trump’s orbit. So what has to happen to get us from here to the end of the Trump presidency?

First, let’s talk about the charges that were brought, and why. Paul Manafort and Rick Davis grabbed the headlines at first. They were jointly charged in an elaborate scheme that involved secretly working for foreign actors, and collaborating with them on a plan to evade paying US taxes on the income gained. That last bit, the collaboration with foreign actors to evade income tax, is the basis for the charge of conspiracy against the United States. The charge sounds spectacular, but it is a much lesser charge than treason, which is not indicated here. Trump was right when he said that there was nothing in these charges about collusion regarding the election, and that the events that gave rise to these charges began long before the campaign began. Any normal campaign would have discovered much of this, and never brought Manafort aboard, but a lack of proper vetting is not an impeachable offense. But here we should also remember that Al Capone finally went to jail for tax evasion. So the charges against Manafort and Davis that were filed this week do not tell us that they did not collude regarding the election; instead, they mean that these are the crimes Mueller feels he has enough evidence of to gain convictions. The plan now is to use a plea bargain process to get Davis, and especially Manafort, to testify about what they know. These are also just the federal crimes that Manafort and Davis may have committed, and Trump can only pardon potential federal offenses. Mueller is saving plenty of potential crimes for charges especially in New York State, in case Trump tries to protect his people with a pardon. Even so, Monday was not free of collusion. Later, Mueller revealed a guilty plea from George Papadopoulis. The charge here is lying to investigators, but the substance of the lies had to do with a Russian offer to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulis is cooperating with investigators, and what we know so far could form the basis of perjury charges against Jeff Sessions.

That’s how it is done. When Richard Nixon resigned rather than face impeachment, it was after months of watching associates being arrested, and turning state’s witness. We are only at the beginning of that process now, but it has begun, and there is every reason to think it will go further, involving people closer and closer to Trump’s direct orbit. Trump foolishly repeated his attempted command that Mueller must not investigate Trump’s business and financial dealings; this only serves to make the public wonder what we will find there. So the legal and investigative steps that could lead to impeachment are well under way. But more is needed.

Impeachment is the bringing of charges by the House of Reprsentatives, and the charges are then tried by the Senate. The Senate must vote to convict with a two thirds majority. The strongest possible criminal case must be backed up with a political climate that makes impeachment possible and successful. That climate is not in place now. Based on what we know now, the House as currently constituted is more interested in protecting Trump than impeaching him. Even if they did, there are not the votes in the Senate to convict. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was a sham trial, because the Republicans who brought it knew they could not get the votes to convict in the Senate. To get to impeachment as the evidence against Trump accumulates, we will also need changes in the political environment. We may well need the Republicans to lose a significant number of seats in both the House and the Senate in next year’s election. But even if that happens, we will still need to convince many Republicans that we the people will punish them for a failure to bring Donald Trump to justice. We must convince them that loyalty to a corrupt president from their own party will cost them enough votes to cost them their seats. We must make them choose between party loyalty and the good of the nation.

In order to force that choice, we must vote, and it can matter if we start doing so this coming Tuesday. If we make sure we go to the polls in large numbers in this odd year election, and we make sure that every possible member of the Republican Party is defeated, that would send a powerful message. For many years, the Republicans in general, and the Tea Party movement in particular, have been able to count on us staying home in off year elections. They have encouraged the idea that the two parties are the same, that your vote does not matter, and you have helped them immensely if you believed it. But, in direct contradiction to that, these same people have worked hard to create new obstacles to voting, especially for minorities who lean heavily Democratic. Clearly, your vote must make a difference, and your party preference must matter as well, if they are willing to work this hard to keep you home. So Tuesday’s election is mostly for local offices. Maybe there is someone you have known all your life and liked, maybe even given your trust to, and this year he is running for the proverbial dog catcher position as a Republican. Sorry, but we must make sure his Democratic opponent wins. If you are lucky enough to live in a place where an independent can win, more power to you, but please be careful with this one. The important thing is, this election can be a powerful rejection of the current path of the Republican Party, but only if we show up, and turn any and all Republicans out or away. That is how we can convince sitting Republicans in Washington to walk the road to impeachment with us.

I’m cheating a bit this week with my song choice, in order to share an old favorite. Only the title of the song really has anything to do with my subject. You may know The Road from Jackson Browne’s version, which is well worth hearing if you haven’t. But this is the original version, by an artist who deserves to be better known, Danny O’Keefe:

Truth is Relative

There can really only be one topic here this week. Jeff Flake gave his retirement speech, and became a new Republican hero. Don’t get me wrong; it was a great speech, well worth reading in its entirety. But the reaction to it in the press misses some very important points. This is Jeff Flake, people. Flake was elected courtesy of the Tea Party movement, so it is horrifying that he has found someone too extreme for his liking. But he delivered this speech, and then voted later that night to outlaw class action suits against financial institutions. Flake has voted for each and every one of the horrible healthcare proposals his party has put out there. So his speech is not a clarion call for policy change in Washington, as so many in the media would have it. John McCain at least helped torpedo the healthcare atrocities with no votes, although he too was upset by process, not policy. Flake deplores the dangerous extremism of the president, but Flake himself was the dangerous extremist when he first came to Washington.

You read that right. We have now have a president whose extremism is shocking and deplorable to a Tea Party stalwart. It has gotten so bad that a Jeff Flake is on the verge of realizing that Mitch McConnell has brought the Republican Party to this point with his stratagems to exclude the Democrats from governance, even when they were the Party in power. But Flake focuses his criticisms on the president, and it is easy to miss his comments about how things are being done in the Senate. Flake calls for a return to “shared facts”, but he has relied throughout his career on only those facts that suited him. He can not see the essential fallacies of supply side economics, and he invokes faith and moral authority in his speech, not the Constitution and established law. On Social issues like abortion and gay rights, it appears to be Trump who has come around to Flake’s point of view.

Where Flake differs from Donald Trump is not in matters of policy, except regarding trade and immigration. Their economic agendas are largely simpatico, and I would expect Flake to be a reliable vote on tax cuts for the rich, for example. The big difference and point of contention is their goals. Trump has pushed his Party toward the Steve Bannon world view. Where Flake believes that the government should exist to help the wealthy produce more wealth, Bannon believes that the government has failed. It must be destroyed, so that something better can be built in its place. While it is not entirely clear what this new better world would look like, it appears to involve reasserting the supremacy of white Christian males, and putting everyone else in their place. Along the way, however, many of the same policies apply. Both Flake and Bannon seek to completely dismantle the safety net. Flake sees programs like Medicare and Social Security as unfair burdens on the wealthy, while the Bannon wing of the Party sees them as handouts to “them”. They are also simpatico on social issues, but Flake sees a moral imperative where Bannon sees government intrusion.

Flake, to his credit, does feel that the United States has an important role to play in world affairs, where Bannon does not. Flake refers to the United States as “the architects of this visionary rules-based world order,” which implies that we should be the ones making the rules, even though he praises our policy of reconstruction after World War II. But the meaning of Flake’s speech changes greatly when you consider the speaker. This is not a shaming of the Republican Party for the harm their policies will do to the people who elected them. This is not a sudden conversion to progressivism from one of the most conservative members of the Senate. No, this is simply a call for a return of responsible governance, from a man who believes his policy positions are correct. Flake feels that, if the Republicans were to return to normal governance, their ideas would prevail simply on their merits. He believes that “shared facts” will bear him out. I think the results would be otherwise, but I applaud Flake for being willing to risk that. In the context of politics as it is being practiced in 2017, it was a brave speech. It would have been braver if it had been made by a man who was willing to stand for reelection after giving it. But that is a lot to ask. It falls to the general public and the people of Alabama in particular to stand up to the wrongness of our country, and reject the Bannon- approved candidates running in 2018. Jeff Flake has signaled that he does not have it in him to take on that job. and I don’t blame him for that.

So the short answer is that Flake’s speech is something of an illusion. Hence, this week’s song:

“Learn, Damnit!”

I am reminded this week of the movie War Games. That in itself is not a bad thing. The movie is a favorite of mine. In the film, Matthew Broderick’s character hacks into what he thinks is a soon to be released commercial computer game, and, in playing it, he sets off a military simulation program that comes close to causing a real world nuclear war. In the climactic scene, Broderick’s character yells, “learn, damnit!” at a computer that can not hear him, as he tries to teach it the futility of “global thermonuclear war”.

Healthcare is no game, but the Republicans have not learned yet that the only way to reform it is not to play. They remain focused on how to enact the largest transfer of wealth possible from healthcare programs to the very wealthy, with no thought of the real life consequences for the health and even the very lives of the Americans they supposedly serve. Because they have not made this intellectual leap, any celebration of the demise of the Senate healthcare bill is premature. Continuing the metaphor of War Games, no one has yet taught the Republicans tic tac toe. In this case, that would mean showing them and the American people what a healthcare plan would look like if the goal truly was to provide a better and more affordable system for everyone.

To be sure, something has been gained. What was defeated was Mitch McConnell’s cynical effort to ram a reform bill down America’s throat without hearings, debate, or even allowing his supposed Republican allies the time to read and try to understand the actual bill. It was this process, not the actual bill, that John McCain voted against. Where Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins actually voted against what the bill would do, McCain was more offended by how this result was arrived at. He deserves some credit for that, but it does not make him worthy of the adulation he has received in the press this past week. McCain’s vote also means that the Republicans can no longer pass healthcare “reform” with a simple majority in the Senate. By voting to open the bill to debate and only then insuring its defeat, McCain made sure that no healthcare bill can be passed using the budget reconciliation process this year; instead, Democratic votes will now be needed to avoid a filibuster and pass anything. That in itself means that the Republicans must actually learn to govern. They must hold hearings, have a floor debate, and find at least six Democrats to support any bill they come up with.

The problem is, any bill that passes the Senate must still be reconciled with the version that actually passed the House. That gives the Republicans the chance to restore much of the harm they still seek to do. The job now, in the Senate, is to bring enough Democrats on board to get the bill to conference committee. Once any Democrats sign on to this, it will be hard for them to back out of passing the final version. The real hero to this point then is not John McCain but Chuck Schumer. He is the one who has kept the Democrats united as the opposition Party, making sure that no one strays across the aisle to abet the Republicans.

How then can we end the threat of “Repeal and Replace”? As activists, we must push the Democrats to do what they have not been interested in doing up to now. They must develop a healthcare plan of their own to hold up against the Republican efforts. They must demonstrate with their plan that they hear the concerns of the American people, that simply preserving the Affordable Care Act is not enough. Any new Democratic plan must address the problem of skyrocketing deductibles and copays. It must have a mechanism to assure that coverage is available in all markets, that insurers can not simply bow out. It must mandate negotiated drug prices to insure that premiums can actually go down.

Universal healthcare would seem to be the obvious solution. But keep in mind, the ideal plan is one that Chuck Schumer can secure 48 Democratic votes for. Even so, we can not expect any Republicans to support such a measure, so it has no chance now of becoming law. Even a bill that passed the Senate would be shot down in the more rabid House. Passing the bill is not the point now. The point now is to extend the debate into the 2018 campaign season. We need to present the American people with a clear choice on healthcare as they choose the next Congress, and we need to make sure that what the Republicans just tried to do to them is still fresh in their minds as they go to the polls. More, we need to get the Democrats in Congress to give unambiguous proof that, on this vital issue, the two parties are not the same. Donald Trump is the master of distraction. His outrageous antics can easily get the American people to forget the healthcare issue in next year’s elections. We must push the Democrats to make sure that does not happen.

War Games came out in 1983. There were no songs on the soundtrack album, just the orchestral score. Perhaps that is why this one, from 1980, was not used:

We Need to Talk

Mitch McConnell finally confessed to his sins this week in going public with the Senate version of Republican health care. Of course, the bill is a travesty. It does not really have anything to do with healthcare at all, except as an obstacle to its true goal of massive tax cuts for the rich. Amazingly, the bill is not only more dishonest than its House counterpart, but it may actually be worse in the severity of its outcomes. So much for the Senate as the more reasonable body,

But here is truly scary part. In discussing the possibility of this atrocity becoming law, the press talks about a handful of Republican Senators. There is, rightly, no mention of what the Democrats might do. Sure, this partly reflects the fact that no Democrat is expected to vote for the bill. But it also reflects the fact that the Democrats have done nothing to make this bill harder to support. In part, this is because they refuse to acknowledge one truth that Donald Trump has accidentally told: we the people are now worse off with respect to healthcare than we were when the Affordable Care Act first went into effect. This is not for any of the reasons the Republicans or Trump name, but it is true all the same. The Affordable Care Act was not the success that it should have been, but Democrats need to explain that its failure was that it its design was vulnerable both to the trickery of the insurance industry and to outright sabotage by the Republicans. To explain, let me talk about my own situation.

I am the sole breadwinner for a family of four. My job is good enough that I do not qualify for the subsidies provided under the ACA, but I have my company health plan. My family and I have a host of pre-existing conditions, so we are heavy users of healthcare and we need a large menu of medicines each month. Over the past seven years, I have seen a steady increase in the dollar amount that comes out of my check for health care, and my out of pocket expenses have shot up as the insurance companies have gotten better at imposing copays and deductibles. So I am grateful for the fact that I can get insurance at all, given the pre-existing conditions. I am glad that my daughter, who is turning 22, can still be on my plan. And I understand that my health care expenses are still much less than they would be without the ACA. But my family and I are hurting, and Hillary Clinton is not our president in part because she did not sufficiently acknowledge and address this hurt. The situation is worse for my brother-in-law and his family. They do not have jobs that provide them benefits like mine, and they live in a state where a Republican governor and legislature blocked the Medicaid expansion that would have meant so much to them. For the first few years of the ACA, they had to choose whether to use the healthcare they could afford for themselves or their children, and of course they chose their children. Thankfully, they have now reached the point where they no longer have to make that devil’s bargain, but we were really worried about them for quite some time. Again, the provision regarding pre-existing conditions in the ACA meant that they could get healthcare for themselves once their job situations improved enough that they could afford it.

I am sure this country is full of families like mine, and like my brother-in-law’s. The Democrats are simply not talking to us. They are not acknowledging our hurt. Instead, they are reacting to what the Republicans are doing, and thereby letting Donald Trump and his allies control the conversation. Hillary Clinton spoke vaguely on the campaign trail of improving the ACA, but I regard myself is more politically aware than most Americans, and I don’t know what improvements she thought were needed. Only Bernie Sanders offered a solution, but he got bogged down in the question of how to pay for it in a way that suggested he was unable to master the details needed to make universal healthcare the law of the land. His approach also would have failed to persuade most Americans to support him in the face of Republican fearmongering. I have explained before how universal healthcare can be sold to the American people, but I have yet to hear any Democrat make this pitch. Barring that, the Democrats must explain all of the ways the ACA has made lives better, and all the ways it could be made to do so much more. They must help the American people to see how much better the ACA could be if the Republicans were not so intent on its destruction. One way or another, they must take back the conversation, and make the Republicans react to them for a change. The results of the midterm elections next year will depend on whether or not they can get it done.

I believe Americans are ready to hear the truth. Here is Sheryl Crow with the alternative we have now:

The Best Defense

The Washington Post has a slogan on their website that is very apt right now: “Democracy dies in darkness”. From the struggles in the House of Representatives to get the atrocity known as the American Health Care Act (AHCA) passed, Mitch McConnell might have taken the lesson that this was a terrible bill for the American people. Instead, he decided the real lesson was that the Senate version must be kept secret as long as possible in order to get it passed. Even his fellow Republicans in the Senate must not have the time to read the full bill before having to vote on it, and under no circumstances should the public have a chance to react until the bill was law. This is darkness at its finest, and democracy stolen again by the Party of voter suppression. It has meant that, in the face of severely limited news of how the new law was being shaped, press coverage has been overshadowed by other issues and developments. Democrats have decided to hope that it will be enough that the public prefers keeping Obamacare to the public efforts so far by the Republicans to repeal and replace it. It will not be enough, but there is still time to do something about it. If preserving the status quo was the best defense against Republican aggression, I would be writing now about how the presidency of Hillary Clinton looks as we approached the six month mark.

What we need instead is a way to put the subject of health care back in the forefront of public discussion. To begin with, let’s take the wind out of one of the Republicans’ favorite arguments by admitting that Obamacare has not delivered on all of its promises. But Democrats need to reframe that argument. They need to say that the Affordable Care Act was not crafted well enough to withstand Republican sabotage, and certainly not to withstand the onslaught of a united Republican government. They also need to say that prices were not controlled as well as they should have been, because Obamacare still makes the American people pay for items that have no bearing on health care outcomes: marketing costs, obscenely high CEO paychecks, and stock dividends for health insurers and big pharmaceutical companies. Democrats furthermore must coopt one of Donald Trump’s favorite promises, to deliver better healthcare that costs every American less. To make all of this news worthy, the Democrats in the Senate must introduce their own healthcare plan in the Senate, and force a very public debate on it. Let it become the standard that any Republican bill will be measured against. During the Obama presidency, it was common for Democrats to point out that the Republicans never presented an alternative plan. If only for that reason, it is essential that there be a Democratic alternate plan now.

I am talking, of course, about universal healthcare, and I have previously laid out the pitch for it here. Bernie Sanders lost the primaries to Hillary Clinton while advocating universal health care, so why should the Democrats play this risky card? First, Sanders never made the capitalist case for it, as I have done. But Sanders also fell into a trap that Hillary Clinton laid for him during the campaign. He got bogged down in the numbers, and wound up proposing large tax increases for everybody to pay for his plan. In doing so, Sanders failed to make the point that universal healthcare will be paid for in large part with moneys that are now being spent on other health care programs, including Obamacare. So the actual funds needed to get from here to there are lot less than the total price tag for universal health care as a stand alone item. It is also not enough to say that it would be less than the average American spends now on health care. The Democrats and the press must explicitly state where those savings will come from. The public resents having to pay for corporate profits out of public funds, but that resentment needs to be harnessed.

Clearly, there isn’t much time, and the Democrats will not do this on their own. Activists must coalesce around this strategy, and start pushing for it immediately. We need to find a Democratic Senator who can be persuaded to introduce a new Democratic health alternative to the Republican plan. So much the better if this starts with someone other than Bernie Sanders, because that would be more newsworthy. The goal here is to control not only the discussion in the Senate, but also the news cycle. Imagine the reaction in the media if someone like Cory Booker were to introduce this with an impassioned speech on the floor of the Senate. That’s what needs ideally to happen, in order to steal this issue from Mitch McConnell’s darkness, and bring it back into the light where it belongs.

This week’s song has everything to do with the news cycle:

A Morality Play

The takeaways in the media from James Comey’s testimony last week were certainly interesting. For many, the argument to be had was over whether Comey was saying that Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice. Comey was very careful to not say that himself, but he also explained why not. Comey as a private citizen has no standing to bring that charge, and that legal distinction is important to him. Keep in mind that Comey was our nation’s top law enforcement officer until Trump fired him. However, his testimony was an offering to Robert Mueller. If Mueller wants to pursue the charge of obstruction, Comey just let him know what his evidence would be. The media also spent a lot of time on the Republican’s attempts to defend Trump. But if Trump was just inexperienced at governing, or just too immature at age 70 to know better, why did he have everyone leave the room, even waiving off Jared Kushner and Attorney General Jeff Sessions when they tried to stay behind, before discussing the Michael Flynn case with Comey. That was a clear act of intent. You do that only if you want to make sure there are no witnesses later to what you are about to do. If the Republican excuse that Trump was simply handling things the way he did as a businessman was true, that is very interesting information, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t obstruction. It just means that when he pursued this tactic as a businessman, he grew used to it working so well that we never heard of it until now. Meanwhile, what Comey was willing to come right out and say was that Trump’s lies about the Comey firing constituted defamation of character. Comey knows that that is a legal charge, and that he has the standing as a private citizen to bring it. He is not a man to use the words without being fully aware of the legal implications.

But the larger picture is that the testimony gives the Democrats a huge marketing opportunity for the 2018 elections and beyond. The Republicans, in their responses to the Comey testimony, showed a complete lack of morality. When the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal arose, the Democrats had the decency to be ashamed that one of their own could behave in such a manner. Privately, that stance may well have involved cynical calculations, but the public act is what concerns me here. The Democrats make mistakes, but they have the good grace to be ashamed, and to apologize. The Republicans do not. John McCain surrendered the last claim he may have had to be the conscience of the Republican Party with his line of questioning. Republicans, faced with behavior that was clearly wrong, rush to explain why they are OK with it. And it’s not just the Comey testimony either. Donald Trump sat back and let the Republicans in the House and now in the Senate craft their own versions of a healthcare bill, and the results once again show a complete lack of morality. As long as there are tax cuts for their donors, Republicans simply do not care at all who their legislation hurts. Remember too that it was not the current Republican president who wove an elaborate tapestry of lies to get the nation into a completely unjustified war that may have been nothing more than a personal vendetta. Here again, there was no concern with the innocent Iraqi or even American lives that would be lost. The Republicans do pretend to care what happens to the veterans of that war, but their legislative actions say otherwise

. So the Democrats must put all of this together, and start making the case to the American people that the Republicans are a once respected legislative partner that has lost their way. It is not simply that Donald Trump is immoral, although he certainly is. But he is a Republican for a reason, and the Democrats need to say soon and often what that reason is. Make Republican a bad word, in the same way that the Republicans made being a liberal anathema. There were articles last year about how the Republicans were destroying themselves by making Trump their standard bearer. What we should have learned from his victory is that that destruction will not happen by itself. We need to help it along, and we were just handed an easy way to get started.

Muddy Waters gets the nod for the song this week:

A Plan for the Democrats

The Republicans who now control the White House and both houses of Congress have a problem, and it is the job of progressives in particular, and the Democratic Party as well, if they will only accept the challenge, to make that problem worse for them. The Republican Party as now constituted is dedicated to the proposition that government can only do harm, and never do anything good. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, flies in the face of that proposition, which is why from the beginning the Republicans set out to sabotage the ACA once they understood that they could not stop it. It was also necessary to amplify every problem that occurred during the rollout of the ACA, to promote the idea that the ACA overall was bad. One defense the Democrats pursued was to challenge the Republicans by asking what their alternative was. Now we know: it is the monstrosity known as the American Health Care Act, which I prefer to call Ryancare. At this point, it is not Trumpcare, because Trump had no apparent hand in shaping it, but he has said that he will try to sell it.

In trying to “repeal and replace” the ACA, Republicans ran into sharp opposition from their own constituents at emotional town halls. It turns out that people are discovering, when faced with the prospect of losing the ACA, that they really like and need it. Oddly, Ryancare is also opposed by the most extreme members of the Republican Party, who object to the fact that it fails to completely repeal the ACA. So it would seem that progressives would have nothing to worry about, because the Republicans will not be able to find the votes to pass Ryancare. This assumption, however, fails to take into account the extraordinary sales skills of Donald Trump. This is a man who could sell sand in the Sahara Desert. The last time we underestimated him, he became president. The Democratic Party is being too complacent at the moment, and not listening to their own advice. It is not enough to defend the status quo, to insist that the ACA must remain in place. Despite the exaggerations and outright lies of the right wing, there are real problems with the ACA that created the opening for Trump’s victory in the first place. For many, lack of insurance has been replaced by insurance that people can not afford to use. So, in order to make sure that Ryancare fails, The Democrats need to offer up their own plan, just as they insisted the Republicans do. Let me offer my idea of what that plan should be, and how to sell it.

The purpose here is to offer up a plan that highlights the inadequacies of Ryancare and the harm it will do. We also need to undercut Trump’s efforts to get it passed. So we need a plan that really does deliver on a promise that Donald Trump made, that he would deliver a plan that would save money and deliver better care than the ACA. That plan is universal health care. I have talked before about how and why Democrats have failed to sell it to the American people, but I want to go into more detail now about how to win this battle. Hillary Clinton tried to get universal healthcare in 1993, but her instincts are always to find a consensus solution to any problem. There is no consensus solution here, because there is no way around the fact that you are destroying a vital part of the insurance industry, taking them out of the very lucrative health care business entirely. Done properly, universal health care also hurts the pharmaceutical industry, because you should insist that the government has the right to negotiate for the best prices. So you need to stand up to some powerful lobbies to pass universal health care. That is why the best time to do it is during a severe economic crisis. Barack Obama had that opportunity in 2009, but he too was intent on government by consensus, so we got the ACA instead. Last year, Bernie Sanders tried a different approach, insisting that universal health care was a right, a moral imperative. It is, but Hillary Clinton was able to get him bogged down in the details of how to pay for it. She made him lose the same battle she had lost thirteen years earlier, and also managed to make him look unprepared to govern while she was at it. I believe this was a major reason why Sanders lost the primaries. Ironically, the answer to how to sell universal healthcare was at Sanders’ fingertips the whole time, but he never effectively put the whole package together for the voters.

Universal health care would give the American people cash to spend on other things, so it would provide a major boost to consumer spending. Money that now gets deducted from paychecks for premiums, or spent on copays and deductibles, would instead go directly into the economy, leading to a major boost in job creation. It would also make American companies more competitive, by reducing the cost of hiring, and freeing companies from the expense of providing retiree health benefits. To pay for it, we must first recognize that the current cost of the ACA and other government health programs would no longer be needed, so those funds would go here instead. On top of that, companies currently deduct $260 billion for employee health benefits. Add in increased revenue from all of those new jobs I mentioned. And then there is the kicker. Pair universal healthcare with a measure that costs the government nothing, and you suddenly need very little in the way of new taxes to pay for it all. That measure is an immediate increase in the minimum wage to $15, indexed to inflation. Right wingers like to make the disputed claim that increasing the minimum wage is a job killer, but pair it with the job creating aspects of universal healthcare and that problem disappears. Over time, the minimum wage increase promotes consumer spending, which also means more jobs, and more revenue to pay for healthcare. Bernie Sanders erred in failing to realize the powerful synergy between his two proposals. It even gets better. All those new jobs, plus increased pay for existing jobs, means a sharp reduction in the number of the working poor, meaning funds that had been spent on public assistance programs such as food stamps can be used to pay for universal healthcare instead. I am not an economist, but I think it is possible that this proposal could be sold as being revenue neutral. At the worst, it should be possible to claim convincingly that the only new taxes needed would be on the wealthy.

I am a realist. I understand that there is no chance that a Republican-controlled Congress would ever pass this. Even if they did, you can be sure that Donald Trump would veto the measure. But that is not the point. By offering up this proposal and selling it properly, the Democrats would guarantee the failure of Ryancare, and expose the callousness of the Republican Party for all to see. If anything, the fact that this proposal would not pass should help reluctant Democrats to rally around it, knowing that they would have to answer to their constituents in redder states only for an idea, but not a law that would be vilified in the right wing media. The minimum wage increase is a popular idea, and so is universal healthcare if the public can be made to accept that their taxes do not need to rise to pay for it. The Democrats need to show that they are better than the Republicans who could not come up with an alternative to the ACA for eight years, and this is how to do it.

OK, I admit the song this time is a stretch, but I couldn’t resist:

Government By Punk Rock

This is a political blog, and this is a political post, I promise. I will be talking about the here and now, but I need to start in the late 1970s, talking about punk rock. Bear with me.

So, as I said, we begin in the late 1970s. Popular music had burst at the seams with creativity in the previous decade, and the range of ideas that popular music could express similarly exploded. But, in the 1970s, the record companies began to realize that this music could make serious money, and they turned major label music into a product. There were still artists and groups who wanted to say something real, but it became harder for such artists to get signed. Albums became more and more crafted: where the Beatles had made 19 albums in 6 years, now 6 albums in 19 years would be closer to the mark for someone like Michael Jackson. The music sounded like it was three years in the making as well. Pop music became dominated by artifice, by emotional poses rather than the emotion itself. An awful lot of bad music came out of this, as well as some extraordinary art that I personally needed many years to learn to appreciate on its own terms. But the immediate sincerity of the music of the 1960s got lost along the way. Punk rock emerged into this setting as the antidote to all this. It was deliberately uncrafted. It was a badge of honor amongst groups like the Sex Pistols that they could barely sing or play their instruments. The Circle Jerks rammed the point home with a cover of The Gilligan’s Island Theme that was more of a deconstruction. Punk rock was supposed to be a revolution, the overthrow of corporate rock. The problem was that the revolution was doomed to fail. Any group that stayed together too long began to learn to play and sing; they then had the choice to either pretend they still had no talent, or to keep their honesty by revealing what they had learned. Both the Clash and XTC were groups that started as punks, but no longer were by the release of their third albums. Neither group ever lost the fire that initially fueled them, but now they had become artists.

Politically, our situation now reminds me of the early days of punk rock. The current wave of the politicization of fear began when the 9/11 terrorists provided George W Bush with the opportunity to become a national hero by showing his toughness in a war with Iraq. But Bush was still a product of corporate politics, representing a Republican establishment that wanted to govern their way, but wanted to govern. The Republican brand of punk rock started with two related developments during the Obama presidency: the decision by Mitch McConnell to refuse to pass anything Obama proposed; and the rise of the Tea Party movement. These developments had in common a determination to overthrow the current order. Tax cuts, which had been a Bush triumph for his wealthy backers, became instead a means of destroying the government and its “bloated” programs. A right wing media environment grew up to support these ideas. It gave a voice to the fears and hatreds of supporters who had grown weary of the coded messaging of establishment Republicans. The genius of Donald Trump was to recognize that blatant racism and xenophobia would be a badge of authenticity to this audience. The outrageous and ugly things he said during the 2016 campaign were proof to this crowd of his genuineness. He was punk.

Just as the punks had to prove their authenticity with their lack of musical ability, Trump began to build his cabinet with a group of people whose complete lack of knowledge of how to govern was a badge of honor. But now there is a problem. A Republican Party and a Tea Party movement built on overthrowing the government now controls it. The forces arrayed to destroy our government must now govern, and we see that there was never a plan for what to do if this day ever arrived. They know what they were against, but they have no idea what they are for. The time has come for the punks to learn to play their instruments.

Not all of the punk rockers ever did become musicians. Many lived in a haze of drugs that prevented their talents from emerging, and also killed many of them. Similarly, we have started to see scandals claiming the political lives of some of the political punks. Andrew Puzder and Michael Flynn are gone, and their replacements are establishment Republicans. While I am sure that some hardline Republicans will never be cured of the ideological psychosis promoted by the likes of Fox News and Breitbart, there will be others who will actually learn to govern. To quote another pop culture reference, they will learn that with great power comes great responsibility.

The Republicans have already begun to sort themselves into factions, one that truly wants to figure out what to do with this prize they have won, and another that wants to retain their punk authenticity at all costs. Which faction comes to dominate the next four years, if either one does dominate, will be determined by how closely the rest of us continue to watch them. The scandals are our best hope of weeding out the bad apples, which means we must continue to protest, and we must also continue to support honest media sources. Most important of all, we must build a team that knows how to govern for when our turn to do so comes around again. That means winning local elections, and building from there. When our turn to govern at the national level comes again, we must be ready to show the American people the benefits of knowing how to do it. We must learn to play our own instruments.

There has to be a song to close this one, and this seemed like a good choice:

Be Careful What You Wish For

In this bizarre campaign season, I am seeing a lot of talk about third parties. Nearly half of all registered voters are now registered as independents, and fantasies are being spun that these voters somehow represent a unified bloc that only awaits a hero for them to rally behind. Could it be Jill Stein? Gary Johnson? Bernie Sanders, if only he had been willing to try? Progressives who are dreaming this way have not thought through what a viable progressive third party could mean. In any case, most registered independents will actually vote for one or the other of the major parties, but do not want their registrations to commit them to either party in advance. Having said all that, we may be witnessing the birth of a viable third party this year, but not the one progressives are talking about.

Let’s suppose that a group of people had done the years of hard work it would take, starting from the ground up, and actually built a viable progressive third party in time for this year’s election. Let’s call it the Progressive Party. To be viable, they would have started years ago by running in very local races, and grown organically to the point where they now had members of both the Senate and the House, and they were able to stage primaries and caucuses in all fifty states and hold a national nominating convention. So now, the Progressive Party presents to the country their first candidate for president of the United States, who I will call John Doe. For those who are bitter that Bernie Sanders did not win the Democratic nomination, and who refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton, Doe is their dream candidate. Roughly 13 million people voted in the primaries for Sanders, and that sounds like a lot of people. But it is only about 10% of the total turnout in the last two presidential elections, so it is not enough to elect anyone, even with three candidates on the ballot. Knowing that, many of those 13 million voters would stay with the Democrats and vote for Clinton, especially since the Progressive Party, in the eyes of a majority of the public, is brand new. So, generously now, Doe is going to receive about 5% of the vote. That’s a great start, something to build on to be sure, but nowhere near a win. The vast majority of those votes come from the Democrats, so it becomes more likely that Trump wins. In trying to build a progressive third party, there would be an initial cost of Republican victories that could have been Democratic ones. This year, we face an extraordinary election, and the risk is simply too great. I would like to see someone build a viable third party like this, but we might have to sacrifice a few elections before this model would yield a John Doe who could actually win the presidency.

But, historically, this is not the model for how American third parties have arisen. It may well be that a scenario like the one I just outlined has kept any grass roots party from achieving the critical mass necessary to become a viable third party. That transitional phase where the growing pains of a new party cost an established party a series of elections is just too great a price to pay. Instead, third parties in our history have arisen from schisms within existing parties. In 1824, the Whigs and the Democrats arose from a split in the Democratic-Republican Party. In the 1850s, a split in the Whigs over the issue of slavery yielded the Republican Party. In both cases, a viable third party arose at the expense of one of the two previous parties, one of which soon vanished.

The modern Republican Party has been hijacked by far right wing extremists, and the Trump nomination represents their greatest victory to date. Old school Republicans remember a party that collaborated with Democrats to actually govern the country, but that doesn’t happen now. For some years now, moderate Republicans have been leaving either the Party or the government, as the extreme wing has made it harder for them to hold off far right challenges in their primaries. In the primary season just passed, there was more of a hope than an effort to promote an establishment candidate who could withstand the rise of Donald Trump. The Party no longer had an attractive moderate candidate for old school Republicans to rally around. So now there are important Republicans who fear that Trump is headed for a defeat in November of historic proportions. They fear that his campaign could produce such in bad taste for voters that the Republicans could also lose control of one or both houses of Congress. And so we are seeing every day now a story about another Republican who has announced that he is leaving the party, rather than risk being associated in any way with the Republican candidate for president. Especially if Trump does lose by a landslide in November, we could be seeing a split in the Republican Party, and the birth of a new third party. This would be a center-right party, more like what the Republicans were like in the 1960s. Some moderates who left the Republicans could easily swell the ranks of this new party, as could people like Jim Webb, who previously left the Republican Party to become a conservative Democrat. They would be able to offer a slate of candidates with name recognition who could start winning elections immediately.

If this third party comes to be, it would push the current Republican Party far to the right, as its remaining more rational members would join the new party. Initially, the Democrats could be the big beneficiaries of this, as the conservative vote is split. But I think, as happened in our history, this new party would quickly supplant the old Republicans, who might live on as a fringe party on the far right, but would never again enjoy the power they have now. In this scenario, The Democratic Party, by virtue of losing some of its most conservative members to the new party, would become somewhat more progressive. But , while this altered Democratic Party would be more welcoming for progressive candidates, those who seek an alternative to the current Democrats would keep looking.