Category: Justice

Debt Ceiling Impasse: Biden Needs to Go on Offense

Delay is the enemy

Let there be no mistake: Republicans are forcing the current debt ceiling crisis for political purposes. It is not about fiscal responsibility. If it were, the Republicans would not have cavalierly raised the debt ceiling three times during the Trump presidency, thereby pumping up the debt by about $7 trillion.  The Republican debt ceiling hostage-taking is calculated to push the economy south sufficiently to undermine Biden’s economic policies through the 2024 election. If the result is a recession or a depression does not matter that much to them, as long as it creates economic pain and thereby gets votes in 2024. True conservatives—the Party siding with rich people and corporations—would prefer it be only a recession, but if driving the economy over a cliff is what is required to boot Democrats out of power, they’re on board  The MAGA Republicans who have contrived the deficit dilemma really have no political philosophy apart from fear and detestation of the federal government, and a concept of individualism bordering on anarchy. So they don’t care either way. These are bad people who cannot be counted on to act in good faith.

These bad people—either by extreme action or through the tacit threat of extreme action to include physical violence—are the ones driving the debt ceiling crisis.  Their main strategy is intimidation. This strategy of intimidation is what stayed Merrick Garland’s hand in pursuing Trump and Trump henchman over the stolen documents case back in 2021  and continuing into 2022.  It is also delaying President Biden’s hand in his fight with House Republicans over the debt ceiling.

Let there also be no mistake regarding House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s shows of negotiating with the White House: the MAGA Republicans are capable of, and willing to, sabotage any compromise between McCarthy and the President at the last minute.

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Tribal Dynamics 2: Subversion and the Price of the Southern Strategy

Preface: a reader characterized one of my recent posts as “philosophical musings.” I get that, just as I get the frequent dismissal of philosophy as largely useless in solving real-life problems. But some philosophical musings are more relevant to real life than others. The discussion of “moral foundations” in Jonathan Haidt’s  The Righteous Mind is an insightful, clarifying guide to the most divisive political dynamics today. It matters to understand the values and motivations of political and cultural adversaries while withholding reflexive judgements. The “Authority/Subversion” foundation—a foundation key in greater or lesser degree to maintaining a stable society—sheds light in particular on the divisions within the Republican Party today.  

In an earlier post “Tribal Dynamics 1: Loyalty” I drew upon Jonathan Haight’s hypothesis of Left/Right tribal divisions being rooted in different degrees of adherence to five “moral foundations.” (See bottom of this post for a list of the five foundations as described in Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, and another [if you missed it before] link to a video discussion.) For example, the stronger adherence to loyalty among conservatives (loyalty/betrayal being one of the moral foundations) explains Sarah Huckabee Sanders—who privately knows better—spewing wild partisan accusations against Biden and the Democrats in responding to Biden’s State of the Union speech. Sanders dug deep into the Right Wing pit of grievances to demonstrate her loyalty.

The country is now witness to the roiling of divisions within the Republican Party—of which the widest is between the MAGA mob and true conservatives like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney  who have been branded traitors by the MAGA mob.

The distance the current Republican Party has diverged from traditional conservatism illustrates its unmooring from the positive anchor of the “moral foundation” which Jonathan Haight identifies as the “Authority/Subversion” foundation.

In Haidt’s framing, conservatives lean heavily toward respect for, and honoring of, authority. Conservatives are, for example, much more comfortable with an institution such as the military, where lines of authority are clearly defined by rank. (Note that Haidt’s framing does not equate conservatism with the policies of the U.S. Republican party, and certainly not the Trump wing. He is talking about a conservative construct that people are not inherently good, and therefore “need external structures or constraints in order to behave well, cooperate, and thrive. These external restraints include laws, institutions, customs, traditions, nations, and religions.” He cites especially Edmund Burke as a source of this construct.)

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Low Crimes and Misdemeanors: Crushing Democracy One Shovelful at a Time

Scales of justice teetering all one way

Thunk, thunk, thunk, is the sound of Donald Trump throwing shovelfuls of partisan excrement on one side of the sagging scales of justice within a crumbling system of governance.  In one week he has named a blatantly partisan operative of the political right wing to the position of Acting Attorney General—without even bothering to give lip service to the obligation to get Senate confirmation—and gone on to deny the legitimacy of elections in places where the sole source of grievance is that the President’s allies may lose to Democrats.

Talk of impeachment is now much in the air, with pundits parsing the meaning of the “high crimes and misdemeanors” to be invoked in the case of impeaching a U.S. President.  Here’s the wording of the impeachment clause in the U.S. Constitution: “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

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