I wrote about an old problem for pro-choice Catholic Democrats at New York this week:

[A] priest in South Carolina announced that he had denied Communion to Joe Biden on Sunday, according to WPDE:

“The pastor and priest of St. Anthony Catholic Church in Florence refused to give communion this past Sunday to Former Vice President and Presidential Hopeful Joe Biden …

“The church’s pastor, Rev. Robert E. Morey, released the following statement on the matter:

“’Sadly, this past Sunday, I had to refuse Holy Communion to Former Vice President Joe Biden. Holy Communion signifies we are one with God, each other and the Church. Our actions should reflect that. Any public figure who advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of Church teaching. As a priest, it is my responsibility to minister to those souls entrusted to my care, and I must do so even in the most difficult situations. I will keep Mr. Biden in my prayers.'”

This isn’t a new experience for Biden: In 2008, when he was running for vice-president on a ticket with Barack Obama, the bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Biden was born, went out of his way to make it known that the then-senator would be banned from taking Communion in his diocese. The subject became a big and noisy deal in 2004 when two Catholic bishops made a similar declaration with respect to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, just the third Catholic (after Al Smith and John F. Kennedy) to head a national party ticket. There was some talk of denying 2016 Democratic veep candidate Tim Kaine access to Communion over his positions on abortion and same-sex marriage. Most recently, the bishop of Springfield, Illinois, barred Communion for any of the state legislators who supported a pro-choice bill. Even where the hierarchy or individual priests have not made such abrasive statements, pro-choice Catholic pols are often encouraged quietly to stay away from the altar.

The basis of this sort of excommunication is a provision of church law, Canon 915, that those “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.” Many Catholic leaders are reluctant to single out pro-choice pols for this sanction, given the strong tendency of anti-abortion pols to run afoul of Church teachings on important issues ranging from capital punishment to immigration to climate change.

Biden, of course, has gotten some heat in Democratic circles for long-ago anti-abortion views, and for a more recent position supporting the Hyde Amendment barring use of public funds for abortion services (which he finally reversed in June). His willingness to put up with harassment from the odd bishop or priest will probably make him more credible in feminist circles, though he probably won’t get into a big public fight with his Church, either. His campaign responded to questions about the South Carolina incident by calling it a “private matter.” As Biden surely knows by now, there’s not a lot of privacy on the presidential campaign trail.

Like a bad penny, the bad idea of Hillary Clinton running for president again next year keeps coming up, mostly thanks to Republican trolling, But only HRC can bring this speculation to an end, as I asked her to do at New York:

[T]he preposterous idea of Hillary Clinton seeking a rematch with Donald Trump in 2020 has mostly been a right-wing fantasy projection from people who loved the idea of beating her again (and perhaps imprisoning her in the bargain), wanted an excuse to continue their ludicrous conspiracy theories about her, or simply wanted to troll Democrats. Yes, once-upon-a-time Clinton adviser Mark Penn traded on his lost relationship with her to titillate his new conservative friends with HRC 2020 talk last year, but nobody should have taken his bad-faith word seriously. And nearly a year ago, one genuine Clinton intimate, Philippe Reines, let it be known that while it was very unlikely, there was a remote chance she might be interested in a comeback:

‘When pressed on whether she’s running, Reines told Politico: ‘It’s somewhere between highly unlikely and zero, but it’s not zero.'”

Earlier this month HRC’s name started coming up again in conjunction with probably exaggerated reports of big-money donor panic over the weak “centrist” bench in the Democratic presidential field. But the Washington Post reported that “according to two people close to her, [HRC] has not ruled out jumping in herself, a sign that she is hearing similar dissatisfaction.”

And now, in a move designed to make sure conservatives don’t forget their own HRC 2020 dream world, Reines did something to keep the speculation alive:

Now as I’ve said before, Hillary Clinton’s service to her country and her party mean she is entitled to say and do any damn thing she wants with her life and career going forward. But she of all people should grasp how very bad an idea this is, and scotch it once and for all. Yes, it’s understandable that she would want to “redo” that disastrous 2016 campaign. But that is precisely what Democrats from every faction of the party and every perspective on politics do not want to do.

In no small part that’s because we may never completely figure out how and why the Bad Man did the Bad Things and won anyway. There are so many theories, ranging from Russian interference to post-Obama racism to financial and mechanical mistakes by the Clinton campaign to her long exposure as an “Establishment” figure to revenge by the Bernie people. Personally, I think sheer complacency and protest voting (and nonvoting) by people who couldn’t imagine a monstrous figure like Trump winning were the X factor. But the fact remains that HRC cannot go back and fix one thing and make the nightmare go away, for her, for Democrats, or for America. So clearly someone else needs to pick up the banner and keep the next four years from being like the years we are living through right now.

Panicky donor whining notwithstanding, Democrats have a record number of options for doing just that. They offer a wide range of policy views, records, theories of change, personalities and identities. And while one may worry about this or that candidate underperforming during the “invisible primary,” nobody still in the race has been eliminated yet. All the leading Democratic candidates are routinely trouncing Trump in general-election trial heats; his job approval rating is perpetually stalled in an area that usually means defeat; and half the electorate wants to run him out of Washington without even waiting for the opportunity to eject him at the polls. Why are any Democrats in the sort of despair that might support a recourse to HRC?

It’s far too early for panic, but it’s probably not too early to conclude that the current field isn’t going to be displaced by some late entry. How, exactly, is Hillary Clinton supposed to win the nomination? Will she rebuild an Iowa organization even though all her old staff and supporters have moved on to other candidacies? Can she push aside Joe Biden? Would supporters of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders really look to her for inspiration and salvation? Perhaps the idea is that the convention in Milwaukee will be deadlocked and will then turn to the 2016 nominee. How likely is that, as opposed to a coalition ticket? And if a retread somehow seems appropriate, why not John Kerry, who also narrowly lost but did not lose to Donald J. Trump?

Please, Ms. Clinton, don’t keep this right-wing fantasy in play, and don’t make admirers (like me) have to keep reciting the reasons you should not run for president in 2020. If you want to have an impact, endorse someone who is already running, or help the party in other ways. You’d done what you can to expose the terrible future Trump represents for America and its most vulnerable people. Let someone else change that future for good.

I’m passing along most of this piece I wrote for New York because it involves the common GOP tactic of geographical stereotyping, as deployed by a young pol thought by many to represent the future of right-wing “populism.”

Before U.S. senator Josh Hawley took exception to something he wrote and called him a “smug, rich liberal elitist” who expressed “open contempt for the people of the heartland and all we love,” I knew nothing about my friend Greg Sargent’s socioeconomic background…. As Greg explained by way of setting Hawley straight, he’s a middle-class guy educated in public schools who happens to have grown up — yes, he pleads guilty — near a coast. And he rightly accuses Hawley of deploying a phony sort of populism to make his own narrow views seem mainstream:

“[A]s Will Wilkinson notes, Hawley’s ‘great American middle’ is in reality code, an effort to recast the minoritarian America of ‘nonurban whites’ who fundamentally reject this country’s ‘multiracial, multicultural national character’ as the American mainstream.

“This ‘great American middle’ apparently does not include the large majorities who hold allegedly ‘elite’ positions such as favoring the legalization of millions of undocumented immigrants and opposing further immigration restrictions.”

Now, I wouldn’t have paid much attention to the effort to smear Greg if it had emanated from some Trumpian organ-grinder or a backbench Republican in Congress. But Josh Hawley is one scary dude who could become our ruler one of these days. Much celebrated for his “populist” attacks on rich corrupters of the traditional family, Hawley is the new face of a very old (and not very American) form of reactionary culture-war politics, as I noted a while back:

“Government-sanctioned culture war against private entities like those which control Hollywood and Silicon Valley is indeed a departure from traditional American conservatism. But it’s entirely consonant with a European brand of right-wing authoritarianism that drew on precapitalist strains of religion-based hostility to liberalism in economics as in culture, and contemptuously rejected modern liberal democracy while utilizing its institutions to seize power whenever possible. What makes Hawley fascinating and scary is how systematically he embraces this illiberal world view.”

Beyond that, Hawley doesn’t exactly have much standing to label other people as “elitist,” as an admiring profile in National Review explains. The son of a banker, the future senator attended an elite Jesuit prep school before matriculating at those well-known heartland universities Stanford and Yale, and then rising quickly through the top crust of legal apprenticeships, including a stint as a clerk to John Roberts. His heroes were not exactly the horny-handed sons of toil:

“One summer, Hawley interned at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. He worked for Matthew Spalding, a scholar of the Constitution. ‘He asked me who I most wanted to meet in Washington, D.C.,’ recalls Hawley. ‘I said, “George Will.” He told me to write a letter. So I did.’ Will wrote back and the two met for lunch. They also stayed in touch.”

And you know what? That’s fine with me, so long as Hawley doesn’t pretend to be some sort of prairie avenger who learned to read by candlelight. Before going after Greg, he should have reflected on the words of a certain man he is said to worship (Matthew 7:3-5, King James Version):

“3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

“4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

“5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

Beyond hypocrisy, Hawley, who is not a stupid man, is engaging in the kind of crude geographical and cultural stereotypes that ought to make him ashamed. A very wise man who represented a state adjoining Hawley’s in the U.S. Senate had this to say about that unfortunate and divisive tendency:

“The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the Red States.”

All kinds of people live and work in all kinds of places, and demagogues who try to convince their constituents that Greg Sargent hates them and can’t understand them because of where he lives and works are deeply cynical. Josh Hawley isn’t what he superficially appears to be at this moment. Neither are most of us. I write for New York Magazine, live in Monterey County, California, and received an undergraduate degree from the near-Ivy private institution Emory University. Clearly, I’m a liberal coastal elitist who looks down on the sturdy heartland virtues of Josh Hawley’s Missouri. Except that I had never even met a private-school attendee before going to college on scholarships (and using savings as a janitor); speak in an accent not too far separated from Appalachia; go to church every Sunday; and spend every autumn Saturday watching college football and making barking noises when the Georgia Bulldogs are doing well. Offered a chance to take an extravagant vacation wherever I wanted on one of those big birthdays with a zero on the end, I chose the Iowa State Fair.

Like I said, people are complicated, and I hope I never judge Josh Hawley by anything other than his expressed views, which I find terrifying. But then again, Hawley is an ally and fan of the bully in the White House, the insanely rich and powerful “populist” who loves to intimidate journalists with threats that suggest roundups and reeducation camps. The junior senator from Missouri really needs to stop treating writers who disagree with him like future candidates for the knout and the rack. It’s Josh Hawley, not Greg Sargent, who holds power; he, not Greg, who’s The Man. He needs to read his Bible and learn some humility.

If you think things in the White House can’t get much worse, think again, as I argued at New York this week:

The Democratic strategy for impeachment of Donald Trump is obviously a big deal right now. I explored one aspect of the issue at New York:

When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi publicly announced an impeachment inquiry on September 24, she made it clear that the trigger for her decision, and her primary focus, was the president’s efforts to coerce Ukraine into a damaging investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden. As part of that focus, she put the principal investigation into the hands of Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff instead of the traditional impeachment forum of the Judiciary Committee. But at the same time, she did not foreclose the possibility of additional articles of impeachment; even before her public announcement, she asked the chairs of all the committees investigating Trump to prepare to “send Nadler their best cases for impeachment,” as my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti reported. The idea was that the Judiciary would draft the formal article or articles of impeachment, even if the charge the House chose to pursue was a simple matter of a Ukraine quid pro quo aimed at Joe Biden.

At that time, understandably, the many House Democrats (and their even more numerous progressive allies in the opinion biz) who had been fruitlessly agitating for the impeachment of Trump before the Ukraine story came out were upset about the idea of a narrow impeachment inquiry. What about the Mueller Report? What about the obstruction of justice evidence Mueller invited Congress to use in an impeachment proceeding? Would a narrow focus on Ukraine implicitly exonerate Trump on matters not related to that incident, or encourage him to do bad things in the future? And given the extremely high odds that the Senate would refuse to remove Trump from office on narrow or multiple articles, should Democrats throw everything they have at Trump to damage his 2020 reelection prospects?

But Trump himself is now complicating the strategic calculation, just as he did by beginning his campaign to get Ukraine to destroy Biden even as Democrats were still debating what to do with Mueller’s report flowing from Trump’s behavior toward Russia. The man just won’t stop committing impeachable offenses. And worse yet, his most egregious impeachable offenses are aimed at frustrating the Ukraine investigation, and Schiff is among many Democrats pointing this out, as the Washington Post reported last week:

“The impeachment inquiry is having a hard time getting central players to even talk, and on Tuesday, the White House said it wouldn’t cooperate with the impeachment inquiry in any way.

“Democrats are saying all this amounts to obstruction and are hinting strongly at what the House can do to get around this: impeach Trump for blocking the investigation.

“’The failure to produce this witness [diplomat Gordon Sondland], the failure to produce these documents, we consider yet additionally strong evidence of obstruction of the constitutional functions of Congress, a coequal branch of government,’ said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), who has become the face of the investigation, on Tuesday.”

Obstructing a congressional investigation of the Executive branch, particularly if it involves potentially impeachable offenses, is a well-acknowledged impeachable offense in itself, as my colleague Jonathan Chait observed in making “obstruction of Congress” a whole category in his menu of “high crimes and misdemeanors” Trump has committed:

“The Executive branch and Congress are co-equal, each intended to guard against usurpation of authority by the other. Trump has refused to acknowledge any legitimate oversight function of Congress, insisting that because Congress has political motivations, it is disqualified from it. His actions and rationale strike at the Constitution’s design of using the political ambitions of the elected branches to check one another.”

This is hardly a novel concept. One of the three articles of impeachment the House Judiciary Committee approved in 1974, which triggered Richard Nixon’s resignation, involved similar but arguably less comprehensive efforts by the Tricky One to obstruct Congress:

“[Nixon] failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives on April 11, 1974, May 15, 1974, May 30, 1974, and June 24, 1974, and willfully disobeyed such subpoenas. The subpoenaed papers and things were deemed necessary by the Committee in order to resolve by direct evidence fundamental, factual questions relating to Presidential direction, knowledge or approval of actions demonstrated by other evidence to be substantial grounds for impeachment of the President. In refusing to produce these papers and things Richard M. Nixon, substituting his judgment as to what materials were necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against the lawful subpoenas of the House of Representatives, thereby assuming to himself functions and judgments necessary to the exercise of the sole power of impeachment vested by the Constitution in the House of Representatives.”

Nixon, moreover, didn’t try to incite violence against his congressional tormentors as Trump has repeatedly done.

You could certainly make the case that an article of impeachment involving “obstruction of Congress” with respect to the Ukraine scandal is a natural sidebar to an article on the scandal itself, in that it strengthens public perceptions that far worse presidential behavior probably occurred but cannot be documented. But there are bigger questions about public perceptions. Yes, it’s clear under the Constitution and any reasonable interpretation of the Founders’ intent that “high crimes and misdemeanors” do not require violation of criminal statutes. Indeed, the kind of misconduct that cannot be addressed by the criminal-justice system is precisely the sort of thing the Founders had in mind in providing for impeachment. But does the public understand that, and if so, does it accept it? The Ukraine scandal clearly involves conduct most people would consider criminal (particularly if it’s explained as a violation of campaign-finance laws, including those aimed at preventing foreigners from being involved in U.S. elections). Obstructing Congress? Maybe not so much, particularly since Congress’s job approval ratings are significantly worse than Trump’s (21 percent, according to the latest RealClearPolitics polling average).

While what to do with Trump’s obstruction of Congress is one question House Democrats must face before pursuing a Ukraine-only impeachment strategy, it’s not the only one. Other examples of impeachable conduct keep popping up, as the Washington Post observed over the weekend:

“Within a one-day span, The Washington Post reported that  Trump sought to enlist then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in the fall of 2017 to stop the prosecution of a Turkish Iranian gold trader represented by Rudolph W. Giuliani. The former New York mayor is Trump’s personal attorney.

“The Financial Times reported that Michael Pillsbury, one of Trump’s China advisers, said he had received potentially negative information on Hunter Biden during a visit to Beijing.”

What do you do when the target of (to use the criminal-justice analogy) a prosecution won’t stop doing crimes for long enough to pin down an indictment?

“’We’re basically getting like three new impeachable offenses a day, so it suggests that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg on what’s happening,’ said Daniel Pfeiffer, a former Obama strategist who hosts ‘Pod Save America’ and who has been pushing Democrats to expand their probes.”

Toss in the unacted-upon Mueller findings, and whatever fresh hell may come up from past, present, and future Trumpian misconduct, and you can see that when the deal finally goes down, House Democrats will have a tough decision to make, whatever Pelosi originally intended.

There was a lot of attention given in the media to GOP heartburn about Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds in Syria. But there was another angle that I wrote up at New York:

No one should have been surprised by the fury that arose in congressional Republican circles over the president’s green light to his fellow authoritarian, Recep Erdogan, for a Turkish invasion of Syria. Most of them, after all, have never bought into Trump’s particular Jacksonian mix of militaristic bluster and non-interventionism, reflected in his alternating desires to get U.S. troops out of Syria or deploy them to kill everything that moves. Traditional Republicans, moreover, feel a strong sense of attachment to the Kurds, U.S. allies in the Iraq War (which Trump considers a disaster pursued by losers) and the fight against ISIS (which Trump considers his own personal triumph, not to be shared with foreigners). The most unexpected thing, indeed, is that Trump chose to infuriate Republicans just when he needs them most in the battle against impeachment and the 2020 election. This is not the sort of statement he needs right now from the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lindsey Graham:

“Graham, who has been one of President Trump’s strongest allies in the Senate, on Wednesday said Kurdish fighters in Syria had been ‘shamelessly abandoned by the Trump Administration’ in its sudden decision to pull U.S. troops from northern Syria, leaving America’s longtime allies in the fight against the Islamic State group exposed to an attack by Turkey.

“’I hope he’s right — I don’t think so. I know that every military person has told him don’t do this,’ Graham said in an appearance on ‘Fox & Friends. “If he follows through with this, it’d be the biggest mistake of his presidency.”

But if old-school neoconservative hawkishness explains part of the bad reaction Trump got for his invitation to Erdogan, there’s a separate reason that leaders representing another important slice of the MAGA coalition. Conservative Evangelicals have rebelled — some even more angrily than Graham — including the ancient Christian Right warhorse, Pat Robertson, as the Washington Post reports: