Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. explains why “The GOP’s speaker chaos is a blessing in disguise,” and writes: “The chaotic Republican-led House of Representatives has a rather poor sense of timing. The United States is in the midst of two international emergencies and faces the threat of a government shutdown next month. President Biden’s prime-time speech on Thursday pressing for aid to Ukraine and Israel underscored the exorbitant costs of the GOP meltdown….But the embarrassing exercise could prove to be a blessing because it’s exposing a crisis in our politics that must be confronted. The endless battle for the speakership is already encouraging new thinking and might yet lead to institutional arrangements to allow bipartisan majorities to work their will….The House impasse was precipitated by both radicalization and division within the Republican Party. Narrow majorities in the House have enabled right-wing radicals to disable the governing system. Normal progressives and normal conservatives, in alliance with politicians closer to the center, are discovering a shared interest in keeping the nihilist right far from the levers of power….The GOP doesn’t want to recognize that McCarthy gave Democrats no reason to save him — he flatly refused to negotiate with them in his hour of need — and many reasons to believe he’d continue to kowtow to party extremists….The last straw came after Democrats gave more votes than Republicans did to pass McCarthy’s bill to avoid a government shutdown last month. The next day, McCarthy turned around and bizarrely claimed that Democrats “did not want the bill” and “were willing to let government shut down.” That dishonest nonsense sealed his fate.”

“Democrats are going out of their way,” Dionne adds, “to say they are ready to deal. “We are willing to find a bipartisan path forward so we can reopen the House,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said at a news conference on Friday, after Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) went down in his third and decisive defeat in the speakership vote. Republicans, Jeffries said, had a choice: to “embrace bipartisanship and abandon extremism.”….The Democratic rank and file has quietly been working in this direction. Rep. Annie Kuster (N.H.), chair of the New Democrat Coalition, told me that moderate Democrats “were talking to any reasonable Republican we had a relationship with” in an effort to empower Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.) to bring up bills that have broad support in both parties….She noted that the Democrats’ conditions were minimal and hardly left-wing: to agree to avoid a government shutdown; to pass spending bills along the lines of the fiscal accord McCarthy and McHenry themselves made with Biden in May to avert a debt default; and to provide military aid to Ukraine and Israel and humanitarian aid for Palestinians….All friends of democratic rule should be grateful. With a regiment of nine lesser-known Republicans pondering a now wide-open speaker’s race, a new version of the McHenry option might gain appeal….Bipartisanship is no magic elixir, but bipartisanship in pursuit of majority rule is a worthy cause. Pushing Republicans to confront extremism in their ranks is both good politics and essential for governing. The Democrats’ offer to help Republicans through their intraparty struggle will either hasten the day of reckoning or expose the GOP’s refusal to stand up to its nihilists.”

“Former President Obama issued a new statement Monday on the ongoing violence taking place in Israel and Gaza as the death toll continues to tick up,” Lauren Sforza writes in “Obama issues new statement on Israel and Gaza” at The Hill. “In a lengthy statement, Obama again condemned the deadly attacks launched by the militant group Hamas on Oct. 7 in what he called an “unspeakable brutality.” While he maintained Israel had a right to defend itself against the attacks, he reiterated the need to abide by “international law.”….“But even as we support Israel, we should also be clear that how Israel prosecutes this fight against Hamas matters. In particular, it matters — as President Biden has repeatedly emphasized — that Israel’s military strategy abides by international law, including those laws that seek to avoid, to every extent possible, the death or suffering of civilian populations,” Obama wrote….He said upholding international law is “vital for building alliances and shaping international opinion.”….The attacks on Israel have resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians across the region. More than 1,400 Israelis have been killed, mostly in the initial attack launched by Hamas on Oct. 7. The U.S. and other countries have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization….More than 5,000 Palestinians have been killed so far in the conflict in Gaza, including an estimated 2,055 children and 1,119 women, with more than 15,000 injured, the Gaza Health Ministry reported Monday….“The Israeli government’s decision to cut off food, water and electricity to a captive civilian population threatens not only to worsen a growing humanitarian crisis; it could further harden Palestinian attitudes for generations, erode global support for Israel, play into the hands of Israel’s enemies, and undermine long term efforts to achieve peace and stability in the region,” he wrote….He also recognized Israel has “every right to exist,” but Palestinians have “also lived in disputed territories for generations.”….“But if we care about keeping open the possibility of peace, security and dignity for future generations of Israeli and Palestinian children — as well as for our own children — then it falls upon all of us to at least make the effort to model, in our own words and actions, the kind of world we want them to inherit,” he concluded.”

You may not be shocked to learn that “Voters under 30 are trending left of the general electorate,” as Monica Potts and Holly Fuong report at FiveThirtyEight, via ABC News. “Voters under the age of 30 have largely been part of the Democratic camp since former President Barack Obama won two-thirds of them in 2008. That same age group may have helped put President Joe Biden over the top in 2020, and assisted Democrats in broadly overperforming expectations in the 2022 midterms. And there’s some evidence that these young voters are staying liberal even as they age, defying the trend of previous generations. That’s especially true of millennials, the now-27 to 42 year-olds who were so taken with Obama’s first campaign. (Throughout this analysis, we use the Pew Research Center’s definitions of millennials and Generation Z.)….Young voters are consistently more liberal than the general electorate is on a range of issues, according to a 538 analysis. We took a look at data from the Cooperative Election Study, a Harvard University survey of at least 60,000 Americans taken before the 2020 elections and the 2022 midterms, and found notable differences between younger voters and the general electorate on key issues like the environment, abortion and immigration. That could make a big difference in the general election — that is, if young voters actually show up to vote….In 2020 and 2022, voters under 30 made up 21 percent of the electorate, according to our analysis of the CES data. In both of those elections, the cohort of 18 to 29 year-olds was composed of a mix of millennials and Gen Z, those born after 1996. More of Gen Z will be eligible to vote next year than ever before, and so far, they seem to be voting like the millennials that came before them. If history holds, they are likely to become more politically active as they age, and if they keep the political preferences they exhibit now, then like millennials, they’ll have a bigger and bigger impact on elections to come. That impact may begin as soon as 2024….Turnout among millennials and Gen Z, many of whom will be voting in their first presidential election, will be key in 2024. The youngest voters in any given election year have historically been the least likely to vote, with around 46 percent in that age group voting in 2016, more than 15 percentage points lower than the general electorate. Turnout rose in 2020, as it did for all groups, when an estimated 50 percent of young voters and 66 percent of the general electorate voted, but declined some in 2022 compared to the previous midterm in 2018.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of the forthcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

The appalling terrorist attack by the appalling terrorist group Hamas, which slaughtered more than 1300 Israelis, 87 percent of whom were civilians, is the largest single day killing of Jews since the Holocaust. The response of America’s intersectional left has also been appalling. As Sohrab Ahmari accurately noted in a Compact magazine article titled “Woke Is Dying”:

Many of those who spent the last few years promoting #Defund, “intersectionality,” and similar concepts refused to condemn Hamas’s butchery—that is, when they didn’t celebrate it. The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter tweeted, “I Stand With Palestine,” along with a picture of a paraglider, an allusion to how Hamas terrorists descended upon an outdoor party, murdering some 260 ravers. Yale American Studies professor Zareena Grewal declared: “Settlers are not civilians. This is not hard.” The New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America promoted a Times Square rally at which murderers were hailed as liberators.

What is wrong with these people?

In my opinion, the rot goes very deep. This is not a one-off. Over the last number of years, huge swathes of the American left have become infected with an ideology that judges actions or arguments not by their content but rather by the identity of those involved in said actions or arguments. Those identities in turn are defined by an intersectional web of oppressed and oppressors, of the powerful and powerless, of the dominant and marginalized. With this approach, one judges an action not by whether it’s effective or an argument by whether it’s true but rather by whether the people involved in the action or argument are in the oppressed/powerless/marginalized bucket or not. If they are, the actions or arguments should be supported; if not, they should be opposed.

This approach was always a terrible idea, in obvious contradiction to logic and common sense. But it has led much of the left and large sectors of the Democratic Party to take positions that have little purchase in social or political reality and are offensive to the basic values most people hold. The failure to unequivocally condemn the Hamas massacre as a crime against humanity is just the latest example of this intellectual and moral malignancy.

Take the vogue for “anti-racist” posturing. This dates back to the mid-teens and gathered overwhelming force in 2020 with the George Floyd police killing and subsequent nationwide protests. It became de rigueur in left and liberal Democratic circles to solemnly pronounce American society structurally racist and shot through with white supremacy from top to bottom. No argument along these lines was too outrageous if it came from or on behalf of “people of color”, who must be deferred to given their place in the intersectional hierarchy.

Nothing exemplifies this better than the lionization of Ibram X. Kendi, whose thoroughly ridiculous claims were treated as revealed truth by tens of millions of good liberals and leftists:

There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups…The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination….The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

Only those who have checked their capacity for critical thinking at the door could possibly take this “analysis” seriously. But they did because of the intersectional positioning of Kendi and those he claimed to advocate for.

How else to explain why liberals didn’t run screaming in the opposite direction when Kendi called for the passage of an “anti-racist Constitutional amendment” that would:

…establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

It is difficult to imagine anything more illiberal than proposing an unelected Soviet-style bureaucracy of “experts” that would vet the actions, ideas, and perhaps even the thoughts of all public officials in the country for their anti-racist content and punish those who deviate from the correct path. Madness! And yet he has been showered with honors, money, and coveted academic positions (though recent revelations of epic mismanagement at his Boston University Center for Antiracist Research may curb some of that enthusiasm).

Bad ideas and arguments are bad ideas and arguments. It shouldn’t matter who makes them. Just like it shouldn’t matter who in the intersectional hierarchy massacres Jews. It’s still an atrocity.

It’s high time for Democrats to decisively reject this kind of thinking across the board. Embrace instead the universalistic principles the overwhelming majority of Americans believe in. They believe, unlike Kendi, that racial preferences in rewards and decision-making are not fair and fairness is a fundamental part of their world outlook. They actually believe, with Martin Luther King Jr., that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a recent University of Southern California Dornsife survey, this classic statement of colorblind equality was posed to respondents: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” This MLK-style statement elicited sky-high (92 percent) agreement from the public, despite the assaults on this idea from Critical Race Theory (CRT), Kendi, and large sectors of the Democratic left. In a fascinating related finding, the researchers found that most people who claim to have heard about CRT believe CRT includes this colorblind perspective, rather than directly contradicting it. Perhaps they just can’t believe any theory that has anything to do with race would reject this fundamental principle.

Similarly a recent Public Agenda Hidden Common Ground survey found 91 percent agreement with the statement: “All people deserve an equal opportunity to succeed, no matter their race or ethnicity.” This is what people deeply believe in: equal opportunity not, unlike the intersectional left, equal outcomes.

Equally, Americans believe crime is crime no matter who commits it and that criminals should be punished. They do not believe that open drug use, street camping, shoplifting and countless other symptoms of social disorder should be tolerated because the populations involved are “marginalized” or because enforcement outcomes might not be equally distributed across races. Nor do they believe that the borders of the United States are merely suggestions that can be ignored by those appropriately placed in the intersectional hierarchy.

Reactions to the Hamas massacre have exposed the moral cul-de-sac occupied by the intersectional left. Democrats and liberals should seize this opportunity to dissociate themselves not just from these disgraceful reactions but also from the entire world view that has produced bad policy and worse politics in area after area.

Of course the usual suspects will inevitably say that returning to a universalist, mainstream approach is tantamount to throwing loyal Democratic constituencies in need of help “under the bus”. But who is throwing whom under the bus? Perhaps it is those whose intersectional dogma stands in the way of a Democratic approach that could plausibly generate the widest possible support that are throwing those who need help the most under the bus.

Early as it is in the 2024 presidential election cycle, it’s good to pay attention to general election trial heats, which I did at New York:

Despite some Republicans’ concerns about Donald Trump’s 91 felony indictment counts, and Democrats’ worries about Joe Biden’s age and job approval ratings, these two men are steadily heading towards a 2024 rematch. Fairly regular polling of a prospective Biden-Trump general election has consistently shown a close race: At the moment, the two are actually tied in the RealClearPolitics polling averages.

But as we should be constantly reminded, presidential elections are determined by the Electoral College, not the national popular vote (if they were, neither George W. Bush nor Donald Trump would have been president). So as the two parties begin to formally nominate their 2024 candidates, attention will shift to how well they might fare in the “battleground states” where the fight for 270 electoral votes will be waged.

We’ve now gotten a taste of that landscape via two big batches of state general-election trial heats from Emerson and Bloomberg/Morning Consult. Emerson seems to have focused much of its polling on states with down-ballot races, so the firm is mostly confirming that Trump is predictably far ahead of Biden in red states like Montana (by 21 points), Tennessee (by 33 points), and Wyoming (53 points). But Emerson also has polls of Wisconsin (Trump 42 percent, Biden 40 percent), Michigan (Biden 44 percent, Trump 43 percent), and a Pennsylvania shocker (Trump 45 percent, Biden 36 percent).

The new Bloomberg/Morning Consult polls are squarely centered on the seven states that were closest in 2020 (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin). The results show Trump leading among registered voters in Arizona (47 percent to 43 percent), Georgia (48 percent to 43 percent), North Carolina (47 percent to 43 percent), Pennsylvania (46 percent to 45 percent), and Wisconsin (46 percent to 44 percent). Biden leads in Nevada (46 percent to 43 percent), and the two candidates are tied in Michigan (at 44 percent). Taking the margins of error into account, Trump has small leads in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, and the candidates are statistically tied in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Aside from the rather important fact that the 2024 general election is more than a year away, there are a lot of variables to keep in mind when looking at such early data. For one thing, both Emerson and Bloomberg/Morning Consult are measuring sentiment among registered voters; you can make arguments for either candidate having an advantage when a set of likely voters emerge (Trump because Republicans are historically the most likely to vote and Biden because he’s unusually strong among the college-educated voters most likely to vote). For another, in both 2016 and 2020, Trump over-performed his national numbers in battleground states, which is why he was able to win in 2016 while losing the national popular vote by 2.1 percent and come close in 2020 despite losing the national popular vote by 4.5 percent.

It’s pretty likely that neither candidate is going to be wildly popular by November 2024, so the ultimate deciding factors could be (a) how many voters who dislike both Trump and Biden decide to turn out and (b) which candidate they prefer. Trump actually won the “hate ‘em both” vote by similar margins in 2016 and 2020, but lost in part because this segment of the electorate was a lot smaller in the latter year.

The even bigger variables, of course, could be turnout levels within each party’s base, and the possible impact of nonmajor-party candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, and someone sponsored by No Labels. On this latter front, it will be important to see exactly where minor-party-indie candidates gain ballot access; nobody’s really going to care if they rack up significant percentages of the vote in states either Biden or Trump is carrying easily.

It’s not too soon to begin paying attention to the places where the presidency will actually be determined next year. In the end, a national popular vote win may be a nice bonus for the next president or another bitter reminder that our system isn’t fully democratic.

Andrew Prokop mulls over “5 ways the House speaker drama could end: Will the “Never Jordan” bloc cave? Will there be a bipartisan deal? Or … what?” at Vox and writes:

“Republicans’ staring contest of a speaker’s race, then, is continuing, with no resolution in sight. Here’s the GOP’s math problem:

• 217 out of 221 Republicans need to vote for the GOP’s speaker candidate on the House floor to elect him (if all Democrats oppose him).
• Roughly 180 Republicans appear to be team players who will happily back any nominee preferred by most of the conference.
• But there are about 20 holdouts on the right who have embraced hardball tactics to try and force a more right-wing speaker to be elected. Think of them as an “Only Jordan” bloc.
• And now there’s a newly emerged roughly 20-person “Never Jordan” bloc, composed of mostly mainstream or swing-district members who are fighting back against the right-wingers.

So what are the ways this could end?

1) The “Never Jordan” bloc caves: Jordan is currently the GOP’s speaker nominee, and he’s still trying to win over enough support among the 22 Republicans who opposed him on the most recent House floor vote.

Some of these members are powerful Appropriations Committee Republicans who could be given promises over how Jordan will handle spending fights. Others represent swing districts and fear support for an extremist candidate like Jordan could hurt their reelection, but they’ll need support and fundraising from the party establishment to keep their seats. And other holdouts appear to be motivated by personal gripes over how Jordan treated the previous speaker nominee, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) — maybe their feelings could be assuaged?

2) The “Only Jordan” bloc settles for someone else: If Jordan can’t win over enough holdouts and quits the contest as Scalise did, the GOP will go back to the drawing board and try to select another speaker nominee.

The question then will be whether that person can win over the hardcore Jordan supporters on the right. These recalcitrant right-wingers made it difficult for Kevin McCarthy to be elected speaker in the first place in January — but he did eventually win enough of them over. Perhaps another candidate, not yet in the race, could do the same. (Or maybe McCarthy could do it again.)

3) Some Republicans cut a deal with Democrats: If neither bloc of GOP holdouts is in the mood to cave, one other option is to rely on Democrats to get a Republican speaker candidate elected. In theory, such a deal could take place with a small group of Democratic moderates, or through a deal cut with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) that has the Democratic Party’s official approval.

Any such deal would draw fury from conservative media, and GOP leaders have already tried to denounce any idea for a “coalition government.” This is why the recent proposal to empower McHenry via some Democratic votes got dropped like a hot potato. But if the far right truly seems impossible to win over, a bipartisan deal may seem to mainstream Republicans like the only option to keep the government open.

4) McHenry just takes the reins without an official vote: Up to this point, speaker pro tempore McHenry has interpreted his duties as limited to facilitating the election of a new speaker. He has said he doesn’t want to do any more than this, and the belief within the GOP conference was that for him to be able to do more, the House would have to vote to empower him.

Outside experts, though, have argued that such a vote might not be necessary. Brendan Buck, a former aide to speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, wrote a New York Times op-ed arguing that McHenry “may simply need to act on his own.” That is, he should start calling up resolutions or bills, and if any member of Congress objects, just put it to a vote and see if a majority of the House backs him. “All of this is unstable and unsustainable, but so too is our current course,” Buck wrote.

5) It doesn’t end: Finally, for the sake of completion, one more possibility (albeit right now an extremely remote one) is that the House simply remains speaker-less until 2025. This would mean an unprecedented, devastating 13-month government shutdown with unforeseen consequences — something enough Republicans would likely want to cut short so they won’t be blamed for it. It would also mean an end to legislation for the next year, including perceived “must-pass” measures like aid to Israel. So it seems unlikely things would go this far. But there’s a first time for everything.

None of the scenarios outside of option 3 bode well for the Republic. Meanwhile, Jordan is doing a great job of dividing his party, with plenty of support from eager accomplices.

Can Democrats leverage the “GOP can’t govern” meme next year?  Jordan’s remarkable record of zero legislative accomplishments in his entire career will invite continuing scrutiny, if he gets elected. But it may be a bit stale a year from now. For Democrats, the short term-strategy is to publicize GOP paralysis, keep chipping away at their prospects in swing districts and work on a legislative agenda that can interest political moderates, while holding liberal support steady..

It’s always a good idea to compare political rhetoric to facts, so it’s important to be aware of the latest official crime statistics, as I noted at New York:

Anyone whose major information source is conservative media or the rhetorical stylings of Republican politicians probably believes the United States is in the grip of an unprecedented crime wave. Indeed, one of the standard GOP talking points against the investigation and prosecution of Donald Trump is that prosecutors should be devoting their resources to fighting out-of-control crime rather than pursuing the former president. But beyond that, an alleged unwillingness to fight crime is a central element of GOP attacks on Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. And as has been the case for many decades, crime-wave rhetoric has provided a pretext for conservative politicians and pundits to engage in thinly veiled racist commentary on the dangerous nature of the Black and Latino citizenry in various urban areas.

The latest official crime statistics for 2022 (the most recent full year for which numbers are available), released this week by the FBI, poke a major hole in the premise of crime-wave talk:

“The FBI’s crime statistics estimates for 2022 show that national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates:

“Murder and non-negligent manslaughter recorded a 2022 estimated nationwide decrease of 6.1% compared to the previous year.

“In 2022, the estimated number of offenses in the revised rape category saw an estimated 5.4% decrease.

“Aggravated assault in 2022 decreased an estimated 1.1% in 2022.”

Violent crime, and particularly the homicides that understandably get so much attention, are even lower if viewed in any sort of historical context, as Popular Information explains:

“Since 1991, the rate of murder has dropped 36%….

“The rate of violent crime is the lowest it has been since 2014, and is nearly half of what it was in 1991 and 1992.”

This downward trend, experts say, is expected to continue in 2023. According to crime data from the first half of the year, there is “strong evidence of a sharp and broad decline in the nation’s murder rate,” crime analyst Jeff Asher reports. Asher finds that preliminary data indicates that the nation is witnessing the “largest annual percent changes in murder ever recorded.”

Yes, property crime were up 7 percent in 2022, but as Popular Information also notes, it was mostly owing to what should be a temporary spike in certain auto thefts:

“The rise in auto thefts is likely due to a recent trend on social media platforms, including TikTok, that teaches viewers how to steal certain models of Kias and Hyundais.

“According to Axios, the videos show people how to “break windows and remove parts of the steering column cover, then start the vehicle with a screwdriver, or a plugin from a USB device.” The viral videos take advantage of Hyundai Motors’ decision “not to install a theft prevention mechanism called an immobilizer in certain makes and models” of Kias and Hyundais since model year 2011. The craze developed into a “Kia Challenge,” which involves creating social media content about successful car thefts.”

In its report on the phenomenon, Axios notes that “Kia and Hyundai both released new ‘theft deterrent software’ for more than 8 million vehicles in response to the trend.” So it may not last. And more to the point, crime analyst Jeff Asher observes, it’s not like we are in some historic property “crime wave” either: “The property crime rate in the US has fallen an astounding 61 percent since 1991.”

All in all, GOP fearmongering about crime parallels the party’s inflation alarms based on selective and outdated numbers. It can be effective, unfortunately; during 2022, Gallup found that 78 percent of Americans thought crime was higher nationally than in 2021. Turns out it just wasn’t true.

 

“To comment on this intra-left controversy risks distorting the political stakes,” E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes in his Washington Post column, “Empathy for Palestinians cannot mean sympathy for Hamas.” Dionne cites “a rare consensus in mainstream politics that Hamas’s terrorism was “an act of sheer evil,” as President Biden said in his powerful speech on Tuesday. Little pockets of sympathy for Hamas will have no effect on U.S. politics going forward. The important contrast is between the moral and strategic seriousness of Biden’s response and the petty, unhinged and self-involved rantings of Donald Trump. Maybe, just maybe, Americans pondering a vote for the former president will see more clearly that returning him to the White House would be an act of democratic suicide….The sharp turn to the right in Israel that Netanyahu engineered has undercut support for the country among younger Americans in the United States. Most of these increasingly vocal critics have resisted supporting Hamas, but the gut liberal sympathy for Israel has largely disappeared among those born after Biden’s generation and mine. If Hamas’s shameful attack has mostly restored consensus in the Democratic Party around the need to defend Israel against mass terrorism, the underlying opposition to Israel’s settlement policies and its refusal to engage with Palestinian demands for self-determination remains….The shock of these traumatic events should shake everyone into a reassessment rooted in moral realism. As my Post colleague Max Bootargued last week, the imperative of accountability should lead eventually to Netanyahu’s ouster. Even as supporters of Israel stand up for its right to self-defense, analysts with long experience in the Middle East, including Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times and The Post’s David Ignatius, warn of the dangers of overreach in Gaza. Having reported alongside them and learned from them during the war in Lebanon in the 1980s, I share their skepticism of grand military plans that promise to settle a conflict for good. We have seen too many such promises fail in the Middle East. And Biden was right in his speech to call attention to moral obligations that apply even in legitimate wars of self-preservation….The left should not stop advocating on behalf of justice for Palestinians. And Israel’s center and left should not stop demanding that Netanyahu’s plans to undercut the country’s judiciary be shelved permanently. But terrorism will not create a more democratic Israel or lead to self-determination for Palestinians. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is rife with ambiguities and conflicting moral claims. This cannot be said of what Hamas did. Its actions are, exactly as Biden said, unambiguously evil.”

NYT columnist Thomas B. Edsall flags an important study, “24 for ’24: Urgent Recommendations in Law, Media, Politics, and Tech for Fair and Legitimate 2024 U.S. Elections,” and here are some excerpts from the Executive Summary: “Over the last two decades, hyperpolarized politics and very close elections have led to fights over election rules and controversy over the administration of U.S. elections. The emergence of these “voting wars” has caused some people, especially those on the losing end of election battles, to question the fairness and integrity of the systems and rules used for conducting elections and tabulating results. This crisis of confidence emerged even as election administration has become more professionalized and even after some of the worst-performing voting systems were taken out of service….Concerns about election fairness and legitimacy exploded during and after the 2020 elections. That election was conducted during a worldwide COVID-19 pandemic and as one of the two major presidential candidates, Donald J. Trump, repeatedly made false and unsubstantiated claims against the integrity of the electoral process. After losing the election, Trump and his allies engaged in an unprecedented series of maneuvers in an unsuccessful attempt to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential results. All reliable evidence indicates that the election was conducted without widespread fraud or irregularities under difficult circumstances….No longer can we take for granted that people will accept election results as legitimate. The United States faces continued threats to peaceful transitions of power after election authorities (or courts) have declared a presidential election winner….Variation and fragmentation of authority leave ample room for litigation in the case of close election results….After public meetings and further online deliberations, this Committee makes the following 24 recommendations for immediate change that should be implemented to increase the fairness and help bolster the legitimacy of the 2024 elections. These recommendation are aimed collectively at assuring access to the ballot for all eligible voters, protecting election integrity, and enhancing the public’s confidence in the fairness of the election and the accuracy of the results.* Read the report here for the specific 24 recommendations.

Should Democrats get more involved in helping to pick the next House Speaker? It’s a tricky strategic question. It’s so much fun to watch the Jim Jordan follies. And there is the saying, “When your adversary is committing political suicide, get out of the way.” But at a certain point, might the public get pissed off that Democrats don’t use what leverage they can muster to prevent the next government shutdown from happening. Perhaps the strategy is to let the Republicans keep branding themselves as incompetent and incapable of governing for a while, and then create a coalition that can elect a more moderate Republican speaker. It’s doubtful that the House is going to pass anything anyway. As Justin Papp writes at Roll Call, “In fact, there’s some shiny silver lining visible in the depths of Republican dysfunction, Crockett and other Democrats said. “There is no campaign slogan, there is no messaging the Democrats could ever do, to better demonstrate who the modern day Republican Party is,” Crockett said….“It’s not good for our country, and it’s not good for the world,” said New Hampshire Democratic Rep. Ann McLane Kuster, who chairs the New Democrat Coalition, of a potential Jim Jordan speakership. “But winning the majority in 2024 just got a whole hell-of-a-lot easier.”….with an important election approaching next November and a razor-thin GOP House majority, some Democratic lawmakers and strategists are salivating over what they view as unforced Republican errors….“There’s almost no doubt that this type of dysfunction and chaos among Republicans will benefit Democrats,” said Brad Woodhouse, a Democratic strategist….“By tying their political futures to an election-denying, anti-law enforcement, pro-shutdown far-right extremist, these so-called moderates are hand-delivering the DCCC content for campaign ads ahead of next year but, more importantly, they are doing a grave disservice to their country,” said Viet Shelton, spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee….“There will be tens of millions of campaign dollars making sure voters are aware of the GOP’s further lurch toward autocracy and lunacy,” Jeff Timmer, a senior adviser with the center-right Lincoln Project, said via email Monday. “Not only will this doom the 18 Rs in Biden districts, it’s going to imperil other marginal Rs … in ways they don’t yet comprehend.”

Papp continues, “Democrats, in response, have begun making their own chess moves, launching campaigns Monday targeting Jordan and drawing attention to his role in spreading lies about the 2020 presidential election in the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol; his staunchly antiabortion stance; and the allegations that he turned a blind eye to sexual assault while he coached wrestling at Ohio State University in the 1980s and 1990s….On Monday, House Majority Forward, the nonprofit wing of House Democrats’ leading super PAC, launched robocalls in 11 districts — many of which are seen as highly competitive in 2024 — urging House Republicans to vote against Jordan as speaker….“Republicans have nominated Jim Jordan for Speaker, who voted to overturn the 2020 election, defended the criminals who attacked the Capitol on January 6th, and is in favor of an extreme agenda to ban abortion nationwide, cut veteran benefits by 22%, eliminate health insurance for 21 million Americans, and fire 108,000 school teachers and aides,” the robocall says….The calls targeted Reps. David Schweikert and Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, Bill Huizenga and John James in Michigan, and Nick LaLota, George Santos, Anthony D’Esposito, Mike Lawler, Marc Molinaro, Elise Stefanik and Brandon Williams, all from New York….Also on Monday, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee announced a six-figure ad buy in support of Virginia state Democrats in response to the “silly, yet predictable Republican speaker fight.”…. “If national Republicans continue to show they won’t govern, why would Virginia Republicans be any different?” Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee Communications Director Abhi Rahman said in a statement announcing the investment in local races….Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called for a bipartisan end to the impasse, in which Democrats would supply votes in exchange for concessions on rules and House procedures to better foster bipartisan governing….By and large, Republicans have rejected calls for a bipartisan solution, though Kuster said as recently as Monday that some Republicans were still interested in working across the aisle, though they’d need to first hit “rock bottom” first before turning to their Democratic colleagues.”

So, “Will Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoil the election for Biden — or Trump?” That’s the question Nathaniel Rakich addresses at abcnews.com, and writes:

Both sides have valid reasons for concern; there’s some evidence to suggest that Kennedy would take more votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee, and some evidence to suggest that he might take more votes away from the Republican nominee. But at the end of the day, his impact on the presidential race is probably being overstated. Third-party candidates rarely win a significant share of the vote, and the election would have to be extremely close for Kennedy’s presence to change who actually wins.

Only a few polls so far have tested a hypothetical three-way race between Kennedy, Trump and President Biden, but they’ve mostly found the same thing: Kennedy’s presence slightly increases Trump’s margin over Biden. On average, Trump leads Biden by only 0.5 percentage points in national polls when Kennedy isn’t included, but that lead grows to an average of 1.8 points in the three-way matchups.

Granted, one year plus out from Election Day, all such polls can end up meaning nothing. There is also an argument that Democrats may suffer more damage from Cornell West’s candidacy for the presidency. Here’s a basket of recent polls, shared by Rakich:

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, politics editor of The Liberal Patriot newsletter and co-author with John B. Judis of the forthcoming book “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?,” is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Most people have long forgotten—if they ever noticed to begin with—that the Biden administration did, in fact, propose an ambitious immigration reform bill very early in Biden’s tenure. Ambitious, but without the remotest chance of passing. Republicans, to no one’s surprise, did not sign on to a bill that did almost nothing to address their concerns about border security.

At the time, Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar, from TX-28, a heavily Hispanic border district, presciently remarked:

Hey, we don’t want the wall, but when it comes to the other issues, we gotta be careful that we don’t give the impression that we have open borders because otherwise the numbers are going to start going up. And surely enough, we’re starting to see numbers go up.

Also around that time, I wrote:

Democrats moving forward have to accept the reality of American public opinion and politics that border security is a huge issue that cannot be elided in any attempt to reform the immigration system. Indeed, the most popular part of the current immigration bill is the provision most directly related to border security (technologically enhanced port of entry screening) according to Morning Consult. And public opinion polling over the years has consistently shown overwhelming majorities in favor of more spending and emphasis on border security.

This suggests a serious revamp of the Democratic approach to immigration flows and immigration reform. The public has indeed become more sympathetic to immigrants and immigration, partially as a thermostatic reaction to the practices of the Trump administration. But that does not mean that Democrats can simply be the opposite of Trump on this issue. He was closed; we’re open! He was mean; we’re nice! Any moves toward greater leniency at the border and the creation of legalization regimes for undocumented immigrants raises the possibility of knock-on effects and unintended consequences that would be highly unpopular. How do you prevent people from gaming the system? How do you handle the possibility of surges at the border to take advantage of leniency and legalization regimes? Any immigration reform package worth its salt must have serious answers to these questions.

America is a very desirable destination and it is simply a fact that many more people want to come here than can possibly be accommodated. Therefore, choices will have to be made about the numbers to be let in. What is, in fact, a desirable level of legal immigration? If Democrats wish it to be much higher, which is a defensible position, then they must have an answer for who these people should be. How are slots to be allocated—would the country be served well by moving to more a skill-based system or at least a hybrid that leans in that direction? And if the immigration system is to be more generous, how are levels of illegal immigration to be controlled? It will not do to make the immigration system more generous, while doing little to control flows of illegal immigration. Most of all, voters want an immigration system that is both reasonably generous and humane and under control. Democrats ignore the “under control” part at their peril.

I think it’s fair to say that the Biden administration did not heed this counsel and that of others who made similar points. Instead, an initial moratorium on deportations and a multitude of other actions the administration took clearly signaled that there was to be a very different regime at the border than there was under Trump. This regime was touted as being more ‘humanitarian” and “compassionate” but prospective migrants, predictably enough, interpreted it more simply as “easier to get in” if you come. And come they did.

Two straight years of record-breaking illegal immigrant border crossings followed. Some were turned away of course but a large proportion (76 percent) remained in the U.S. Recently, that proportion may be even higher. The situation is exacerbated by the thoroughly broken asylum system. It is being systematically gamed by arriving migrants who are briefed by smugglers and social media on exactly what to say to establish themselves as asylum-seekers.

Read more…

An excerpt from “What Friends Owe Friends: Why Washington Should Restrain Israeli Military Action in Gaza—and Preserve a Path to Peace” by Richard Haas at Foreign Affairs. “The case for the United States working to shape Israel’s response to the crisis and its aftermath rests not just on the reality that good if tough advice is what friends owe one another. The United States has interests in the Middle East and beyond that would not be well-served by an Israeli invasion and occupation of Gaza, nor by longer-term Israeli policies that offer no hope to Palestinians who reject violence. Such U.S. aims are sure to make for difficult conversations and politics. But the alternative—of a wider war and the indefinite continuation of an unsustainable status quo—would be far more difficult and dangerous….The United States should urge Israel, first in private, then in public if necessary, to orient its policy around building the context for a viable Palestinian partner to emerge over time. By contrast, Israeli policy has, in recent years, seemed intent on undermining the Palestinian Authority so as to be able to say there is no partner for peace. The aim should be to demonstrate that what Hamas offers is a dead end—but also, just as important, that there is a better alternative for those willing to reject violence and accept Israel. That would mean putting sharp limits on settlement activity in the West Bank; articulating final-status principles that would include a Palestinian state; and specifying stringent but still reasonable conditions the Palestinians could meet in order to achieve that aim….Getting there would require a U.S. willingness to take an active hand in the process and show a willingness to state U.S. views publicly, even if it means distancing the United States from Israeli policy. ” And if Biden’s leadership can make a significant contribution to peace in the Middle East, it will provide a boost to his image as the adult in the room when it comes to U.S. foreign policy.

In “The House GOP Is Irretrievably Broken” at The Nation,  Joan Walsh suggests a new approach for Dems: “No Republican is likely to get 217 votes from Republicans only. Everybody in that party hates everybody else, and some of them seem to hate everybody. The next speaker will have to be elected with Democratic votes, perhaps just a handful of moderate defectors. If a GOP candidate gave Democrats some concessions—bigger roles on committees, a way to avert a government shutdown in November, calling off or at least slow-walking the bogus Joe Biden impeachment inquiry—maybe they’d win more than a handful of Democratic votes, but they’d almost certainly lose even more Republicans….I’ve said this many times: In a sane world, reporters and pundits would be hammering Republicans about one solution that should be obvious: that five or so Republicans join all 212 Dems and back Speaker Hakeem Jeffries. People laugh at me when I suggest that, but here’s my point: Of course it’s virtually impossible given the current political gridlock. But it’s not the job of reporters to be cynical and rule out solutions; it’s their job to posit solutions and ask why they’re not on the table….If Republicans do find a sacrificial moderate—some are surfacing Oklahoma Representative Tom Cole, one of McCarthy’s most loyal lieutenants—you’ll hear the pundit class bleating for Democrats to make him speaker. As I was writing, former Meet the Press host David Gregory, now a CNN analyst, proved me right, telling Poppy Harlow: “I actually have my eye on Democrats. How long are Democrats going to stand by in the world of identity politics, and zero-sum politics, and not be part of any solution?” There is not even a GOP speaker nominee yet, but Gregory thinks Democrats are part of the problem anyway….I’ll be here pushing the obvious solution—that some combination of Republicans in districts Biden won and those about to retire break ranks and join Democrats to elect Jeffries as speaker. It’s highly unlikely. But it shouldn’t be. The media has helped create the climate in which it’s unthinkable.”

“Last week, I wrote a column puzzling why no mainstream Democrat is challenging President Biden for the nomination, given the strong demand among Democrats for a different and younger nominee.”  Jonathan Chait writes at New York magazine. “It remains mysterious to me.”….Dan Pfeiffer offers a reasonably strong response that still fails to satisfy my curiosity. Pfeiffer, a former aide to President Obama, argues that the main challengers are largely unknown. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, Georgia senator Raphael Warnock, and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker “were mentioned but still have relatively low name ID among the Democratic electorate,” in a CNN poll. He concludes, “a primary challenge would be a massive longshot with potentially devastating consequences for the primary challenger and the incumbent.”….I think that argument may capture why private polls might not show an alternative standing a strong chance to beat Biden. And perhaps it would also explain why challengers have stayed out of the race — if they are surreptitiously taking polls and finding Biden holds a commanding lead, which some insiders have speculated but remains unknown, they would sensibly decide not to run against him….But I think this misunderstands the nature of such a race. Name recognition is extremely important in an ordinary presidential primary. Contested primaries typically involve a lot of candidates, and a big component of winning is getting the media to give you a lot of coverage so voters think of you as a contender. 2020 had an enormous field of contenders, most of whom never received serious coverage…But a race with one main contender against Biden would have a different dynamic. (This assumes the contender had a credible background, such as having won statewide office or some other well-established record.) The campaign would draw a lot of media attention. Name recognition would pretty quickly cease to pose a major obstacle. The question would be whether the candidate could look to Democrats like a better candidate than Biden….Yes, it’s early, and yes, the polling has limited value this far from an election. An improving economy offers a highly plausible scenario for how the dynamic of the race could change for the better….That said, I can’t escape the conclusion that Democrats are treating a highly risky plan as though it were a safe one, locking themselves in to a single-track strategy, and leaving themselves little recourse if the plan falters.”

Harold Meyerson writes in “Investing in Disinvested AmericaThe Biden administration’s manufacturing subsidies are disproportionately flowing to red states and districts” at The American Prospect: “Like Lyndon Johnson once he became president, Joe Biden has deliberately sought to build on Roosevelt’s New Deal legacy. He is surely the most pro-union president since FDR; he is reviving the long-overdue regulation of big business; his social proposals in the Build Back Better bill of paid sick leave, affordable child care, and free community college would have extended the social provisions of the New Deal; and his commitment of funds and tax credits to revive America’s industries and infrastructure has clear echoes of Roosevelt’s public investments….That those commitments of funds also have a specific regional focus, though, isn’t often viewed as a central feature of Bidenomics. A Washington Post article from this August headlined “5 Key Pillars of President Biden’s Economic Revolution” said that the five were: Run the economy hot; Make unions stronger; Revive domestic manufacturing through green energy; Rein in corporate power; and Expand the safety net….,Those are indeed five key Bidenomics pillars. But there’s a sixth, or, at least, a crucial addition to the one about reviving domestic manufacturing: Locating that revival in regions that private capital has long abandoned….I don’t for a moment think that the Biden people believe investments of any size will enable Biden to carry South Carolina, Tennessee, or other solid-red states in 2024. I do think they believe it can help him in swing states like Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina, and add an insurance point or two in a state like Michigan. That said, most of his campaign jaunts have been to states and districts where he can claim credit for a new plant springing up. Even if he’s in the reddest of red states, the thinking goes, his message can seep across state lines and may swing some votes that really matter….By revitalizing communities with the shops and eateries and everything needed to serve a new workforce, these projects, if they continue to spring up as they’ve done so far, can bring new life to Disinvested America. Placed alongside Biden’s pro-union actions, his campaign against monopolies and overpriced medications, his as-yet-unrealized plans to help families navigate child care and sick leave and the costs of college, his resurrection of American industry and the places from which it fled affords him just one more way he can answer the question of Which Side Are You On….Biden has yet to convince most Americans—especially those whose local economies will benefit the most from those policies—that he is, in fact, very much on their side. His resurrection of American manufacturing comes with no guarantee of electoral success. But in its long-term effect on American well-being, as Biden once famously said, it’s a big fuckin’ deal.”

A very old hypothesis essentially attributing Republican extremism to southern influences popped up again this week, so I addressed it at New York:

Having grown up in the authoritarian police state of the Jim Crow South, I am acutely aware of the racism that dominated the politics of my home region while white supremacists had the former Confederacy in their grip, and that persisted in various ways even as they lost power. So I am sympathetic to the argument that the roots of today’s twisted Republican Party trace back to the peculiar white southern conservatism that migrated into the GOP during and after the civil-rights movement. New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie revives this “southern coup” hypothesis in a meditation on the death of Republican prophet (and later anti-Republican writer) Kevin Phillips and the rise of Louisiana’s Steve Scalise. But I think it’s a bit anachronistic. The MAGA movement that has now conquered the GOP is a thoroughly national phenomenon drawing on reactionary and “populist” impulses from every region of the country.

There’s no question that the rapid defection of the South from its ancient Democratic allegiances to the GOP that began with Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964 was a major factor in the narrow victory of Richard Nixon in 1968 (for which Phillips was the whiz-kid demographic analyst). But as Phillips pointed out in his seminal 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, southern white conservatives angry about civil rights were just one component of the new coalition that just three years later gave Nixon a vast landslide win that captured nearly every former citadel of Democratic power. There were the Catholic working-class ethnic voters (soon to be known as “Reagan Democrats”) of the urban Northeast and Midwest, who had their own racial and economic grievances with LBJ’s Great Society; rural midwestern and western “populists” bridling against federal regulations; and, throughout the country, white suburbanites defending their quality of life from rising crime and creeping taxes. Yes, racism pervaded much of this newfangled conservatism, but it was native to much of white America, not just imported from the South.

It’s plausible to argue that there was a particular ferocity to southern white conservatism — perhaps based on Evangelical culture and/or a racialized approach to issues like labor relations and public education — that has come to characterize conservatism elsewhere. But just as country music is a national (and even global) cultural force whose southern heritage is increasingly incidental, there’s a point at which white conservative Republican politics became truly national as well, blending southern and non-southern traditions.

When Connecticut Yankee turned Texan George H.W. Bush became president in 1988 by catering to the Christian right in the primaries and running openly racist ads in the general election, was he representing “the South”? How about that much-discussed avatar of harsh partisanship Newt Gingrich, the Pennsylvania-born Army brat from a suburban Georgia district that could have been relocated to just about anywhere in the country without changing its character? Did the South slowly strangle the moderate Republican tradition in its ancestral northeastern stomping grounds, or did the GOP come to represent a coalition of homegrown cultural and economic conservatives in unlikely places such as New York? It’s often been noted that the harsh anti-labor and anti-government themes Scott Walker championed in Wisconsin made the 21st-century politics of that once-progressive state feel like 20th-century “southern” politics. But at a certain point, you have to stop treating a national political movement as some sort of interregional infection; it’s more like an ideological pandemic.

That point was surely reached when Donald Trump came along and conquered the Republican Party with a speed that showed how ripe it was for a sharp turn toward authoritarian populism in all its forms, from southern cultural and religious grievances to western anti-government paranoia to the midwestern protectionism and isolationism that gave Trump his “America First” motto.

It’s really no accident that Trump was a quintessential New Yorker who moved to the least “southern” spot south of the Mason-Dixon line, just as it’s no surprise that Ohioan Jim Jordan has outflanked Louisianan Steve Scalise on the right in the House GOP conference. Sure, there remain some distinctively southern MAGA folk such as the Alabaman Tommy Tuberville and arguably even Marjorie Taylor Greene, a wealthy Atlanta suburbanite who basically bought a rural-and-small-town congressional seat. But those battling to restore the “American greatness” of government of, by, and for conservative Christian white people hail from fever swamps located in all 50 states.