James.galbraith

By dismissing his impeachment as illegitimate, the president tries to make the anti-Trump majority disappear.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts exit the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, DC, in 2013.  | Katherine Frey/Washington Post/Getty Images

At stake: a society in which civil rights laws aren’t optional for religious employers.

The Supreme Court announced on Wednesday that it would hear a pair of cases concerning the “ministerial exemption” to employment discrimination laws. Broadly speaking, the “ministerial exemption” provides that religious “ministers” are not protected by civil rights laws in their workplace — so a church could, for example, fire its preacher because the preacher is black.

Now, who exactly counts as a minister? A preacher counts, to be sure, but how about a teacher in a religious school? The Supreme Court has only ever decided one case involving this ministerial exemption, Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC (2012), so it has provided very little guidance on just who qualifies as a minister. The two new cases, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru and St. James School v. Biel, concern whether school teachers with limited religious duties fall within the ministerial exemption — and thus are unprotected by anti-discrimination laws.

It may not seem like it at first blush, but the stakes in these cases are enormous. If the conservative Supreme Court defines the word “minister” broadly, that could potentially exempt many employees from the protection of civil rights laws, opening them up to discriminatory actions by the religious institutions they work for.

What is the ministerial exemption?

The ministerial exemption provides that religious organizations may choose which individuals embody their faith, and that the government may not interfere with this choice. As a practical matter, that means that laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, gender, disability, or other such traits do not apply to “ministers.”

Few judges question that the Constitution gives religious institutions broad discretion to choose their own clergy. Hosanna-Tabor was a unanimous decision, and, as the Supreme Court explained in that case, the First Amendment’s provisions protecting the faithful and dividing church and state ensured that the government “would have no role in filling ecclesiastical offices.”

“The Establishment Clause prevents the Government from appointing ministers,” Chief Justice John Roberts explained for his Court, “and the Free Exercise Clause prevents it from interfering with the freedom of religious groups to select their own.” This is why, for example, a federal law barring gender discrimination in employment does not require the Catholic Church to ordain women.

But religious institutions employ many people who perform a combination of religious and secular duties — and many of these employees have only minimal religious responsibilities. According to the federal appeals court that heard the case, for example, Biel involves a Catholic schoolteacher who mostly provided secular instruction — but who also spent a couple hours every week teaching from a workbook on the Catholic faith. She claims that her teaching contract was not renewed because she has breast cancer, in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. (The school claims that this teacher lost her job because her classroom management was not strict enough.)

Morrissey-Berru involves another Catholic school teacher who claims she’s a victim of age discrimination. Just like Biel, the teacher in Morrissey-Berru claims she lost her job due to discrimination. The school claims her contract wasn’t renewed for performance reasons.

In Hosanna-Tabor, the Supreme Court laid out several factors that a court should consider when deciding if a particular employee counts as a “minister.” Did the employer hold the employee out as a minister, and did the employee do the same? Did the employee have significant religious training? Did their job duties involve “important religious functions?”

Based on these factors, Hosanna-Tabor was an easy case. The plaintiff in Hosanna-Tabor was a teacher in a Lutheran school that presented her as a minister and gave her the title “Minister of Religion, Commissioned.” She was required to “complete eight college-level courses in subjects including biblical interpretation, church doctrine, and the ministry of the Lutheran teacher,” and to pass an examination administered by Lutheran faculty. She’d also claimed a federal tax benefit for employees who earn their income “in the exercise of the ministry.”

And, on top of all of these factors, the plaintiff in Hosanna-Tabor taught both secular and religious subjects, she led her students in prayer, and she occasionally led chapel services.

Biel and Morrissey-Berru, by contrast, involve seemingly weaker claims that particular schoolteachers qualify as ministers.

As the appeals court decision explains, the plaintiff in Biel has a degree in liberal arts and a secular teaching credential. She’s taught in both religious and secular institutions, including “tutoring companies, multiple public schools, another Catholic school, and even a Lutheran school.” She has no formal religious training and has never held herself out as a minister. Her job title was “Grade 5 Teacher.”

She did have some religious duties, but these were only part of her responsibilities. She “taught lessons on the Catholic faith four days a week” and “incorporated religious themes and symbols into her overall classroom environment and curriculum.” She also had to make sure her students were quiet in their seats during a monthly mass.

According to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, these limited religious duties were not enough to trigger the ministerial exemption. As Judge Michelle Friedland wrote, “the exception need not extend to every employee whose job has a religious component.”

The religious right has big plans for the ministerial exemption

Biel and Morrissey-Berru are hard cases. It’s not immediately clear just how much religious training and how many religious duties an employee must take on to be considered a “minister.” Yet, if the conservative Supreme Court includes too many people within the exemption, that could have devastating consequences for many workers doing almost entirely secular jobs.

Here’s a personal example: When I was 16 years old, I worked as a junior counselor at a Christian-identified summer camp. I spent the lion’s share of my time doing secular activities like playing capture the flag or teaching boating safety. But a couple evenings a week I would lead a 10-minute “devotion” for a small group of children, and then close that devotion with a prayer.

Was that enough to make me a minister, and therefore beyond the reach of civil rights laws? It seems doubtful that the Constitution framers imagined a teenager reading a Bible verse to children when they sought to keep the government from “filling ecclesiastical offices.” But if a schoolteacher who spends a couple hours every week teaching Catholic doctrine qualifies as a minister, then it’s hard to make a principled argument that a camp counselor leading religious-themed devotions doesn’t also qualify.

Here’s another example: Suppose that a publisher sells a mix of religious and secular books. A person works as a receptionist for this publisher, and their job duties require them to sometimes answer basic questions about the doctrines espoused by the religious books. Is the receptionist a minister?

It may seem obvious that the receptionist’s duties are pretty far afield from the work done by bona fide clergy. But, in 2015, the Southern Baptist Convention partnered with a leading Christian-right law firm to draft a manual advising religious employers to dole out religious duties to secular employees to immunize the employer from anti-discrimination law.

The manual, titled Protecting Your Ministry From Sexual Orientation Gender Identity Lawsuits, suggested that someone like the receptionist should qualify as a minister.

When feasible, a religious organization should assign its employees duties that involve ministerial teaching, or other spiritual qualifications — duties that directly further the religious mission. For example, if a church receptionist answers the phone, the job description might detail how the receptionist is required to answer basic questions about the church’s faith, provide religious resources, or pray with callers. Consider requiring all employees to participate in devotional or prayer time, or to even lead these on occasion.

Ultimately, it’s up to the Supreme Court — not the Southern Baptist Convention — to decide whether an employee who leads an occasional prayer session with their co-workers qualifies as a minister. But it’s clear from this manual that religious groups are already thinking big about what they can get away with if the ministerial exemption grows very large.

The result could be a society in which civil rights laws are optional for religious employers.

Tulsi Gabbard, the Hawaii congresswoman seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, voted “present” Wednesday on both articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, making her the only member of the chamber not to vote “yes” or “no.”

Her vote wasn’t a complete surprise: prior to the vote, Gabbard introduced a resolution calling for Trump’s censure, rather than impeachment.

Democratic leaders didn’t know how Gabbard would vote Wednesday or if she was even in Washington. But when the vote took place, Gabbard came into the chamber, interacted with just one or two lawmakers and then left immediately after voting — going out through a GOP door.

In a lengthy statement released by her presidential campaign, the Hawaii Democrat framed her votes as decisions that put country before party.

“One may not always agree with my decision, but everyone should know that I will always do what I believe to be right for the country that I love,” she said. “After doing my due diligence in reviewing the 658-page impeachment report, I came to the conclusion that I could not in good conscience vote either yes or no.”

Gabbard added that while she believes “Trump is guilty of wrongdoing,” she couldn’t vote “yes” because the process was partisan and “fueled by tribal animosities that have so gravely divided our country.”

The congresswoman, who announced in October that she would not seek reelection, noted that she introduced a censure resolution to “send a strong message to this president and future presidents that their abuses of power will not go unchecked, while leaving the question of removing Trump from office to the voters to decide.”

“I am confident that the American people will decide to deliver a resounding rebuke of President Trump’s innumerable improprieties and abuses,” she continued. “And they will express that judgment at the ballot box. That is the way real and lasting change has always occurred in this great country: through the forcefully expressed will of the people.”

The impeachment vote comes on the eve of the final Democratic presidential debate of 2019. PBS NewsHour and POLITICO will host seven candidates at Loyola Marymount University on Thursday night. Gabbard, however, will not be on stage after falling short of the polling requirements.

The president’s impeachment now heads to the Republican-controlled Senate, which is expected to begin its trial early next month. Five Democratic presidential candidates — Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and Michael Bennet — will sit as silent jurors.

Sarah Ferris contributed to this report.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

President Trump walks toward Marine One prior to his departure for a campaign event in Battle Creek, Michigan, on December 18, 2019. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Impeachment proceedings will now move to the Senate.

For the third time in history, the House has voted to impeach the president of the United States.

On Wednesday night, the House voted to pass its first of two articles of impeachment brought against President Donald Trump — one charging the president with abusing his power. The final vote was 230-197, with two Democrats voting no and one — Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) — voting present. Gabbard is currently running for the Democratic nomination for president.

The second article the House will vote on shortly accuses Trump of obstructing Congress. Both are tied to the Ukraine scandal and Trump’s urging of the Ukrainian president to investigate his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son, Hunter.

It has taken nearly a year to get to this point. While House Democratic leaders were at first extremely hesitant to wade into an impeachment inquiry, that changed when new revelations about Trump and Ukraine were raised. After a slow march toward opening a formal inquiry, House Democrats have finished proceedings before Christmas. Now, the process will move to the Republican-controlled Senate.

“Democrats did not rush to judgment, Democrats did not embrace impeachment at its first opportunity,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters Tuesday, pointing out that the vast majority of House Democrats didn’t vote for earlier impeachment bills brought forward by progressive members. It was only after a whistleblower’s complaint became public and the Ukraine scandal broke that the tide turned, both for moderate Democrats and for leadership.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Only two other US presidents have been impeached: Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. Richard Nixon resigned from office in 1974 before he could be formally impeached.

Few Democrats defected from their party, save for moderate Rep. Jeff Van Drew (NJ), who recently announced he plans to switch parties and become a Republican. Van Drew was joined by longtime moderate Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN) and at least partially, Maine Rep. Jared Golden, who said he planned to vote for the abuse of power article, but against the article on obstruction of justice. Independent Rep. Justin Amash (MI), a former Republican, voted in favor of the first article of impeachment, and was invoked by Hoyer during a somber speech ahead of the first vote as someone beholden to neither party, and taking a purely principled stance.

Trying to extend the vote longer, many House Republicans chose to vote red paper ‘no’ ballots to be counted during the first vote, rather than the usual electronic method. But they weren’t alone; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi filled out her own green ballot signifying a yes vote, and brought it to the clerk.

Just because the House impeached Trump doesn’t mean he’ll be removed from office — in fact, it’s highly unlikely. At least 67 members of the Senate would have to vote to convict him on at least one of the impeachment articles for him to be ousted from the White House. It’s improbable that 20 GOP senators will vote against the president.

A brief breakdown of how we got here

The House Judiciary Committee approved a resolution to formally launch an impeachment inquiry on September 12, and on September 24, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the House would officially move forward with the inquiry. The catalyst was a whistleblower complaint filed against the president about his communications with the Ukrainian president.

The House Intelligence Committee then undertook an investigation into the matter, including public testimony from multiple witnesses, and put forth an impeachment report on December 3. The Judiciary then conducted hearings of its own, drew up articles of impeachment, and released a lengthy report on Trump’s impeachment.

Beyond the argument for the two articles of impeachment, the report also laid out other allegations against the president, including that he committed bribery and wire fraud. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop explained, it’s a way for Democrats who wanted the scope of the impeachment articles to be broader to still make an expanded case:

It may seem odd to relegate these accusations of presidential lawbreaking to a relatively brief section, more than 100 pages into a 169-page report. But they may have done so because they don’t want to leave the misimpression that criminal conduct by Trump must be proven to justify a vote for impeachment.

In the end, the report lets Democrats have it both ways. They may have dropped the contested “bribery” language from their actual articles of impeachment on which members will vote. But they’re now also arguing that Trump’s not off the hook for bribery, either.

“Taken together, the articles charge that President Trump has placed his personal, political interests above our national security, our free and fair elections, and our system of checks and balances,” the report reads. “He has engaged in a pattern of misconduct that will continue if left unchecked. Accordingly, President Trump should be removed from office.”

Impeachment now goes to a trial in the Senate, where the president is all but sure to be acquitted, given the state of partisan affairs.

Want to learn more about impeachment? Read Vox’s explainer here.

Taylor Swift as Bombalurina in Cats. | Universal Pictures

This movie is indescribable. Let’s try.

Truly, the most spectacular movie of the holiday season is Cats, and I write this half-expecting the movie’s marketers to use that as a pull quote on the poster. There’s simply no better word to describe this fantasia. The trailer, featuring very famous people with cat fur and unnervingly placed tails singing songs from the 1981 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, broke the internet and people’s brains. Rarely have I been at a party in the last few months without the conversation turning to Cats.

Now I’ve seen it, and my own brain feels turned to glitter, much like the sequined blue cat ears on a headband I was handed at the press screening. It is ludicrous and kind of divine, furry and flabbergasting, absurd and, in some moments, weirdly touching. It is a film that resists ordinary treatment and, especially, ordinary reviews.

I left without any idea of what I thought, only that I was exhilarated and baffled and kind of impressed, all at once. I had no idea what to say, only observations and questions written in my notebook, many of which conflict with one another. I present them now, with a whisker of editing, for your contemplation.

Things you will see, and maybe never unsee, if you watch the movie Cats

Acclaimed thespian Ian McKellen, playing “Theater Cat” Gus (short for Asparagus), lapping up milk from a shallow bowl resting at chin height.

A chorus line comprised of humanoid cockroaches performing a dance presumably choreographed by a tiny cockroach, Busby Berkeley.

Humanoid mice, singing.

James Corden, a.k.a. Bustopher Jones, eating everything in sight in a dumpster, as if he is Templeton the Rat in Charlotte’s Web.

Jason Derulo as Rum Tum Tugger, shimmying his hips from side to side as if butt-bumping invisible buddy-cats.

Idris Elba, as the conniving Macavity the Mystery Cat, with extremely green cat eyes.

And, his abs.

Rebel Wilson, who plays lackadaisical house cat Jennyanydots, unzipping her cat suit to reveal another cat suit below it, but that one is bedecked in a jazzy pink sequined suit.

Not one, but two instances of cats getting hit in their (perfectly smooth, Barbie-like) groins and crying out in pain.

Taylor’s Swift’s very smooth, defined, nipple-free cat bosom.

A surprisingly moving scene of Jennifer Hudson, as the beleaguered street cat Grizabella, absolutely losing it singing “Memories,” in a scene director Tom Hooper clearly pegged as the parallel to Anne Hathaway’s “I Dreamed a Dream” in his 2012 Les Misérables adaptation.

Jennifer Hudson being taken away to heaven in a chandelier attached to a hot air balloon.

Judi Dench sternly explaining that cats are not dogs.

Universal Pictures

Things you will not see in the movie Cats

Cat genitals.

Questions I have after watching the movie Cats

Is Cats a good movie?

Is it a bad movie?

Is the answer to both “yes”?

Why is there a whole movie just about taxonomies of cats, with a side plot about one lucky cat’s life literally ending, opening against the ninth canonical Star Wars movie?

Why can’t Tom Hooper get through a single song without cutting every two seconds to a new shot? What does he have against letting us watch things happen for a little while before changing perspective?

Why, if they built giant sets so that the normal-sized people were cat-sized, are the cats exactly the size of ferrets?

Why exactly does “Beautiful Ghosts,” the song that Andrew Lloyd Webber (who wrote the original stage show in the 1980s) and Taylor Swift (who plays the slinky Macavity ally Bombalurina), sound so incredibly unlike the rest of the songs in the show? Shouldn’t Webber have been able to figure that one out?

Will “Beautiful Ghosts” win an Oscar?

Who is the evil genius who thought, You know what? Let’s make a piece of avant-garde performance art, cast a bunch of stars in it, and call it a blockbuster? How can I pledge that genius my fealty?

Is Mr. Mistoffelees really a magical cat?

Universal Pictures

Given how much CGI is being used here, how much of the dancing is really, actually good, and how much just got fixed in post-production? Is the lurking sense that this is all just animation the reason why none of the performances seem particularly amazing, except Hudson’s and McKellen’s?

How — how — was a show this bizarre and plotless, with songs this mediocre, one of the most successful Broadway shows of all times, on both sides of the pond? What was happening in the 1980s?

Is Cats ... like ... a secret metaphor for something? Why can’t I figure out what it is?

Will this movie make all the money, or none?

Will the earnestly supportive parents of theater kids who take their teens to the movies over the holiday ever speak to their children again?

Did I love this movie?

What the hell is a Jellicle?

Final verdict on the movie Cats

It’s literally incredible. I hope I never see it again.

Cats opens in theaters on December 19.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) speaks to reporters on December 18, 2019, as the House debates articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

A sampling what Trump’s allies in the House had to say before the vote.

As the vote on two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump neared on Wednesday night, Democrats took turns on the House floor making one argument for impeachment: that Trump abused his power and then attempted to cover it up. In Trump’s defense, Republicans took turns on the House floor making many, many, more.

Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa, for example, claimed Trump couldn’t have been out for personal political gain when he asked the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden because Biden is taking part in a presidential primary, and thus is not a “campaign rival.”

Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania blamed the Democratic-led inquiry on the Democrats’ blinding hatred of the president and likened the vote to the bombing on Pearl Harbor that led the US to enter World War II.

Other Republicans questioned the impeachment process itself, calling it unfair — perhaps even more unfair than the trials of Jesus Christ.

At their heart, these Republican defenses aren’t about what Trump did or didn’t do. Instead, they’re a series of complaints about process and politics designed to convince his supporters that the saga isn’t about investigating Trump, but about insulting them.

“Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus”

A recurring argument Republicans have made over the last few months is the notion that Trump has been denied his right to face his accusers in person, rendering the entire process illegitimate. Sen. Rand Paul wrote in an op-ed for the Hill that “the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to confront one’s accusers,” therefore Trump “must both face his accuser and face questions regarding his own knowledge and activities.”

Legally, that’s not true. The impeachment process in the House is not a trial, and as conservative legal scholar Andrew McCarthy noted, “The Sixth Amendment has nothing to do with impeachment, and it does not advance a claim that the ‘whistleblower’ should be outed and questioned.”

And moreover, the House resolution on the impeachment process explicitly stipulated that Trump and his attorneys could participate in the proceedings, including their ability to make their case and offer evidence, request documents, cross-examine witnesses, and object to testimony. The White House refused to do so.

But some members of Congress appeared unaware that Trump had, in fact, been given the ability to participate in his own impeachment inquiry, and instead argued that Trump had been unable to face his accuser, which rendered the entire event moot.

Two Republicans seemed to compare Trump’s impeachment to the capture, trial, and ultimate crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) said, “Pontius Pilate afforded more rights to Jesus than the Democrats have afforded this president in this process.”

And Rep. Fred Keller (R-PA) quoted Jesus on the cross as he’s portrayed in the Gospel of Luke, saying that he was praying for Democrats: “From the gospel of Luke, the 23rd chapter, verse 34: ‘And Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’”

“They hate the president”

Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) made a different argument in defense of the president and against impeachment, one that’s been made by a number of conservatives: that the fight over impeachment is actually an attack aimed at supporters of the president three years in the making.

In his remarks, Stewart said:

This vote, this day, has nothing to do with Ukraine. It has nothing to do with abuse of power. It has nothing to do with obstruction of Congress. This day is about one thing and one thing only. They hate this president. They hate those of us who voted for him. They think we are stupid. They think we made a mistake. They think Hillary Clinton should be the president and they want to fix that. That’s what this vote is about. They want to take away my vote and throw it in the trash. They want to take away my president and delegitimatize him so can he not be reelected. That’s what this is about. For those who think this started with this investigation, what nonsense. ... You have been trying to impeach this president since before he was sworn into office.

Stewart wasn’t alone in arguing that impeachment was a long-running effort aimed squarely not at Trump, but at those who voted for him. Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) went so far as to hold a moment of silence for Americans who voted for Trump in 2016, while Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) used a map of counties Trump won while arguing that “weaponized impeachment” was brought about by socialists.

It should be noted that several Republicans voiced support for impeaching Hillary Clinton before the 2016 presidential election even took place. But moreover, many Republican members of Congress seem to take seriously the idea that there is a synonymity of Trump and Trump’s voters — that attacks on Trump are attacks on the millions of Americans who voted for him.

I wrote about this before in an article about why conservatives weren’t rallying behind the concept of a President Mike Pence. In short, some voters seem to see aspects of themselves in a president they view as willing to fight on their behalf.

While Trump might be, in their view, uncouth, unfair, even immoral and a hindrance to the growth of the conservative movement, they view the left as the real threat, a threat only Trump has seemed able to stand up against.

And to many Trump-supportive conservatives, the impulse to fight on Trump’s behalf against his critics on the left and in the media is intimately tied to their own sense that they themselves are constantly targeted in unfair ways by those same forces.

Ben Shapiro, the popular podcast and radio host, told me, “People feel that no honest standard has been applied to conservatives, and they feel that Trump has been targeted just as they have.”

Those voters have real sway with Republicans in Congress. So while some Republicans might believe that Trump’s conduct was wrong, perhaps even impeachable, they won’t say so in front of those voters who will decide their own reelection.

The year was 2008. President Barack Obama had just been elected the first African American president in the history of the country. Donald Trump was revving his racist engines to begin a birther campaign in what likely started as a publicity stunt. Doing the media rounds, Trump spoke with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. In a clip that Blitzer posted on Twitter Wednesday, Trump can be seen giving his thoughts on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the concept of impeachment.

DONALD TRUMP: You know, when she first got in and was named speaker, I met her. And I’m very impressed by her. I think she’s a very impressive person. I like her a lot. But I was surprised that she didn’t do more in terms of Bush [W.], and going after Bush. It was almost, it just seemed like she was gonna really look to impeach Bush and get him out of office. Which personally I think would have been a wonderful thing.

Blitzer, without a teleprompter, is sort of like a Christmas Tree without lights—quiet—and has to do his best. So he stammers the question, “Impeaching him?” 

TRUMP: For the war.

BLITZER: The conduct of the war—

TRUMP:--Well he lied! He got us into the war with lies. And, I mean, look at the trouble that Bill Clinton got into with something that was totally unimportant. And they tried to impeach him, which was nonsense. And yet Bush got us into this horrible war with lies, by lying. By saying they had weapons of mass destruction. By saying all sorts of things that turned out not to be true.

It’s one of Trump’s more coherent set of sentences, and arguably the only true thing he’s said in the last decade. But of course, with President Obama and a Democratic Congress, 2008 was a good year for Trump to promote Democratic Party officials. It would be six years later that Trump would be calling for President Obama’s impeachment for who knows what. I guess he stopped thinking Speaker Pelosi was so impressive when he actually had to try and face off against her in the same arena. Having Pelosi wipe the floor with you probably left a bad taste in his mouth. 

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Check out this exchange I had with then private citizen @realDonaldTrump on Oct. 15, 2008. We spoke about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and he then offered his thoughts about impeachment. pic.twitter.com/mXlsG9SjbB

— Wolf Blitzer (@wolfblitzer) December 18, 2019

Elections are easier to win if you can put a thumb on the scale.

An appellate court dominated by conservative judges just ruled that a central provision of the Affordable Care Act—its mandate that all Americans obtain health insurance—is unconstitutional, a decision that could lead to Obamacare getting struck down in its entirety.

The two judges writing for the majority on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals held that the individual mandate, which the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 was a proper exercise of Congress’ power to levy taxes, no longer amounted to a tax. That’s because, as part of the GOP’s 2017 tax bill, the penalty for failing to purchase insurance was reduced to zero. As a result, said the court, that penalty could no longer be viewed as a tax because it could not bring in any revenue for the federal government and therefore had been rendered unconstitutional.

That ruling places the entire Affordable Care Act in jeopardy because of a legal doctrine known as “severability.” The plaintiffs in this case have argued that the individual mandate cannot be “severed” from the rest of the law, meaning that if the mandate is not constitutional, the law as a whole is not constitutional.

The majority (which includes one judge appointed by Donald Trump and another by George W. Bush) punted on this question, asking the trial court to investigate the matter further. However, that lower court already ruled that the mandate was non-severable, and could do so again.

The choice to defer ruling on this all-important issue could be a way for conservative jurists to avoid a final decision from the Supreme Court striking down Obamacare before next year’s election. Doing so would shield Republicans, including Trump, from attacks that they’ve blown up a law that has long enjoyed majority support. It could also allow the Supreme Court to wait until a possible second Trump term to issue the final word.

‘Tis the season! Loved ones are scrambling to complete last-minute shopping, children are singing their little hearts out in school holiday choirs, friends and co-workers are gathering around cheese plates, cookie trays, and the bar for after-work celebrations. It’s the time of year when we put our differences aside and rejoice in the holiday spirit together, right?

Well, it used to be. Now Donald Trump is president. And while he insists that he (and he alone) is responsible for people saying, “Merry Christmas” to one another (nobody ever stopped saying that this time of year), it seems the other messages of Christmas completely escape him. Case in point: his annual holiday card. It’s a time for an American president to send out a traditional greeting to supporters and his fellow public servants, including members of Congress. This year, he included a little something extra. 

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Thanks for this card & your 6 page impeachment screed. Bizarrely delivered together. Happy Holidays & best wishes for the coming year! pic.twitter.com/kUDektXMvt

— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) December 18, 2019

That’s right: Donald Trump included his bonkers six-page screed against his impending impeachment in his Christmas cards. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy confirmed that he also got the rant, along with, for whatever reason, a second, smaller Christmas card.

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True story: there is a White House staffer going around the Senate delivering to each office, as a package, the incoherent, scathing Pelosi letter AND...wait for it...a giant 16x12 White House Christmas card (along with, implausibly, a second smaller Christmas card).What a day. pic.twitter.com/y8gZuQbipl

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) December 18, 2019

And what is up with those matching signatures? In 2017, handwriting analyst Sheila Kurtz told Yahoo that Melania Trump’s signature has been “stylized” to match her husband’s. Kurtz said, “Maybe they brought someone in to show her how to do it or [it’s] a stamp, but it is definitely stylized.”

Anyway, Merry Impeachmas. Maybe next Christmas we can flood Donald Trump’s White House with bon voyage cards. And then break out the burning sage and the bleach to scrub that entire house clean. 

The political press corps may have hit peak impeachment failure on Sunday when Meet the Press host Chuck Todd introduced a segment in which voters from a toss-up district in Michigan were interviewed about the House proceedings against Donald Trump. Touted as a way to take the temperature of everyday voters outside of the "Beltway," the sit-down with six voters from Kent County, Michigan, offered a chance to hear from America's heartland and if its denizens "care" about impeachment. Except there was a slight problem: Every voter interviewed was a Republican, and every voter interviewed opposed impeachment. ("I don’t even care. It's just noise.")  

Even more stunning was the fact that the Michigan county highlighted by Meet the Press is represented in Congress by Justin Amash who made headlines earlier this year when he left the Republican Party because of Trump's corrupt behavior, and who has since come out in favor of impeachment. Yet network news producers looked at that backdrop, and the fact that 54% of Americans support impeachment according to the most recent Fox News poll, and thought the best approach would be to only ask Republican voters how they felt about impeachment?

If that doesn't pull back the curtain on today's coverage and how it's being told literally through the eyes of the Republican Party, I don't know what does. Wedded to the Republican narrative that impeachment has put Democrats back on their heels and is boosting Trump's standing, the press in recent weeks increasingly resembled a soft landing spot for GOP spin.

On Tuesday, when Trump released an incoherent, paranoid diatribe in the form of a petulant, hate-filled six-page letter in an attempt to answer his impeachment accusers, some observers likened the screed to a would-be Unabomber manifesto, only not as well-written. But the Beltway press? They scrambled to normalize Trump's appalling behavior, describing the shocking display of pity and lies as "resilient" and "fiery."

Meanwhile, the dominant theme in recent days—and it reads like it's straight from the Republican National Committee—is that Democrats from closely divided districts face a looming backlash if they vote to remove Trump from office. But there continues to be virtually no evidence to support that.

Keep in mind Democrats just won 40 House seats last year in what many observers saw as voters rewarding the party for vowing to stand up to Trump. Additionally, Republicans under Trump have lost control of the Virginia legislature, lost 435 state legislative seats nationwide while losing control of chambers in Colorado, New York, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Washington, and Maine, and lost the governor mansions in Louisiana and Kentucky. Yet the media narrative today regarding impeachment is that Democrats standing up to Trump are in danger of … upsetting voters? It doesn't make sense. But many journalists and news organizations have adopted that hollow “Democrats in Disarray” storyline.

Stressing "the quiet hand-wringing" that consumed Democratic leaders, The Washington Post last week insisted the party was "bracing" for Democratic defections when the articles of impeachment are soon voted on by the full House. The clear message was that the Democratic strategy was failing and might soon unravel as internal dissension set it, specifically among moderate Democrats who allegedly feared a voter backlash.

Yet in the end, it looks like one Democrat out of the party's House caucus of 233 members will vote no on impeachment. So much for the "bracing" for defections storyline, and how moderate Democrats were running scared. (Hint: The fact Trump publicly admitted to pressuring a foreign government to investigate his political foe has made the impeachment vote a pretty easy one for Democrats.) In an ironic twist, it turns out the only Democratic member of Congress who clearly faces a looming backlash back home over impeachment is Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, who has vowed to vote against removing Trump from office. After polling from his district showed Democratic voters furious over such a move, Van Drew is reportedly considering switching to the Republican Party.

And talk about viewing impeachment only through the eyes of Republicans: Last week The Washington Post published a long article on Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, examining what the political fallout from impeachment has been for the "moderate" Republican. To determine that answer, the article  quoted three Republican officials and zero Democrats. The article quoted Stefanik, but not her Democratic opponent. The Post also interviewed the owner of a local diner who had "set up a shrine to the president—complete with a framed portrait, Trump books and a Trump doll." And guess what? After hearing mostly from Republicans, the Post concluded that impeachment has been working out just fine for the Republican congresswoman. Funny how that works.

Even when reporting on Democrats and impeachment, the framing has consistently been through a Republican prism. "On Verge Of Impeachment Vote, First-Term, Moderate Democrats Weigh A Political Risk," read a recent NPR headline, the type of which has been reproduced by scores of news outlets in recent days and revolves around GOP spin: It's Democrats who find themselves in a bind over impeachment, not Republicans. (Keep in mind, it's a Republican president being impeached.)

By the way, one reason why journalists aren't profiling first-term Republicans from swing districts to examine what the impeachment vote will mean for them is because there virtually are none. Why? Because Republicans got wiped out in those districts in 2018. And why did they get wiped out, especially in the suburbs? Because Trump remains deeply unpopular. Yet against that backdrop, the media claims it's Democrats who are on the defensive?

Half the country supports removing Republican Trump, the most consistently unpopular president in American history, and the press scrambles to explain why that's a problem for Democrats. January will feature the impeachment trial in the Senate. That means journalists still have time to stop telling the impeachment story through the eyes of the GOP.

Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.

This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.

On Monday, American Family Association president Tim Wildmon and his anti-LGBTQ organization put out a press release announcing he was joining Trump’s faith advisory council, but the White House has “no idea what he’s talking about.”

Wrote AFA: “Headline after headline analyze the important role evangelical Christians played in President Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and continue to play in his presidency and his possible re-election in 2020. Now, American Family Association (AFA, www.afa.net) President Tim Wildmon has been named to President Trump’s faith advisory council, made up of key leaders who support and help guide the president’s faith-based initiatives, give insight on policy important to evangelicals and, most importantly, pray for the president.”

White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere told the Washington Blade on Wednesday: “I have no idea what he’s talking about. There is no such thing as a White House Faith Council or Advisory Board. There is a Faith & Opportunity Initiative led by an advisor, Pastor Paula White, but it does not include a council or advisory board.”

The post Anti-LGBTQ Extremist Tim Wildmon Says He’s Joined Trump’s Faith Advisory Council But White House Has ‘No Idea What He’s Talking About’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Get out your hankies, because this is your official sniffle alert. I mean, there is about to be some dust in the room when you read what White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham has to say about the effect of impeachment on the Trump family.

“His family has been hurt by this. Here you’ve got a family—Mrs. Trump—who has been working so hard on behalf of the children of this country.”

You know, the anti-bullying advocate who’s outraged if her son’s name is mentioned but is okay with her husband publicly attacking a teenage girl. Working so hard for the children! Of this country. Abusing the children of Sweden is fine.

“You’ve got Ivanka, who has been pushing relentlessly for paid child leave and women’s empowerment all over the world.”

Pushing for women’s empowerment while selling goods manufactured in international sweatshops and providing a smiling face to cover over her father’s sexual assault habits.

“And you’ve got Jared, who has been pushing for Middle East peace, for crying out loud.”

Get back to me when Jared succeeds at anything other than self-promotion, for crying out loud.

“You’ve got a whole family who have been working really hard on behalf of this country and who continue to be abused and demonized by the Democrats.”

A whole family, eh? What exactly are Don Jr. and Eric doing for the nation? Angry tweets and pretending to run the family business? AND WHAT ABOUT TIFFANY, for crying out loud? How come Tiffany isn’t getting any credit here?

“It’s just really unfortunate.”

So, so sad that these very wealthy people, some of whom occasionally pretend to try to do good works for the benefit of the nation, are being emotionally hurt by the attention on a few of the many crimes and abuses of power the family patriarch has been doing.

Hawaii aid workers (nurses) help out with MMR vaccinations on December 6, 2019 in Apia, Samoa. | Photo by Chikara Yoshida/Getty Images

This island nation saw 70 measles deaths so far this year, most in children under age 5.

2019 has been a terrible year for measles — and it’s unfortunately ending with a devastating outbreak in Samoa.

On October 16, the ministry of health in the tiny Pacific Island nation sent notice of a measles outbreak within its borders. A month later, the Samoan government declared a state of emergency over the rapidly spreading virus, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). By December 10, Samoa had counted 4,819 measles cases, including 70 measles-related deaths.

To put this into perspective, Samoa has a population of around 196,000. In the US, with more than 1,600 times the people, even in a very bad measles year, like 2019, the government recorded 1,200 measles cases.

In such a small country, almost everyone knows someone who has been affected, Sheldon Yett, UNICEF representative to the Pacific, told the BBC. “People are nervous, people are seeing the impact of this disease.” Most of the cases and deaths have occurred in small children, under the age of 5.

In response, Australia has been shipping child-size coffins to bury the dead. Schools across the island have had to shut down over the past couple of months, and public gatherings have been banned. The health system is strained trying to keep up with the onslaught of cases, and while there’s no tally on the cost of the outbreak, it’s sure to be huge.

So how did measles spiral out of control so quickly? It’s pretty simple: because not enough people were vaccinated.

The deaths of children from an improperly-mixed vaccine contributed to a plummet in the vaccine rate

According to the WHO, in 2018, the national rate of coverage for a single dose of the measles-containing vaccine was only 31 percent — a halving from about 60 percent in 2016.

That’s way too low for what’s known as herd immunity, or the percentage of people in a community that have to be vaccinated in order to keep the disease from spreading. With measles, around 95 percent of people need to be immunized in order to achieve herd immunity. That number is high because measles is so incredibly contagious; less transmissible diseases, such as polio, need a coverage rate of about 80 percent. This means Samoa has less than one-third of the necessary vaccine coverage rate.

The vaccine-related deaths of two children last July fueled skepticism about the measles shot. There wasn’t actually anything wrong with the vaccine. Instead, two nurses tainted the measles vaccine by mixing it with muscle relaxant instead of the required doses of water, and wound up in prison for manslaughter as a result, the Washington Post reported.

Still, the human error was interpreted by some as a systemic problem with the measles vaccine — a fear anti-vaccine activists seized upon to sow vaccine doubt.

“The anti-vaccine narrative took off — but there was another step there,” said Saad Omer, a vaccine researcher and director of Yale’s Institute for Global Health. At the time of the deaths, the government halted its measles vaccine campaign for 10 months while investigating the tragedy, against the advice of the WHO. “When you pause the program, it increases the number of [people susceptible to measles],” Omer added. So it’s no surprise, he added, that measles made inroads when the immunization rate plummeted.

Right now, a mass vaccination campaign is underway, and aid workers and measles experts from other countries, including the US, have traveled to the island to help.

Samoa is part of a broader trend

But what’s happening in Samoa is not an isolated case; it’s part of a broader trend. Measles vaccine rates have been stagnating globally while measles has surged around the world. In the first three months of 2019, there was a 300 percent rise in measles cases globally over the same period in 2018, according to the WHO. More than 140,000 people died from causes related to the virus in 2018, and cases have increased in all WHO regions since 2017.

The areas that have seen the biggest year-over-year surges include the African region (900%), the Western Pacific region (230%), and the European region (150%); the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Madagascar, Somalia, and Ukraine were among the countries most affected in 2018.

High-income countries have reported record measles cases, too. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced they’d counted the greatest number of measles cases in nearly three decades by May, and by October, America nearly lost its measles-free status. (That status is conferred on countries without continuous measles transmission for at least one year.) Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, Greece, and Brazil lost their measles elimination status recently.

The reasons for outbreaks differ in each country. In the US, the UK, and Samoa, vaccine refusal contributed to the uptick in measles cases. In other places, it’s a lack of access to immunizations or civil unrest. “Wherever there is war and conflict or political destabilization we also see the return of measles, which explains the situation in DR Congo,” said Peter Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

But it all adds up to a declining rate of vaccine coverage globally. And “policymakers have not really figured out a response,” Hotez added. He believes we’ll keep seeing more measles cases — from Samoa to the US. “In 2019, the WHO appropriately named vaccine hesitancy one of our top 10 global health threats. I’m afraid that will still be the case in 2020,” Hotez said. “I don’t see this trend improving any time soon.”

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism reports: An increasingly popular tactic challenges conventional wisdom on the spread of electoral disinformation: the creation of partisan outlets masquerading as local news organizations. An investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School has discovered at least 450 websites in a network of local and business news organizations, each distributing thousands of algorithmically generated articles and a smaller number of reported stories. Of the 450 sites we discovered, at least 189 were set up as local news networks across ten states within the last twelve months by an organization called Metric Media. Titles like the East Michigan News, Hickory Sun, and Grand Canyon Times have appeared on the web ahead of the 2020 election. These networks of sites can be used in a variety of ways: as 'stage setting' for events, focusing attention on issues such as voter fraud and energy pricing, providing the appearance of neutrality for partisan issues, or to gather data from users that can then be used for political targeting. On October 20, the Lansing State Journal first broke the story of the network's existence. About three dozen local news sites, owned by Metric Media, had appeared in Michigan. Further reporting by the Michigan Daily, the Guardian and the New York Times identified yet more sites. Ultimately, previous reporting has identified around 200 of these sites. Our analysis suggests that there are at least twice that number of publications across a number of related networks, of which Metric Media is just one component. Over a two-week period starting November 26, we tapped into the RSS feeds of these 189 Metric Media sites, all of which were we found that were created this year, and found over fifteen thousand unique stories had been published (over fifty thousand when aggregated across the sites), but only about a hundred titles had the bylines of human reporters. The rest cited automated services or press releases.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rep. Abigail Spanberger (R-VA) (L) and Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) are among the moderate Democrats voting in favor of the articles of impeachment. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“This is not something that you can do based on polls:” Moderate Democrats are wading into unknown electoral territory after impeachment.

Ahead of the House vote on impeachment, the 31 moderate Democrats who won seats in Trump districts face a difficult problem: explaining this vote to the cross-over Republican constituents who helped elect them in 2018.

Staring down this tough political reality a year out from their reelections, they say they’re planning to vote their conscience.

“To be honest with you, if this was a political calculation, then I wouldn’t have come out for the inquiry and I wouldn’t be voting ‘yes’ on articles,” first-term Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) told reporters. “This is not something that you can do based on polls.”

This has the only likely defectors — Rep. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, longtime Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, and first-term Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, who’s voting for one article, but not the other — out on a lonely impeachment island. Van Drew’s handling of this decision was so polarizing he is switching to the Republican Party, a change he’s expected to announce this week.

And while it’s perfectly normal for a handful of vulnerable lawmakers to defect from a party’s stance, there’s remarkably little sympathy in the Democratic caucus for Van Drew, a moderate from New Jersey’s Second Congressional District.

“He felt he had to find another home, because otherwise he’s finished,” Rep. Bill Pascrell, a longtime New Jersey Democrat told Vox, describing Van Drew’s move as misguided.

After coming out against impeachment in recent weeks, Van Drew quickly lost the support of regional Democrats, and privately signaled his intention to become a Republican this weekend rather than face a potentially tough primary and general election.

“He doesn’t have any chance to win as a Democrat or a Republican,” Pascrell said. “Politics is not where the wind blows. You’re in the wrong place if you think that’s what you’re all about.”

Van Drew’s so-called “frontline” colleagues in tough districts seem to agree. Almost all other moderate first-term Democrats have clearly come out for the articles of impeachment, even though some are well aware it could cost them their seat come November 2020.

“I know this might cost me my job, and that’s exactly why I did it,” Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) told Vox Tuesday. “I never imagined three years ago I’d be in this position, for gosh sakes. I can rest comfortably, and I’m not sure that can be said for all 433 members of this body right now.”

To be sure, making the tough choice to impeach Trump — even if it is a principled stance — also helps these Democrats avoid Van Drew’s fate: having their base abandon them or facing a tough primary before a difficult general election.

“He didn’t go into this thinking his vote on impeachment would cost him the support of his party. ... That turned out to be wrong,” said Cook Political Report House editor Dave Wasserman. “Other Democrats in similar districts are well aware a vote against impeachment could cost them more allies than could win them new friends.”

At this point, impeachment is a “no-win situation” for Democrats in Trump districts, Wasserman told Vox.

“They have no choice at this point but to hold hands and jump.”

Still, it’s worth noting that no one knows exactly how impeachment will play out in the polls in 2020, with multiple lawmakers citing this point as even more reason to vote on their principles.

As Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) told Vox, “Nobody here knows what the political impact will be and anybody who says they know is fooling themselves.”

Moderate Democrats are facing pressure both from their own base — and cross-over voters

The 2018 midterms were a wave election for Democrats; the party picked up seats in 31 particularly tough, redder districts that voted for Trump in 2016. It’s important to remember some of these districts are more conservative than others.

Van Drew’s New Jersey district, which covers a chunk of southern New Jersey and encompasses Atlantic City, is very conservative (Cook rated it R+8 ahead of the 2018 election). Van Drew won the open district last year in part because he was a former state legislator who was known for working with Republicans, and his Republican challenger had faced allegations of racism.

Peterson, the longtime Minnesota moderate, represents a conservative and agriculture-heavy part of his state. He’s held onto his seat so long in part because he’s known for bucking the Democratic Party. And even though Jared Golden’s Maine district voted reliably Democratic in presidential elections from 1992 to 2012, it went for Trump by 10 points in 2016. In other words, Democrats in all these districts will need to court the support of 2016 Trump voters in order to be reelected to the House in 2020. That could make a yes vote on impeachment particularly tricky.

“Democrats in Trump-won districts, particularly ones that he won by more than a few points, are likely going to need some crossover support from at least a handful of Trump voters next fall,” says Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball. “At the same time, almost all House Democrats, even those in competitive seats, are backing impeachment, in part because they probably think it’s the right thing to do and, politically, because they probably think opposition would cost them with their own base voters.”

Even among vulnerable Democrats in a tight spot, Van Drew’s decision to switch parties stands out. Peterson, the other moderate expected to vote against the articles, comes from a district Cook rates R+12 but marks reliably Democratic because the Congress member has held onto his seat for 15 terms. Peterson has also been approached by Republicans about switching parties, but he said he has no intention to do so.

“I said I was going to wait until I see everything and I haven’t seen everything yet,” he told reporters on impeachment, adding that his stance has been driven by his opposition to the “process.”

Moderate Democrats attempting to thread the needle on this subject overwhelmingly said their decisions are driven by the need to hold the president accountable.

“To me, this was outside of thinking about politics, it was really about ensuring I’m doing what I think is right for the country,” Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) said. “I think what I’m hearing most [from constituents] is ‘I just want you to approach this with integrity, to be thoughtful about it.’”

Sherrill flipped her northern New Jersey district, rated R+3 by Cook Political Report, in 2018.

Seven moderate first-term representatives known for their national security backgrounds, including Sherrill, first indicated that they were open to impeachment when they came out in favor of an inquiry via a Washington Post op-ed earlier this year. All representatives of battleground districts in 2018, they characterized the impeachment process as a Constitutional duty.

“We have sworn oaths to defend the Constitution of the United States many times over,” they wrote. “Now, we join as a unified group to uphold that oath as we enter uncharted waters and face unprecedented allegations against President Trump.”

And even as moderate lawmakers have had to juggle feedback from voters who oppose impeachment, an array of protests on Tuesday night also highlighted just how much support there is from others in favor of the process. These demonstrations underscored the many competing constituencies House members are continuing to navigate with their vote on Wednesday.

Pelosi has made moves to protect her caucus

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has taken several steps to protect her more vulnerable members since the impeachment inquiry got underway this fall.

Throughout December, she’s focused on advancing bipartisan legislation including a spending package, which could help provide many Democrats some cover when they return to their districts. Although this approach has been criticized for its potential to give Trump a win, it offers moderate Democrats in particular the ability to say they’ve made progress on legislation including a massive trade agreement and a landmark bill to reduce prescription drug prices, while they make moves on impeachment.

“For many of these folks, they want to go home and demonstrate that they can legislate and vote to impeach the president as well,” said Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and staffer under former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.

Malinowski said he’s confident the voters in his district are paying attention to the work that’s being done on policy in addition to impeachment. House Democrats have passed close to 400 bills this year alone, the vast majority of which are sitting untouched in the Senate.

“As long as the Democratic majority in the House is delivering on those issues, I’m confident voters in my district will not only tolerate but strongly support our determination to defend the rule of law,” Malinowski told Vox Tuesday. “I don’t know how this plays politically in the end, but I would not want to be someone in New Jersey politics running and defending the president’s misconduct and arguing we should give control of the House back to the people who screwed my state.”

The thing is, we don’t know how voters will react in 2020

For some time, House Democrats resisted any talk of impeachment because they were concerned it would hurt moderate members’ chances of reelection. Since this fall, however, the caucus has more fully embraced an inquiry and now a vote on the articles. It remains uncertain, though, how all of this will play out at the ballot box.

Despite the surveys that have been released about the impeachment inquiry, we really don’t know how voters will react in 2020. A FiveThirtyEight polling average shows that roughly 47 percent of Americans support impeaching the president while roughly the same proportion of voters do not.

Polling included in an internal October memo from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) found the margins of support for lawmakers backing impeachment to be tight in battleground districts. However, the closeness of these margins could also speak to how much opposition toward Trump has grown since the start of his presidency. Democrats will certainly put a lot of resources towards protecting their majority — and beyond running on their bipartisan accomplishments, they’ll hammer that impeachment was not a rushed decision, and that it was based on facts.

“I think the greatest protection all members will have is that they vote their conviction in the constitution, not their politics,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told Vox. “Republicans are going to pursue this as a political issue, they’ve made it about process ad nauseam, because they don’t want to talk about the facts.”

Also on the minds of lawmakers is the fact that polling only offers a snapshot of where voters currently stand on the subject, and that their views could change before next November. For some voters, too, impeachment may not wind up being the driving issue of their House vote. And even if the impeachment process fires up the Republican base, it’s very possible it could have a similar effect on the Democratic one, too.

As Rep. Cheri Bustos, the head of the DCCC, told reporters — there’s still plenty of time ahead of the election for Congress to work on other priorities, and for voters to make up their minds.

“In the end, you’ve got to be able to live with yourself,” Bustos said. “We’ve got 11 months until the election and that’s at least 11 political lifetimes away. There will be many important votes between now and then.”

What’s more, the electoral results following the past impeachment of President Bill Clinton don’t necessarily spell disaster for Democrats. After Clinton was impeached by the House in 1998, Republicans — who held the majority in the lower chamber — managed to keep it in the election that followed in 2000. In both 1998 and 2000, the GOP lost a number of House seats, but were still able to maintain a narrow edge on the Democrats.

It’s certainly possible that House Democrats are able to pull off the same this time around. Until the results are in, lawmakers say they’re sticking to their principles.

Daisy Ridley as Rey in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. | Disney

The new movie is a colossal failure of imagination.

No spoilers follow, but strong opinions do; proceed at your own risk.

Disney was preoccupied with two things in 2019. The first was growing even bigger as a company, a task it accomplished by acquiring 21st Century Fox’s TV and film assets. The second was embracing the notion that its future lies not in the innovation it was once known for, but in taking very safe bets that guarantee its coffers will continue to swell, both now and long into the future.

So that makes Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker a pretty perfect cap to Disney’s big year: It’s both glutted with plot points and embarrassingly cautious, precisely calculated to not to poke the hornet’s nest of detractors who popped up to voice their displeasure with The Last Jedi, with some complaining about how hallowed characters developed while others voiced more overtly racist and sexist concerns. I can’t read minds, but I think this movie is likely to please those fans.

For everyone else, though, The Rise of Skywalker falls somewhere between an overstuffed fan-service finale and a yawnfest. If The Force Awakens kicked off a new cycle in the franchise and The Last Jedi set it up to push beyond its familiar patterns, The Rise of Skywalker for the most part runs screaming in the other direction.

Odd, it is. The Jedi masters are always saying — including in this film — that a Jedi must be free of fear, that fear is the only enemy, that we must vanquish our fear in order to fulfill our destiny. The Rise of Skywalker emphasizes, specifically, that a Jedi cannot be afraid of her identity — which is to say, of her past or her future. But the fear is palpable in this one.

The Rise of Skywalker is a masterclass in capitulation

Again, no substantial spoilers follow, but if you’re especially averse, proceed at your own risk.

It’s best not to know too much going into a Star Wars movie, no matter what you think your opinion is going to be. So all I will say is that this one picks up not terribly long after the end of The Last Jedi. A broadcast from, well, a menacingly familiar voice has been picked up by whatever devices people in this universe use to pick up broadcasts. Kylo Ren (Adam Driver, this year’s hardest working man in Hollywood), having offed Snoke in the last movie, is now the Supreme Leader of the First Order and is running about the galaxy, looking for the voice’s source. Meanwhile, Rey (Daisy Ridley), with whom Kylo Ren shares some strong psychic connection, is training as a Jedi with Leia (the late Carrie Fisher, resurrected via repurposed footage and digital wizardry).

Resurrection is a weird little motif in The Rise of Skywalker, and maybe I should have expected that given the title. (And the fact that the first words on the iconic opening crawl are THE DEAD SPEAK!) All kinds of people are being resurrected through all kinds of means throughout the film, as memories and holograms and sort of reanimated zombie-like creatures. It turns out that nobody ever really dies anymore in this universe, a physical and metaphysical marvel driven by the need for fan service.

And while lots of things occur, very little actually happens. The movie is easier to talk about in terms of what doesn’t happen. The tease from the thrilling last scene of The Last Jedi, that the Force might be something more than just a handful of people in a couple of families can harness, is basically ignored. Nobody needs to learn anything anymore; scenes of learning through failure are kept to a minimum.

The least possible amount of character development happens (except in one oddly shallow case), mostly because the movie — which clocks in at about 2 hours and 20 minutes — is designed as a chain of successfully completed quests. The question of Rey’s parentage is resolved in an extremely boring way, making most of what happened around that question in the previous two movies totally pointless.

(What’s more, the dialogue is clunky, bad, and overly devoted to exposition — but at least that’s in keeping with most of the rest of franchise, and has become kind of endearing over the past 40 years.)

Disney

Perhaps most tellingly, Rose Tico, played by Kelly Marie Tran, who was trolled viscously by a toxic cohort of so-called Star Wars fans after The Last Jedi, is pushed to the margins of the main plot. Though she was a fairly central figure in The Last Jedi, she’s pointedly excluded in The Rise of Skywalker, especially relative to newly introduced characters. She was a welcome, spunky screen presence in the last film; in this one, the role could have been filled by anyone. It’s noticeable, and it’s hard not to think that choice is designed to avoid further angering those fans who harbor a racist vendetta against a movie that dares to cast an Asian woman in a co-starring role.

These choices and others I won’t reveal make it feel as if the film was written by committee — and, let’s be real, it probably was. (There are four credited screenwriters, including director J.J. Abrams and Jurassic World’s Colin Trevorrow, who was slated to direct this installment and then fired.) It has a lot of lightsaber battles, but it lacks humor, the thrilling reveals of The Force Awakens, and the visual imagination of The Last Jedi. Moments are emphatically teased (particularly one between Finn and Rey) and then never resolved, presumably so that they can be mined for fan service in some future comic book or TV show.

It’s just such a bummer of a movie.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker has nothing new to say — and seems proud of that

If I sound exhausted, it’s honestly because I am. Is this what audiences demand from franchise movies? Films that cater to what’s comfortable and capitulates to the most unimaginative fans? That feel as if they’re just ticking boxes on a checklist? You could say I’m taking this too seriously, but I think a series as important to movies — and to millions of people — as Star Wars deserves to be taken seriously.

Disney

I could say some other stuff about The Rise of Skywalker. About its insistence on a morally simple universe where you’re either dark or light, but you only get to be on one side. About its continued mixing of gnostic and biblical imagery, but without a lot to say about either. About how it could have said something intriguing about our contemporary culture, power, or empires, but just doggedly insists on broadcasting the same two messages that Disney movies fall back on time and time again: first, that you have to believe in yourself, and second, that the real Force was the friends we made along the way.

But The Rise of Skywalker isn’t good enough to earn that kind of discourse. Some day Disney may return to its roots and start innovating again. But it seems clear, at the end of a long 2019, that it has no interest in doing so anytime soon — least of all in arguably the most innovative of the properties it owns, the Star Wars series, which blew a hole in Hollywood when it premiered four decades ago.

Good thing they’re not making any more, huh?

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker opens in theaters on December 19.

CaptainDork shares a report from NewsBTC: Bitcoin lost billions of dollars worth of valuation within a 30-minutes timeframe as a Chinese cryptocurrency scammer allegedly liquidated its steal via over-the-counter markets. The initial sell-off by PlusToken caused a domino effect, causing mass liquidations. PlusToken, a fraud scheme that duped investors of more than $2 billion, dumped huge bitcoin stockpiles from its anonymous accounts, according to Chainalysis. The New York-based blockchain consultancy cited an internal investigation that showed PlusToken scammers on a systematic crypto liquidation spree. Some of them have been actively selling bitcoin since June -- right after the cryptocurrency established a year-to-date high of circa $14,000. According to Chainalysis, PlusToken had cashed out at least $185 million worth of bitcoin via OTC desks. "We can say that those cashouts increased volatility in Bitcoin's price and that they correlate significantly with Bitcoin price drops," says Chainalysis. "Chainalysis's study shows that the entity still holds a massive stash of bitcoin that it might liquidate at a later stage," adds NewsBTC. "That raises the prospects of more price crashes unless there is an adequate demand to match the scammer's supply flow."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The president's unabashed lawlessness will continue. He just told us so himself.

On this day of righteous fury — the nation’s second presidential impeachment in 21 years — I have a special request.

I want to hear from someone, anyone, who meets two standards. One, this person is a supporter of Donald Trump and his Republican backers in Congress who believes the impeachment proceeding is illegitimate and unfair. Two, this person is ready in good faith to convince me that he or she would also oppose impeachment and believe the whole matter to be terribly unfair if the facts in the Ukraine matter were exactly the same in every respect but these: That Hillary Clinton was in the White House and she had asked a foreign leader to investigate her potential GOP opponent in the 2020 reelection.

Does such a person exist? I have my doubts, but my standards for the search are lenient. You do not need to convince me of the merits of your position as a matter of politics or law or constitutional theory. You only need to convince me that you genuinely believe what you are saying and can credibly defend it. It will help, for instance, if you can point to previous examples when you took positions on matters of principle that happened to conflict with your own partisan preferences.

If so, send an email to an account, explain@politico.com, that we have set up in a spirit of curiosity, not judgment, to understand how people take the positions they do on impeachment without cracking up. There may be little suspense in this constitutional drama — a House impeachment Wednesday, a Senate acquittal sometime over the next month or so — but we might as well use the occasion to learn about the workings of the political mind. Not just your mind, but mine, too.

As it happens, I do worry about my own crack up. I hold two beliefs that have been fortified by a quarter-century covering Washington ideological and partisan conflict. These two things are not necessarily in outright contradiction, but they certainly rest uneasily with each other.

Belief One: There is simply no credible way — if one cares remotely about logic or philosophical consistency — that a person could be sufficiently troubled by Bill Clinton’s 1998 sex scandal and the false and misleading statements he made in public and under oath about it to advocate his removal from office and ALSO not be troubled by Trump’s conduct in the Ukraine matter or think that Democrats are horribly out of bounds in demanding accountability.

Belief Two: Most people are quick to spot hypocrisy and double standards all around them but very few people regard themselves as hypocrites on political matters. Most politicians will, on background, wink or sigh or make self-deprecating cracks about having to hold their nose about this or that expedient vote, or bob and weave around some awkward subject. But even in those instances the politicians — just like their supporters at home — will believe they are acting with some ends-justifying purpose. They regard themselves not as unprincipled but as righteous, acting on behalf of a larger truth.

So what exactly is that truth? Again, please, send an email and let me know if you are willing to be quoted by name. I’m not asking people who wanted to evict Bill Clinton from office but indignantly defend Trump against impeachment to justify themselves to me. I’m asking, earnestly, how they justify it to themselves. I’d note that most Republicans — at Trump’s insistence — aren’t saying his conduct was troubling but not impeachable. That was the Democratic defense of Bill Clinton. Most are staying quiet (on the record; there is some background chatter) about what they think of Trump’s behavior. Or they are joining him in saying the way he leaned on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation of the Biden family was an affirmatively good thing.

One consequence of the Trump years is that it has knocked conservatives off a high horse that they had been riding since the Reagan era. Ideas matter, they said triumphantly, drawing a contrast with the supposedly transactional, spoils-based nature of Democratic politicians and the interest groups they relied on. Another favorite: denunciations of moral relativism, a way of justifying any kind of selfish behavior, when in fact right and wrong are absolutes.

For Trump supporters — who back the president even as he regularly shreds once-sacred conservative principles and constantly calibrates his own positions in pursuit of “deals” — ideas matter less than psychology. They like him because he somehow fits visceral notions of how purportedly strong leaders should act. As for moral relativism, it is the essence of Trump politics, as any questioning of his conduct is met with what-about-ism invoking the motives or alleged misdeeds of his opponents, or maintaining that he is simply acting with self-interest that any politician would and it is naïve to expect differently.

This brand of politics sometimes gets described as “tribalism.” That’s an explanation that doesn’t actually explain much, for three reasons:

— It arguably describes broad patterns of group behavior but doesn’t illuminate how this works at the individual level, which is what interests me most. I’ve never interviewed a politician or an ordinary voter who says, “I don’t worry about consistency or even thinking for myself — I just follow whatever my tribe tells me to do.”

— It doesn’t do much to explain why Trump has earned the uncritical support of the tribe. As a native New Yorker whose wealth makes him a “coastal elite,” there are few surface details of his life that he shares in common with his strongest supporters. Sure, maybe they like his views on immigration or believe he is sympathetic to their views in ways more conventional politicians are not. But even a star quarterback gets booed by hometown fans if playing poorly. Logically, wouldn’t tribalists be angry at their leader for embarrassing the tribe through impeachment?

— Finally, I’m not drawn much to a term that is so distancing, and assigns primitive motivations only to people whose views are out of step with one’s own. I’ll be interested in hearing from someone tell me about tribalism to explain the behavior of Trump backers if they would add, “I am influenced by the same phenomenon — here are some of the ways my own political views aren’t strictly logical or principled but are distorted by my group identity.”

At some level, everyone thinks their own views flow from principle and reason rather than some combination of psychology and prejudice. A few years back, an academic and social theorist, Jonathan Haidt, had a bestseller, “The Righteous Mind,” arguing that everyone’s concepts of morality are shaped intuitively, and at a young age. Cognitive rationalization — how warring sides in politics and culture view each other not just with contempt but mutual incomprehension.

Let’s use the Trump impeachment to whittle away at incomprehension. In the George W. Bush years, comedian Stephen Colbert mocked partisans with his concept of “truthiness,” something that feels good to imagine as true no matter the actual facts or logic. In the present circumstances — at least for starters — I’d be perfectly content to understand people at the level of truthiness: Make the case for the basic integrity, for the righteousness, of your position.

Trump defenders may say in backing their president against partisan inquisitors they are just doing what Clinton defenders did. But that’s not much of a defense, since Republicans were incredulous and sharply critical of what Democrats did back then.

“There is a certain satisfaction,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of Napoleon, “in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.”

Two possibilities: Emerson was wrong, or we aren’t yet at the lowest ground. Maybe by the time the Trump impeachment drama is over we will get there, and find out what people really think.

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

Congress was all set to do something bipartisan to help people in Puerto Rico … and then Donald Trump got wind of it and insisted it dial it back.

Republicans and Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Finance Committee had negotiated $12 billion in Medicaid funding over four years for Puerto Rico as part of the government spending package that must pass this week to avoid a government shutdown. Politico reports, though, that Trump wasn’t having it. Over the weekend he said that was too much—for Puerto Rico, anyway, which he clearly doesn’t believe is really part of the United States—and forced Congress to cut the aid down to two years and $5.7 billion.

According to a White House spokesperson, it’s a “win for President Trump and the American people.” Because, again, Trump doesn’t believe that Puerto Ricans count as part of the American people, despite their citizenship. In reality, the effect is that, “With another funding cliff looming in two years under the new agreement, Puerto Rico may continue to lack the certainty it needs to commit to long-term increases of its very low payment rates to health care providers to stem their alarming exodus to the mainland, to provide coverage for such key health treatments as drugs to treat Hepatitis C, and to cover more poor, uninsured residents,” according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Robert Greenstein.

By contrast, Trump's farm bailout has hit $28 billion.

Pick up the new comics anthology I’m putting out, Be Gay, Do Comics: Queer History, Memoir, and Satire from The Nib. 250 pages of comics available through Kickstarter

Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan continues to play both sides of the NATO fence. Now he's once again (yes, again) threatening to close two key U.S. airbases in his nation. This time it's over the successful, bipartisan vote in the U.S. Senate to recognize the 1915 Armenian genocide.

On Sunday, Erdoğan told an interviewer that "if necessary, we may close Incirlik and Kurecik." This has been an ongoing threat, deployed last when the non-Trump portions of the United States government expressed outrage over Turkey's invasion of Kurdish-held Syrian lands. Both bases are important for U.S. operations in the Middle East and for NATO missile defense; Erdoğan, however, may prefer the U.S. have less visibility into what happens on the Turkish-Syrian border. He also appears to be inching toward the notion that he may have more freedom to govern Turkey in the manner he sees fit by forging new ties to Russia, whose oligarchic leader has absolutely no issue with state corruption, advantageous invasions, or the more-than-occasional state murder, rather than suffer through the complaints of NATO allies.

More likely, however, it's just the usual chest-thumping for the home crowd and warning to U.S. lawmakers that they had better treat him with the unadorned respect that Donald Trump does. All Erdoğan needs to do to keep Trump in line is remind Trump of his business interests, and how Trump wouldn't want something to happen to them; this is the same play, but with nuclear weapons.

As with many things that have dissolved in the Trump era, it's not clear that the U.S.-Turkey relationship will return to something less ... stupid ... after our own Dear Leader retires to his Florida club. It is possible that a less obsequious, fawning and compliant U.S. leader would have been able to put Erdoğan's worst impulses more in check, or at the very least not betray American military allies on Erdogan's personal request. But it's also possible Erdoğan intends to put Turkey on an authoritarian path that he expects will result from a full break from NATO sooner or later; he's certainly not getting much pushback on that notion from the current clown.

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Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign omitted more than 20 high-level fundraisers from a list of top bundlers it disclosed last week.

The public list of bundlers, featuring more than 100 people who have raised at least $25,000 for Buttigieg, was meant to bring a close to more than a week of feuding between Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren over campaign transparency. But the list left off a number of people the Buttigieg campaign had previously touted as top donors in an internal campaign fundraising report obtained by POLITICO.

They include uberwealthy supporters such as Boston power broker Jack Connors Jr. — who declared he was “all in for Pete Buttigieg” in a June fundraiser invite — and Hollywood producer Jordan Horowitz, whose films include "La La Land." Buttigieg also omitted hedge fund investor John Petry; William Rahm, senior managing director at the private equity firm Centerbridge Partners; Nicole Avant, the former U.S. ambassador to the Bahamas; and former U.S. Ambassador to Italy John Phillips. The latter two were also major Obama donors.

Candidates voluntarily disclose bundlers to signal forthrightness and allay concerns about conflicts of interest, and lists of bundlers — people who are frequently rewarded with ambassadorships and nominations to other administration posts — offer important windows into the high-powered networks that support candidates like Buttigieg.

In a statement, the Buttigieg campaign said it had made an error and would update its public list of campaign bundlers “to include an accurate accounting.”

The campaign said the error happened as it tallied the total amount of money the bundlers had raised.

“In creating this updated list, we went through to recalculate totals from the earlier list to make sure we were being accurate,” campaign spokesman Chris Meagher said in a statement. Some people who had been previously disclosed in a document to donors were “inadvertently” not listed again in the disclosure Friday, Meagher continued.

But critics — who have already been wary of the Buttigieg campaign’s approach to transparency — said Buttigieg’s campaign has not been as forthcoming with information as it claims.

“Producing data four days after they were asked for it with obvious omissions, that is sketchy,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, which scrutinizes executive branch appointees, and a frequent Buttigieg critic. “The first time I saw this list, I said, 'There is no way this is comprehensive.' It’s just kind of mind-blowing that they would be this dishonest.”

Buttigieg is the only major current candidate who has disclosed campaign bundlers. Kamala Harris disclosed her bundlers before she ended her bid, while Bernie Sanders and Warren do not attend big-money private fundraisers. But other 2020 rivals — including Joe Biden, who has been frequenting the big-donor circuit — are not revealing their bundlers, though there is a tradition of both Democratic and Republican candidates doing so. President Donald Trump has also not revealed his top fundraisers.

While Buttigieg published a list of bundlers on his website last week, the campaign privately circulated the names of people in its “Investors Circle” — fundraisers who had raised at least $25,000 — in a finance update this summer. The 20 people and couples on that document who weren’t on Buttigieg’s public bundler list last week are: Andrew Tobias ofNew York; Barbara and Rodge Cohen of Irvington, N.Y.; David Winter of New York; Didem Nisanci of Washington; Eli Cohen of Chevy Chase, Md.; Eric Schieber of Chicago; Freddy Balsera of Miami; Genevieve and Robert Lynch of New York; Hamilton South of Cornwall, Conn.; Jack Connors of Boston; John Petry of New York; John Phillips of Washington; Jordan Horowitz of Los Angeles; Kelly Bavor of Atherton, Calif.; Kyle Keyser of Atlanta; Nicole Avant of Los Angeles; Stephen Patton of Chicago; Ted Dintersmith of Charleston, S.C.; Tom Gearen of Chicago; and William Rahm of New York.

Buttigieg has combined the power of low-dollar online fundraising and big events with wealthy supporters to become one of the most successful fundraisers in the Democratic field. He has raised $51 million in his bid for president as of Sept. 30, the most recent fundraising deadline, with 47 percent of the contributions coming from donors who gave less than $200.

But as Buttigieg’s poll numbers have risen in Iowa and New Hampshire, critics on the left are accusing the South Bend, Ind., mayor of failing to live up to Democratic Party ideals. Protesters picketed outside a Buttigieg fundraiser in New York last week, chanting “Wall Street Pete.” Warren, who is competing with Buttigieg for the top spot in February's Iowa caucuses, has been particularly critical, calling out Buttigieg for offering donors “regular phone calls and special access.”

Buttigieg recently began allowing media access to his campaign fundraisers in response to some of that criticism.

Buttigieg, who like other candidates is racing to bank millions of dollars to spend on television and field staff in Iowa and other early voting states, has continued hitting high-dollar fundraisers at breakneck speed between his campaign stops. On Monday morning, the families of several of Silicon Valley’s biggest executives — including spouses and relatives of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg — assembled in Palo Alto, Calif., for an event supporting Buttigieg.

The night before, Buttigieg was in Napa Valley, where Buttigieg and donors dined under a chandelier adorned with 1,500 Swarovski crystals in cavernous room known as a “wine cave.” “Needless to say, we will never have a fundraiser at a wine cave,” Sanders' campaign wrote Monday in a fundraising email to supporters.

Speaking to the crowd in Napa, Buttigieg urged his donors to redouble their work.

“I’m asking to you to work to share whatever it is that brought you here to those that may have gotten a little more cynical about the whole thing,” Buttigieg told the donors. “If we do that, as bleak as things are in our country circa December 2019, my hope and my faith is that, in a few years, we’ll be able to look back on 2020 with pride."

Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

As spotted by MSPoweruser, Microsoft has started showing non-removable banner ads in the Windows 10 Mail and Calendar apps. From the report: We last saw these ads in November last year, when Microsoft said they were an experiment. Then the ads only showed for those who were not Office 365 subscribers, but on this occasion, they are present for everyone and appear non-removable. The ads are not fixed -- when you read your Gmail if offers to let you read your Gmail on mobile, and for Outlook.com accounts it offers the Outlook app for mobile. Most annoyingly, the ads are still present, even if you use the Outlook app on mobile, and take up considerable vertical space in the menu. Microsoft said in a statement: "The ads within the app itself will be displayed regardless of which email address you use it with. It is not removable, but you can submit it as a suggestion within the Feedback Hub on Windows 10 here: https://msft.it/6012TVPXG."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Will Collins side with Mitch McConnell and Trump against truth and transparency?

On Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump released on White House stationary the kind of statement that might be expected from a 3-year-old on the floor of the cereal aisle. In a six-page letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Trump demonstrated that the bounds of Twitter just are not bigly enough to support his hissy-fit of fury. And by doing so, he made it that much harder for Republicans in the Senate to dismiss the articles of impeachment with a hasty application of Mitch McConnell’s gavel.

Over the last two weeks, Trump’s already massive Twitter habit seemed to be heading for a climax, with triple-digit excess becoming a daily occurrence. Then Trump started exceeding 100 tweets before lunchtime. If that kind of behavior leads to an OD, this letter appears to be it—because it appears that Trump got out a glue stick and stuck together, in no particular order, every angry tweet he’s made since the impeachment report rolled out of the Intelligence Committee.

In the letter, Trump attacks Pelosi for saying that she prays for him. Trump calls Pelosi a liar, unless, he says, she prays “in a negative sense.” 

The letter continues Trump’s attack on Joe Biden, in denial of the facts, by simply stating the conspiracy theory he pressed on Ukraine as if it is fact. It then accuses Democrats of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and “Impeachment Fever,” while throwing out a massive list of adjectives and utilizing Random Capitalization wherever he wants.

And then it just lies, points fingers, and kind of screams in print. It’s like a Trump rally committed to paper. Only less coherent.

In a book released on the eve of the 2016 election called “Asymmetric Politics,” political scientists Matthew Grossmann and David Hopkins argued that America’s political parties don’t just have different ideologies, but are really different kinds of organizations. “Republicans are organized around broad symbolic principles, whereas Democrats are a coalition of social groups with particular policy concerns,” the authors concluded.

I don’t want to treat that book as gospel, but it speaks to a certain understanding that has existed throughout my 17 years covering national politics. Democrats have been considered the party of Asian, black, gay, Jewish and Latino people, along with atheists, teachers, union members, etc. — in short, a coalition organized around a bunch of different identity groups. Meanwhile, Republicans have been thought of as the party of small government, low taxes, a strong national defense and “traditional” moral values — in short, a coalition based around a few core ideological principles.

That has always been a fairly simplistic view of the parties. (And Grossmann and Hopkins’s book is much more nuanced.) But as an easy rubric to understand the two parties it worked. It still does, to some extent. But less and less so.

The two big stories happening right now in American politics — the 2020 Democratic primary and impeachment — show both parties being reshaped in ways that break with that asymmetry: The GOP is becoming increasingly organized around identity groups, and Democrats are becoming increasingly ideological.

Let me start with the Republicans.²⁸

With Republicans on Capitol Hill strongly defending President Trump amid the Ukraine scandal, you might say that the GOP has simply abandoned many of its principles in deference to Trump. Maybe. But I think the more accurate story is that Republicans on Capitol Hill are standing firmly behind Trump because GOP voters and GOP activists and elites are demanding that they do so. There just isn’t much room to break with the president of your party if close to 90 percent of voters in the party approve of him and many of those voters get their news from sources strongly supportive of that president.

Why are Republican voters and elites so strongly aligned with Trump? There’s not a simple answer, but I think identity — rather than ideology — is a big part of it. Trump is defending the identities of people who align themselves with the GOP, and this is a more powerful connection and reason to back him than pure ideological concerns. In defending Trump, conservative voters are really defending themselves.

No party ever governs strictly on ideology, but some of the breaks with conservative orthodoxy in the Trump era are notable.

If you think of the GOP as being broadly wary of government intervention into the economy, it’s been striking to watch the Trump administration try very hard to prop up the coal industry — even as the rise of natural gas and other alternative fuel sources have reduced the need for coal. The administration’s limits on travel from certain countries and cuts in the number of refugees who are entering the U.S. have affected Muslims most, suggesting that the GOP’s long-championing of religious freedom is now really just about defending the values of Christian and Jewish people. On trade policy, Trump imposed tariffs on China and other nations, and after those nations retaliated by making it harder for U.S. farmers to sell their goods abroad, the administration gave direct financial aid to farmers.

The Republican Party has traditionally favored few tariffs, limited government intervention in the economy and not giving government money directly to people in lieu of them earning it through work. Its recent actions seem out of character for a party organized around a particular ideology.

But if you think of the GOP as being organized around identity groups, these policies hang together quite well. The clear beneficiaries of the Trump administration’s actions have been businesses and corporations whose leaders back the president (such as those in the coal industry), conservative Christians, farmers, gun rights enthusiasts, people wary of increases in the number of foreign-born Americans and Islam, people wary of movements like Black Lives Matter and MeToo, pro-Israel activists and residents of rural areas.

Of course, I’m not the first person to notice any of this. The journalist Ron Brownstein refers to the GOP as the “coalition of restoration,” trying to fight against a “coalition of transformation” led by Democrats. Robert Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute, has described Trump as the defender of a “white Christian America” that sees itself in decline. In a recent speech, Attorney General Willam Barr praised the “Judeo-Christian values that have made this country great” and warned that “irreligion and secular values are being forced on people of faith.” All three of those formulations describe a complicated mix of identity and ideology.

“Some values and preferences that were always there, like racial resentment, rural resentment, nationalism, are being amplified and others, like free markets, are being diminished,” Hans Noel, a scholar on political parties who teaches at Georgetown University, told me.

“Allegiance to Trump is becoming more important to what it means to be conservative,” he added, “But post-Trump, that change may persist, with a conservatism that is more populist and nationalist.”

You might argue that this was always the Republican Party — that the GOP of Ronald Reagan and the two Bush presidents was similarly organized around conservative identity groups and not ideology. Perhaps the Bushes downplayed that dynamic for electoral reasons and to be “politically correct,” and therefore presented themselves as, say, more liberal on racial issues than the party’s base voters really wanted. Maybe Trump has simply stripped away the artifice. And you could certainly also argue that the Trump administration, particularly its aggressive push to reduce the number of people on Medicaid, is quite ideologically conservative on many issues.

Notably, Hopkins mostly disagrees with me, arguing that there have been some shifts in the Trump era but that the GOP has not fundamentally changed.

“His racial appeals are more common, more central and more overt, and he is more likely than most Republicans to simply be misleading or dishonest about what his policies are,” he told me. “But his appeals to patriotism, nationalism and nostalgia for an idealized past are very much in line with traditional conservative rhetoric, and he increasingly speaks the language of small government and capitalism.”

I think those arguments have merit. I don’t think that the Republican Party has abandoned ideology in favor of identity completely. But it does seem like identity is playing a bigger and clearer role than it did a decade ago.

Let’s move to the Democrats. Polling shows that a rising number of Democrats view themselves as liberal — now half of the party, compared to less than a third in the early 2000s. Democratic voters are increasingly likely to support liberal positions such as allowing more immigrants into the country and the government playing a role in helping Americans pay for their health care.

But the shift among Democrats is even more evident among activists and elites. Groups like Black Lives Matter, Demand Justice, the Sunrise Movement, Planned Parenthood and the newly-revived Poor People’s Campaign are pushing the Democratic Party in a more ideological direction. That ideology is perhaps best defined by a push for equality across a lot of realms — and particularly around ethnicity and race, gender, income, sexual orientation and wealth.

I think this is why Kamala Harris struggled to win the support of young, liberal black Democratic activists in her presidential run. She often tried to connect with them on identity (as a woman of color), but many of them were more interested in Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who both made taking strong stands on racial and wealth inequality central to their candidacies.

“What makes the Green New Deal notable is that it’s a solution to climate change on explicitly social-democratic grounds,” said Daniel Schlozman, an expert on parties who teaches at Johns Hopkins University. He was referring to the fact that the Green New Deal is an environmental proposal but also includes liberal goals like guaranteeing all Americans a job and the ability to join a labor union.

I don’t want to overstate this shift, which I think is largely about party activists and a certain bloc of the party’s elected officials, including Sanders and Warren. You might argue both that Democrats have long been obsessed with equality and that the party still functions effectively as a bunch of different groups joined together. And it’s worth noting that about half of Democratic voters identify as “moderate” or “conservative,” not “liberal.” Another reason to be cautious about the idea that Democrats are more ideological than ever is that the leader in the national polls in the Democratic primary, Joe Biden, is running much more as a coalition-style candidate than an ideologically driven one. He seems to be trying to capture the nomination by combining the support of blacks, Catholics, liberals, moderates, Latinos, union members and whites, as opposed to running as an explicitly moderate or liberal candidate.

“I think there’s a ways yet to go before the trends we see add up to a fundamentally ideological Democratic Party,” said Hopkins. But he added, “Sanders and Warren are trying to redefine the party, and there’s a chance they or their political descendants could succeed in the future.”

Indeed, I think the party is changing, even if it has not fully changed. There has been a huge shift over the last five years by the Democratic Party’s officials, activists and even its voters in terms of viewing racial inequality as being principally about societal problems like racism (rather than shortcomings in effort by black people). A greater focus on gender equality in the party has forced Democrats like Biden to cast aside support for limits on abortions that some of these pols had embraced in the past. Biden often criticizes the rising left wing in his party, but the former vice president’s actual campaign positions are solidly liberal — he’s against the death penalty, and supports allowing federal funding to be used for abortions, expanding Medicare to many more Americans, free community college, and decriminalizing marijuana. In many ways, Biden (and Pete Buttigieg) are essentially conceding to the rising power of the ideological left and simply offering a milder version of its ideas than Sanders and Warren.

Why do these party changes matter? First, they explain why fights between the elites and activists within both parties are so intense. Never-Trump Republicans such as Bill Kristol deeply believe they are defending the true Republican Party. Old-style Democrats such as Biden think they are defending the true Democratic Party. Secondly, these shifts explain why some seemingly-on-the rise politicians are struggling. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan was trying to find some middle course between the more ideologically conservative old-style GOP and the more identity-driven Trump version and just couldn’t. I think Harris tried both to connect with the rising activists in her party and the more traditional folks and managed to excite neither group.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, these shifts matter because America is to some extent in a partisan civil war, and we essentially have three competing views on how to end it: A Biden/Bush/Kristol style approach that downplays divisions among America’s various identity groups and reaches for more compromises; a Sanders/Warren approach of resetting America along more equal lines; and a Trump/Barr vision that is decidedly Judeo-Christian and favors maintaining traditional norms over upsetting them to expand equality.