Institutional decay

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A good read, how the Conservative counterrevolution started. Not quite all in on delegitimizing all institutions, but create alternative ones.

Henry Regnery flipped through his notes a final time as he waited for the rest of the group to arrive. In a few minutes Room 2233 in New York City’s Lincoln Building would be packed with some of the brightest lights of the conservative movement, gathered together at his request. Writers, publishers, and editors made up most of the guest list, including William F. Buckley Jr., the enfant terrible of the right; Frank Hanighen, cofounder of Human Events; Raymond Moley, Newsweek columnist and author of the anti–New Deal book After Seven Years (1939); and John Chamberlain, former editor of the Freeman and an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal. When everyone was settled, Regnery explained why he had called the meeting. As 1953 came to a close, he observed the men in Room 2233 were unquestionably on the losing side of politics. And that puzzled him. “The side we represent controls most of the wealth in this country,” he told those gathered. “The ideas and traditions we believe in are those which most Americans instinctively believe in also.” Why then was liberalism ascendant and conservatism relegated to the fringes? Because, Regnery argued, the left controlled institutions: the media, the universities, the foreign policy establishment. Until the right had a “counterintelligence unit” that could fight back, conservatives would remain a group of elites raging against a system that by all rights they should control.

The Birth of Conservative Media as We Know It | New Republic

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Even Rubio is getting fed-up with this. What does that tell you?

On Tuesday, Congress’ latest effort to fund Zika prevention efforts went down in flames after Republicans added a rider blocking Planned Parenthood from receiving Zika-related funding. The bill, which failed on a party line vote in the Senate — the Republican majority needed 60 votes to advance it — represents Congress’ third failure to pass a Zika funding package this year. It came on the same day that seven new locally-transmitted Zika cases were reported in Florida, ABC News reports. Late last month, Centers for Disease Control Director Tom Frieden told reporters that additional funding was desperately needed. “Basically, we’re out of money, and we need Congress to act to allow us to respond effectively,” Frieden said, adding that the CDC had spent about $200 million of the $222 million allocated for domestic Zika prevention this year, according to a Washington Post report.

Even staunch anti-choicer Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) said he opposed the strategy of including a Planned Parenthood poison pill, which prompted Democrats to reject the bill. “My interest is getting the funding, so if [removing the Planned Parenthood lanaguage is] the fastest way to get the funding, I support it,” Rubio told the Hill, though he added that he thinks Democrats are exaggerating the importance of the provision.

Even Marco Rubio Is Getting Tired Of Republicans Blocking Zika Funding

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Very much aligned with what we were arguing in this thread, The Economist on 'post-truth' political discourse:

In 1986 Ronald Reagan insisted that his administration did not trade weapons for hostages with Iran, before having to admit a few months later that: “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.”

It is thus tempting to dismiss the idea of “post-truth” political discourse—the term was first used by David Roberts, then a blogger on an environmentalist website, Grist—as a modish myth invented by de-haut-en-bas liberals and sore losers ignorant of how dirty a business politics has always been. But that would be complacent.

There is a strong case that, in America and elsewhere, there is a shift towards a politics in which feelings trump facts more freely and with less resistance than used to be the case. Helped by new technology, a deluge of facts and a public much less given to trust than once it was, some politicians are getting away with a new depth and pervasiveness of falsehood. If this continues, the power of truth as a tool for solving society’s problems could be lastingly reduced.

Reagan’s words point to an important aspect of what has changed. Political lies used to imply that there was a truth—one that had to be prevented from coming out. Evidence, consistency and scholarship had political power. Today a growing number of politicians and pundits simply no longer care.

They are content with what Stephen Colbert, an American comedian, calls “truthiness”: ideas which “feel right” or “should be true”. They deal in insinuation (“A lot of people are saying...” is one of Mr Trump’s favourite phrases) and question the provenance, rather than accuracy, of anything that goes against them (“They would say that, wouldn’t they?”). And when the distance between what feels true and what the facts say grows too great, it can always be bridged with a handy conspiracy theory.

Given such biases, it is somewhat surprising that people can ever agree on facts, particularly in politics. But many societies have developed institutions which allow some level of consensus over what is true: schools, science, the legal system, the media. This truth-producing infrastructure, though, is never close to perfect: it can establish as truth things for which there is little or no evidence; it is constantly prey to abuse by those to whom it grants privileges; and, crucially, it is slow to build but may be quick to break.

Yes, I’d lie to you | The Economist

It's exactly that 'truth-producing infrastructure that we're defending here, it's not perfect, but it's much better than any alternative. Without it, there is just opinion and interests, often hidden and masquerading as opinion...

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Delegitimizing some more..

Donald Trump's campaign website implores voters to "Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!" by signing up as observers. He warned people at an August 12 campaign event in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that Clinton could win the state only by cheating, and he asked supporters to "go down to certain areas and watch and study, and make sure other people don't come in and vote five times." Less than a week later, Trump's running mate, Mike Pence, encouraged a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire, to help ensure a fair election by serving as poll watchers because "you are the greatest vanguard for integrity in voting."

There's actually a risk that, in a more disorganized way, people are going to be showing up to the polls, they won't know the law, and they'll be engaging in discriminatory challenges," Gitlin said. "That can create the potential for a lot of disruption, longer lines because each voter takes longer to vote, and potentially discouraging and intimidating voters from coming to the polls.

Trump Is Recruiting an Army of Poll Watchers. It's Even Worse Than It Sounds. | Mother Jones

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Lying is the new normal..

Donald Trump lies practically every time he opens his mouth. That's hardly even notable anymore. What is still notable is the corrosive effect he has on nearly everyone who enters his orbit. His kids lie without compunction. His spokespeople lie without compunction. His campaign manager—until recently a fairly normal conservative—lies without compunction. His surrogates lie without compunction. Everyone who spends any time around him seems to inhale the lesson that in the modern media environment, there's simply no penalty for lying, no matter how obvious the lying is.

Today, Chris Christie casually peddled the obvious lie that Donald Trump gave up on birtherism after President Obama released his long-form birth certificate in 2011. This is easily fact checkable. There are tweets. There's video. Glenn Kessler rounds up the evidence:

This is why Americans hate politics. A sitting governor goes on national television and when he is called out for an obvious falsehood, he simply repeats the inaccurate talking points over and over.
This will possibly be our shortest fact check ever....Slate magazine counted nearly 40 Trump tweets since 2011 that raise questions about Obama’s birth. Even after Trump starting running for president last year, he continued to question the president’s background in television interviews.

....This is such bogus spin that we have to wonder how Christie manages to say it with a straight face. Regular readers know we shy away from using the word “lie,” but clearly Christie is either lying or he is so misinformed that he has no business appearing on television.

Donald Trump Is Teaching the Whole World How to Lie | Mother Jones

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The Atlantic, sounding alarm bells:

A Trump victory would render the Constitution as toothless as the Statuto Albertino of 1848 after Mussolini’s March on Rome. That’s not because Trump proposes violating this or that provision; it is because, to him and his followers, the Constitution is simply nonexistent. Trump’s most consistent and serious commitment is to the destruction of free expression. (Note that his response to the bombings in New York and New Jersey was to call for a rollback of the free press, on the grounds that “magazines” are somehow instructing the bombers.) In other areas, his program is torture, hostage taking, murder of innocent civilians, treaty repudiation, militarized borders, official embrace of Christianity, exclusion and surveillance of non-favored religious groups, an end to birthright citizenship, racial and religious profiling, violent and unrestrained law enforcement, and mass roundups and deportation.

But even if America is spared President Trump, will the pathologies of the last year simply dissipate in a burst of national good feeling? Hardly. Trump was not a meteorite who has unexpectedly plunged to earth out of the uncharted depths of space; he is the predictable product of a sick system. “Political correctness” is out of favor, so I won’t pretend that “both sides” bear responsibility. The corrosive attack on constitutional values has come, and continues to come, from the right. It first broke into the open in 1998, when a repudiated House majority tried to remove President Bill Clinton for minor offenses. It deepened in 2000, when the Supreme Court, by an exercise of lawless power, installed the President of their choice. It accelerated when the inadequate young president they installed responded to crisis with systematic lawlessness––detention without trial, a secret warrantless  eavesdropping program, and institutionalized torture.

In the years since Barack Obama—with a majority of the vote––replaced Bush, the same forces, now in opposition, have simply refused to accept him as the nation’s legitimate leader. In control of Congress, they will not perform that body’s most basic duties––formulating a budget, tending to the national credit, filling vacant posts in the government—and, most shockingly, controlling the nation’s passage from peace to war. Now they have turned their attention to the Supreme Court, and are slowly crippling it in pursuit of partisan advantage.

Commentators are assiduously mainstreaming this political deviancy. “[W]e should not pretend that the Senate has some sort of constitutional duty to confirm a nominee, or even schedule a vote,” conservative Professor Josh Blackman of the University of the South Texas College of Law, assured readers of the National Review soon after Justice Antonin Scalia died. Fact-checker Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post conceded that it is a “matter of opinion” whether the Senate is duty-bound to consider a Supreme Court nominee—then, inexplicably, crowned his own opinion as “fact” and awarded Three Pinocchios (“Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions”) to those whose opinions differ.

Trumpism Is The Symptom of a Gravely Ill Constitution - The Atlantic

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Lol..

Hours after the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times publishedseparate stories outlining the lies Donald Trump has told during his presidential campaign, Trump’s campaign spokesperson told ABC’s “This Week” that it isn’t the media’s job to factcheck the presidential debate.

“I really don’t appreciate the campaigns thinking it is the job of the media to go and be these virtual fact-checkers,” Kellyanne Conway said, in an apparent attempted jab at the Clinton campaign. She also opposed debate moderators questioning the candidates’ truthfulness in any way.

And they have at least some members of the media on their side. One presidential debate moderator, Fox News’ Chris Wallace, has already said that he will not factcheck the candidates during the third and final debate on Oct. 19. “That’s not my job,” Wallace said. “It’s not my job to be a truth squad.”

The head of the Commission on Presidential Debates agreed Sunday. Speaking on CNN’s Reliable Sources, Janet Brown said that it’s not the moderator’s job to factcheck. “What is a big fact, what is a little fact?” she said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

Trump campaign says media should not be ‘fact-checkers’

So the media's job is what, exactly?

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And speaking about the media..

On Friday, investigative reporter Michael Isikoff dropped a bombshell story: U.S. officials are investigating secret meetings between a Trump campaign advisor and Russian officials suspected of trying to influence the presidential election.

U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials — including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president, according to multiple sources who have been briefed on the issue.

The activities of Trump adviser Carter Page, who has extensive business interests in Russia, have been discussed with senior members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential election, the sources said.

Representatives from the Trump campaign — Vice Presidential Nominee Mike Pence, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn — appeared on all five major Sunday shows. Only CNN’s Jake Tapper asked about Isikoff’s report, directing several questions to Conway.

Virtual media blackout on emerging Trump campaign scandal with Russia

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Rule by experts was ok as long as the experts confined themselves to the right-wing agenda of deregulation. No longer..

The name Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council is unlikely to appear in a high school history textbook any time soon. It is neither a sexy case nor the sort of case that non-lawyers are likely to recognize as significant even after reading it. But Chevron is both one of the Court’s most important decisions and one of the most cited cases in the Supreme Court’s history. It is both a monument to judicial modesty and a godsend to men and women who toil in obscurity in federal agencies, trying to make the government work.

Chevron was also, until recently, a fairly uncontroversial decision.

At its heart, Chevron is rooted in the idea that, in a democratic nation, the one unelected branch of government should play a minimal role in deciding matters of policy. Chevron held that, when a law is ambiguous, courts should defer to how the federal agency that administers that law resolves that ambiguity rather than deciding themselves how the law should be interpreted. “Judges are not experts in the field,” Justice John Paul Stevens explained.

So given a choice between having an environmental policy question answered by the Environmental Protection Agency or a bunch of laypeople in black robes, it is better to leave these questions to the experts. Just as significantly, Chevron recognized that agencies have a greater claim to legitimacy than courts, at least when matters of policy arise. “While agencies are not directly accountable to the people,” Justice Stevens acknowledged, “the Chief Executive is.” Thus, “it is entirely appropriate for this political branch of the Government” to make policy choices, rather than leave the matter to judges with lifetime appointments and no accountability to the electorate.

As William Eskridge and Lauren Baer recount, “D.C. Circuit Judge Kenneth Starr (later Solicitor General) announced that Chevron was a Magna Carta for agencies to deregulate and to demand judicial acquiescence, which his court was prepared to deliver. Antonin Scalia, Starr’s colleague on the D.C. Circuit, announced the same line and pressed a similarly strong reading of Chevron after Reagan appointed him to the Supreme Court.”

So long as Republicans were winning the electoral game, conservatives loved the idea that courts should defer to the political branches. Chevron was decided in 1984, and for many years it was celebrated by conservatives for giving the Reagan and Bush administrations breathing room to dismantle unwanted regulations. 

Many existing laws delegate a considerable amount of power to federal agencies. A provision of the Clean Air Act that the Supreme Court considered in 2007, for example, permits the EPA to set “standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class or classes of new motor vehicles or new motor vehicle engines” if the EPA determines that those emissions “cause, or contribute to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare.”

Layer these broad delegations on top of Chevron, which requires courts to defer to an agency’s interpretations of such a law so long as that interpretation is “based on a permissible construction of the statute,” and it is easy to see why conservatives don’t want the courts to apply the same deference to President Obama’s agencies that they applied to President Reagan’s.

In an age of rampant Congressional dysfunction, the agencies’ power to regulate provides the president with his only real opportunity to implement a policy agenda. Take that away, and Barack Obama is little more than a figurehead.

So that explains why, at last autumn's gathering of the Federalist Society, an influential conservative legal group whose membership includes two sitting Supreme Court justices, panelists and keynotes spoke of shrinking agency power with the kind of obsession normally reserved to one-legged whaling captains. It explains why Judge Neil Gorsuch, a federal appellate judge who is widely viewed as a leading candidate for the Supreme Court in a Republican administration, recently called for Chevron to be cast aside in an option that alternatively labeled Chevron a “goliath of modern administrative law” and “the behemoth.”

It also explains why, near the end of his life, Justice Scalia himself began to flip-flop on Chevron. If the Clean Power Plan dies in the D.C. Circuit, it will be in no small part because the elderly Scalia gave the plan’s opponents just enough ammunition to claim that the kind of deference unelected judges afforded to President Reagan no longer makes sense after the people elected Barack Obama.

The battle to save the Earth from Scalia’s ghost

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And again axing at the roots of democracy..

The rest of the political world has spent the past several days dissecting a devastating report from the New York Times about Donald Trump’s 1995 tax returns. Trump has spent it, at least in part, warning his followers that Hillary Clinton is about to steal the election.

In two rallies over the weekend, Trump told his followers that Clinton is planning massive voter fraud in "certain areas" (and asked them to serve as vigilante election monitors on his behalf). It’s so clear that a Clinton victory is only possible if the vote is rigged in her favor, in fact, that Trump told the New York Times on Friday he may not concede after all.

This kind of thing has happened once too often to be a coincidence: Whenever things are looking especially dire for Trump’s hopes of winning the presidency, he starts telling his supporters that victory is about to be stolen from underneath their feet. That a vote for Trump is the last chance his supporters will have to save the republic before Hillary Clinton distorts it into something absolutely unrecognizable. That it may already be too late.

Related The apocalyptic argument for Donald Trump

This is the darkest, most conspiratorial, and most potentially dangerous theme in Trump’s rhetoric. Over the weekend, after a terrible week for the Trump campaign ended with the New York Times’s revelations that Trump had lost more than $900 million in a single year, that theme came roaring back.

Donald Trump is toying with refusing to concede if he loses. That’s horrifying. - Vox