What Drives Mitch McConnell? A Conscienceless, Near-Cartoonish Pursuit of Power

by Thomas Neuburger

For all the damage he’s inflicted on American democracy, for all the political corpses he’s left in his wake, Mitch McConnell has never betrayed an ounce of shame.
—Robert Moser, Rolling Stone

Mitch McConnell is a unique individual in the modern political world.

Most politicians are filled with a mix of fevered desires, flattering self-projections, a bittersweet mashup of idealistic regret and sad bows to "practicality," naked ego and the many attractive perks of the "Oh It's You, Senator" club (search on "you get it all the time") — and especially lots and lots of money. (I must add though that their vast corruption is vastly under-compensated, a point I've many times; the money-corrupted among them need a much better agent.)

It's a rare politician who simply wants power and power alone, power for its own sake, power unalloyed by other human desires. Mitch McConnell, like Rupert Murdoch and the real Mayor Daley (Richard J.) before him, is such a man.

At least that's the assessment of Dan Froomkin, writing at his site Press Watch:

Three things the media should be telling you about Mitch McConnell

McConnell’s motivations are essential context for a public trying to understand what’s going on in the Senate – and specifically, why McConnell is blocking Democratic attempts to introduce evidence that wasn’t available to the House.

The good news is that Mitch McConnell is not a hard guy to figure out. Indeed, countless, extensive profiles of him have concluded the same thing: that he is singularly uncomplicated. His only ideology is power. ...

[T]here is no appealing to reason with Mitch McConnell. There is no appealing to precedent, or to a sense of history. There is no appealing to the separation of powers, the role of Congress, or the sanctity of the Senate. There is certainly no appealing to the idea of country or the Constitution over party.

If it doesn’t help Republicans get elected, he’s not interested.

Here are three of the things reporters know about McConnell, but routinely fail to tell their readers and viewers...

Those three things are these:

1. Since money in politics is the chief agent of corruption, and Republican corruption means the acquisition of power for its own sake — what ever you think of Democrats, and I don't think much of them these days, Republicans aren't called "authoritarian" and "fascist" for no reason — "the only issue that McConnell really cares about is opposing any limits to money in politics."

Quoting Alex Parene:

Mitch McConnell is the great avatar of the decades-long enclosure of our public life by money. He does not offer a stirring vision of conservative national greatness or even ends-justify-the-means rationales for Senate horse-trading ... In Mitchworld, you simply pay—and pay, and pay—to play.

And:

Being a Senate majority leader who doesn’t care about almost any particular outcome to any particular political issue not directly related to making sure your funders can fund you actually seems to take quite a bit of pressure off, job performance–wise.

A simple, uncomplicated life. When you want exactly and only one thing, distraction is never an issue.

2. McConnell has "ruined the Senate," and that's just fine with him.

As Froomkin writes, "McConnell has dramatically transformed the U.S. Senate, from a place that once relied heavily on tradition and precedent and was less partisan and more deliberative than the House, into a slaughterhouse for any legislation that might hurt his donor pool."

But that's just one way he's damaged the body he's part of. The other way is to empower a radical judiciary that is more and more taking power away from the legislature, including the Senate, and arrogating to itself decisions the Founders meant the people to decide.

According to Charles Homans, "In the coming years, battles over voting rights, health care, abortion, regulation and campaign finance, among other areas, are less likely to be decided in Congress than in the nation’s courthouses. In effect, McConnell has become a master of the Senate by figuring out how to route the Republican agenda around it."

Using the Senate to diminish the Senate — that's our Mitch.

3. The simplicity of his wickedness renders him almost cartoonish.

Robert Moser (also quoted above), writes of McConnell, "like the president he now so faithfully serves, McConnell has always exuded a sense of pride in the lengths to which he’s gone to achieve his ambitions and infuriate his enemies."

And James Zengerle noted in Politico, "While most politicians desperately want to be liked, McConnell has relished—and cultivated—his reputation as a villain. After all, he achieved his iron-fisted grip on the politics of his home state and his fractious party on Capitol Hill through discipline, cunning and, oftentimes, fear. ... [A]t the moments that have found him happiest—winning elections, blocking bills, denying the sheen of bipartisanship to President Barack Obama—he has radiated not joy but menace."

Yet as amusing as cartoon villainy is to contemplate, this last point should not be dwelt on.

McConnell may well be the most dangerous man in politics today, not just because of his terrible goals — the acquisition of total power for a party that hosts the worse authoritarians in the country — but also because not an ounce of conscience pulls him back from the brink of his most terrible deeds.

He not only fails to fear that brink; he relishes finding it.

If I could choose just two politicians to remove immediately and forever from office, from a list that includes such dark angels as Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, the murderous Mohammed bin Salman, our own progressive-hating Chuck Schumer and his House counterpart (yes, even her) and many more like them — I just might choose to eliminate Mitch McConnell. Twice.
 
 

One Reason Why The Senate Sucks And Will Never Find Trump Guilty

James Madison should have fought harder

"He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had." -Chief of Staff John Kelly (from Bob Woodward's new book, Fear: Trump in The White House)

Unless the Kremlin manages to steal the election again, it's likely that the Democrats will win a substantial majority in the House. Starting next January, Speaker Pelosi could have 250 votes to the GOP's 185, give or take. If reports from Mueller and the House Judiciary Committee (which includes 3 of Congress' intellectual giants-- Ted Lieu, Pramila Jayapal, and Jamie Raskin-- come up with the evidence to impeach, it won't be that hard for the House to do it, despite all the New Dems and Blue Dogs from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party the DCCC is stocking Congress with. But what happens then?

Trump would then be tried by the Senate. No matter which party gets the majority-- and it will be close (possibly depending on whether or not Beto beats Cruz)-- it would be hard to imagine the Senate finding Trump guilty regardless of what Mueller and the House Judiciary Committee find. Even if you want to discount the fact that Doug Jones (D-AL) is up for reelection in 2020 and will be reluctant to vote against Trump, the Democrats are would need 67 votes, meaning more than a dozen Republicans regardless of how well they do in November. That's virtually impossible, unless Mueller can prove definitively that Trump was taking boatloads of cash from Putin to-- for example-- wreck NATO and undermine U.S. alliances worldwide.

And there's more than just basic math in play here. A couple of weeks ago Justin Fox, writing for Bloomberg News and Dave Wasserman, writing for the New York Times explained how inherently un-representative (or anti-democratic) the Senate is-- and was meant to be. Wasserman: "a majority of the Senate now represents just 18 percent of the nation’s population... much whiter, more rural and pro-Trump than the nation as a whole. In effect, geography could again be Mr. Trump’s greatest protector: After all, the Senate-- not the House-- would have the final say on any impeachment proceedings."

Justin Fox's OpEd, The Senate Has Always Been Wildly Unrepresentative just to the reasons why it was created that way. "The primary author of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison, wanted to replace the ineffectual governance by sovereign states of the Articles of the Confederation with a national system built on individual representation, and thought it obvious that Senate seats should be apportioned on the basis of population. He also seemed confident that his view would prevail, writing to George Washington a few weeks before the start of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 that:

A majority of the States, and those of greatest influence, will regard it as favorable to them. To the Northern States it will be recommended by their present populousness; to the Southern by their expected advantage in this respect. The lesser States must in every event yield to the predominant will. But the consideration which particularly urges a change in the representation is that it will obviate the principal objections of the larger States to the necessary concessions of power.

But, as Fox pointed out, "the lesser states did not yield and the larger states did," which resulted in the un-representative, anachronistic Senate of 2018. He referenced an essay by Philip Bump who pointed out that by 2040, 70% of the population will live in just 15 states and thus select only 30% of U.S. Senators. The huge populations of California and Texas are especially viewed as unfair (in those two states) and there has been talk about breaking up into several states and even about seceding from the Union.

Fox explains that 10 states growing the fastest are losing per-person Senate representation (above) while in the states losing population, residents "have been gaining lots of per-person Senate clout" (below).

Juan Williams took a shot at this yesterday for The Hill, noting that "Republican control of Capitol Hill and the White House is based on a 'fake majority.'... America’s politics are being run by a cabal in the Senate that fails to represent 82 percent of the American people." The results that Williams sees are catastrophic-- especially in terms of the Supreme Court.

For starters, the 18 percent controlling the Senate have their own right-wing agenda beyond protecting an unpopular president.

They want a Supreme Court majority that reflects their views and not the views of the majority of the people.

To take control of the court they blocked President Obama-- a Democrat twice elected with a majority of the popular vote as well as a majority of the electoral college-- for close to a year from appointing a centrist judge to the high court.

Senate Republicans, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (Iowa), who will preside over this week’s hearings, refused to even give Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland a hearing, let alone an up or down vote.

And now having already replaced Garland and installed a solid conservative-- Neil Gorsuch-- the Senate Republicans, who represent fewer than 1-in-5 Americans, are about to force another conservative on the Supreme Court.

If they succeed in locking in another conservative, this time Judge Brett Kavanaugh, they will cement a conservative majority on the court for decades in an act that might be described as tyranny.

It is not just the Senate that is acting against the will of the majority.

Remember that both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote by almost three million votes.

If Kavanaugh is confirmed, there is nothing stopping the 5-4 conservative majority on the Court from overturning Roe v. Wade and denying millions of American women the right to an abortion.

This despite the fact that only 29 percent of Americans want abortion to be illegal in all or most cases, according to a July Quinnipiac poll. The vast majority of Americans, 64 percent, want it legal in all or most cases.

Then there is the tyranny of Trump-led GOP efforts to cripple the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

With Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ.) death, there is nothing stopping the 18-percent-Senate-majority from passing their bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act and strip health care from millions of Americans-- even though the latest Kaiser poll taken over the summer shows that 50 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the ACA compared to 41 percent who view it unfavorably.

A June Quinnipiac poll similarly found that 51 percent want the ACA to remain in place and 44 percent want it repealed. McCain famously killed the repeal effort because, for all their complaints, Republicans never came up with a better bill to help Americans with the high cost of healthcare.

Will the Arizona Republican who is appointed to fill his seat display the same courage?

Then there is the tyranny of GOP tax cuts.

The 18-percent-Senate-majority passed tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest one percent of Americans.

Forty-six percent of Americans disapprove of the Trump tax law, according to Quinnipiac polling.

An August Fox poll found that ObamaCare is now more popular than the Republican tax cuts. More than half of voters, 51 percent, favor ObamaCare compared to 40 percent who approved of the tax cuts.

That finding is bolstered by another poll, a CNBC survey from June, which found that 49 percent of working American adults-- a plurality of all the people polled-- said they do not have more take-home pay because of the law.

How about the president’s aggressive focus on border security? Again, a majority in the Fox poll said they disapprove. Overall, 57 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration policy.

And when it comes to the Republican president’s handling of race relations, 58 percent in the Fox poll said they disapproved.

So, to recap: The lives of over 300 million Americans are being affected by policies foisted on them by a Senate “majority” that represents less than one-fifth of them and a president who was elected with three million fewer votes than his opponent.

Meanwhile, even as daily controversy, including federal convictions of his associates, surrounds Trump, the 18 percent represented by the GOP majority in the Senate protects the president from impeachment.

What is wrong with this picture?

...Trump has normalized many horrible things in our politics: racism, lying, scapegoating and corruption.

Future historians may look back and conclude one of the most corrosive things he normalized was minority-posing-as-majority tyranny that cheats the majority of the American people out of their democracy.

How to Block the Trump Nomination: Shut Down the Senate

Imagine this room half empty whenever the Senate tried to vote.

by Gaius Publius

Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business

– U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 5

[Update: Since publishing this piece, I'm reminded that Alabama Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore in a special election earlier this year. My bad for the oversight. However, this makes the partisan divide even more favorable to the Democrats — 50-49. Fifty senators is not a majority. It would take a truly unusual ruling by the Parliamentarian to allow the Vice President to help constitute a quorum, and even if he did so rule, Democrats would then be in position to tie to their Senate chairs not only all Republican senators, but Vice President Mike Pence as well. In other words, the Democrats' hand is even stronger.]

I'm going to expand on this in a longer piece, but the point is too important not to pass on now. If Democrats are truly serious about blocking any Trump-nominated Supreme Court justice, there is a way. But they have to actually want to block the nomination, not just say they want to.

How To Block the Nomination

This strategy, which I'm convinced will work, comes via Vox writer  Gregory Koger. It goes like this. According to the Constitution, Article 1, Section 5:

Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business

This means: Neither house of Congress can do business without a quorum, defined as a simple majority.

What if a majority is not present? Section 5 continues:

a smaller Number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide.

This means: If there's no majority present, the minority can compel absent members to attend. But how? Here's there's no answer, and in fact nowhere in our government is there a mechanism but shame for compelling congressional attendance.

This gives Democrats, or Republicans for that matter, all the power they need, assuming the numbers work out right.

Now consider the numbers. If there were 60 Republican senators, Democrats could absent themselves forever and nothing would change. Sixty senators comprise a quorum.

But look at the current Senate. There are 46 Democrats, two independents who caucus as Democrats, and 52 Republicans. Yet one of those Republicans, John McCain, may never attend another Senate session due to his health. That puts the partisan split at 51-48.

As Koger notes, "Other than quitting for the day or calling for others to come to the chamber, the Senate can do nothing without a majority of its members — 51 senators — participating in a vote. No bill can pass, no amendment can be decided on, no nominations can get approved."

In other words, every Republican senator would have to appear for every vote from which Democrats were wholly absent, or no vote could be taken. Every one of them. Democrats could simply challenge the vote for lack of a quorum, then leave during the quorum call.

Shutting Down the Senate

If the plan were for Democrats to be absent en masse just for the vote on Trump's Court nomination, the plan would fail. On the day of the vote, 51 Republican senators would show up to vote yes and the nomination would be confirmed.

But if Democratic senators were absent en masse from day one of the decision to do it — if all 48  Democratic and independent senators refused to enter the chamber for any vote at all — it would paralyze the Senate. Every vote of the Senate, from the most important to the least, would require every Republican to be present to ensure passage.

In the ideal world this isn't a problem, since there are, just barely, a quorums-worth of Republican senators. In the real world, however, there is almost never a day in which every senator is present for a vote. Democrats could even force a quorum call any time they wanted on a simple procedural vote, forcing Republicans to be nearby and available at a moment's notice. When would they fundraise? When would they meet with lobbyists?

It's almost certain Republicans couldn't conduct Senate business under those conditions. This move would put Democrats in a position of unblockable power until a future election changed the numbers. They could force — not ask, but force — the nomination to wait until after the 2018 election.

All they'd have to do, is want to.

GP
 

Tomorrow Is Election Day In Alabama. Would Moore Be The Most Vile Man Ever Elected To The Senate? We Already Have the Most Vile President

Tomorrow is election day in Alabama. I'm rooting for Doug Jones. He doesn't just seem better than Roy Moore-- now there's a low bar-- but better than Jon Ossoff too. I bought into Ossoff, contributed some monet to him personally and Blue America endorsed him and raised him some money. So I was pretty disappointed as the race proceeded from when I first talked to him and the guy who persuaded me he was a progressive came increasingly under the sway of Beltway money-men, consultants and strategists who persuaded him to change his tone and going in a less progressive direction-- away from the energy and more towards the conventionally safe ground the DCCC always gravitates to in red districts: Republican-lite. It sickened me that Ossoff raised and spent $29,544,195 (to Karen Handel's $6,163,039), while the DCCC spent another $5,065,390 on him (and Pelosi's House Majority PAC threw in $650,571). In all, outside groups spent around $8 million bolstering Ossoff and outside Republican groups spent over $18 bolstering Handel. Handel beat him 134,799 (51.8%) to 48.2%-- in line with Trump's 48.3% to 46.8% winnower Hillary a few months earlier. Handel did about 3 and a half points better than Trump had and Ossoff, despite all that money, did about a point and a half worse than Hillary (who didn't campaign in GA-06 at all. He was a weak candidate. And Jones, down in Alabama is better-- and far more authentic.

Alabama's senior senator, Republican Richard Shelby, won't be having a very collegial relationship with Roy Moore if Moore wins tomorrow. On State of the Union yesterday, Shelby told Jake Tapper that he voted already-- but not for Moore. "We call it a tipping point. I think, so many accusations, so many cuts, so many drip, drip, drip-- when it got to the 14-year-old's story, that was enough for me. I said I can't vote for Roy Moore." He added that if Moore is elected, the Senate "will have to seat him, and we'll see what happens after that... The Senate has to look at who's fit to serve in the Senate."

Still, Jones very well may win tomorrow. The Real Clear Politics average of polls has Moore at 49.1% and Jones at 45.3%, too close to call. The only one of the 7 most recent polls Jones was ahead in was from the Washington Post November 30 that showed Jones leading 50-47%. All the others show Jones winning by between 3 and 7%. But... you know how in normal states, people are often embarrassed to say they plan to vote for a Republican and often lie to pollsters? In Alabama it may be the opposite: people are embarrassed to say they'll vote for a Democrat and lie to the pollsters. We'll see; Republicans could be embarrassed-- should be embarrassed-- to admit they're voting for a child molester.

As of September 22, the last FEC reporting deadline, Jones had spent $9,034,232 and still had $2,543,090 in his campaign warchest and the child molester had spent $4,455,952 and had $636,046 left. Over $7 million has been spent against Moore (mostly by Luther Strange allies in the primary) and $1,529,978 had been spent opposing Jones. A ton of right-wing money has poured into the race in the form of independent expenditures in the last 10 days and we have no figures on that yet.

But if you look on the Blue America Senate endorsement page, you won't find a slot for Jones. We reached out to him the day he announced but he never got back. We reached out a week later and a week after that. People from his campaign even told me at one point they'd get us on the phone together. It never happened. And even though nearly everything I've read about Jones indicated he would be a good candidate, without an interview, I couldn't ask Blue America donors, who expect a degree of vetting, to contribute their money to him (instead of, say, to Tammy Baldwin's reelection campaign or even Beto O'Rourke's race against Ted Cruz). So, like I said, I'm rooting for Jones tomorrow and I'll probably pray for him when I wake up at 4am. But... I didn't contribute my own money, we didn't endorse him and I never asked Blue America donors to send him any money.

That said, I was pretty surprised when I read a critique of Jones from a North Alabama DSA member: Doug Jones is a Terrible Candidate. The DSA member seems to think Jones is not much more than the lesser evil compared to, in her words, the candidate who "is a wretched, disgusting, pedophilic rapist who deserves absolutely no place in any leadership position." Then the big "but." She wrote that "The problem with Doug Jones is revealed not when you point out what he hasn’t done that Roy Moore has, but rather when you look at what Doug Jones says he plans to do, or, as is often the case, not do. At a time when the already abysmal American healthcare system is at threat of being outright gutted by congress, Doug Jones has repeatedly shied away from supporting Bernie Sanders’s Medicare For All plan, and has not backed single-payer healthcare (an immensely popular policy proposal) despite the fact that his very own website states that he believes “Health care is a right, not a privilege limited to the wealthy and those with jobs that provide coverage.” Jones has also shied away from dedicating himself to supporting a $15 livable wage, again, despite the fact that his own website says that he “strongly support[s] ensuring working Alabamians receive a living wage for their hard work.” And, in a time when the college debt crisis is racking up in the trillions of dollars, he has not endorsed any sort of tuition-free college education program, despite--  and I know this is getting tiresome--  his own website stating that “Providing a quality education to all children is the key to a long-term thriving economy.”

[L]ooking at Doug Jones’s campaign website is an enlightening look into the extent of his tiptoeing mediocrity. Clicking the “Priorities” section immediately greets you with a phrase that thrusts into your face Jones’s nauseating fetishization of respectability politics: “Bring integrity back to Washington.” Moving on from the meaningless blurb that is that sentiment is the “Economy” section of this page which starts out with the very telling phrase “Small businesses are truly the backbone of the American economy.” This, despite the fact that workers, not businesses, are the backbone of any economy, and that American workers are continually laboring longer and harder for less and less pay while the capitalists who own these businesses are making more and more, is what Doug Jones feels is most important to state first in his campaign website’s “Economy” section.

Going back to respectability politics; Doug Jones loves it. A lot. It is difficult to hear Jones speak for more than thirty seconds without him mentioning “bipartisanship” or “reaching across the aisle.” Jones cares so much about respecting the “other side of the issues” that his campaign put out an ad that described the Civil War as “two sides believing so strongly in their cause that they were willing to die for it”, and citing the example of a Confederate and a Union General coming together as a virtuous act that should be encouraged. One must think hard about what exactly Jones is willing to compromise on if he sees shaking hands with a General who fought for the preservation of chattel slavery as even a possibility.



The Civil War ad is not the Jones campaign’s only advertising misstep. In a move that garnered some national headlines, the Jones campaign decided it appropriate to mail out fliers that read “Think if a black man went after high school girls anyone would try to make him a senator?” with the picture of a black man underneath. Being that it was a flier that was clearly indicative of some racialized thinking of its creator, there was justified backlash to it--  many calling blatantly racist.

It would seem as if the Democratic Party of Alabama decided to back not only one of the most mediocre and uninspiring candidates possible in a time of strong populist sentiments, but also a candidate who is too racially insensitive to run ads that don’t glowingly reference Civil War “compromise” or spit directly in the face of the black community.

Come election day, Alabamians will have the sacred honor of participating in the democratic process by voting for either a child rapist or a weak-kneed white blob in a suit to go work on Capitol Hill for some unknown corporate donor. Personally, I can’t say that I will be taking part.

OK, since she brought up "sacred," I'll definitely pray when I wake up tomorrow morning and ask Jesus to grant Alex the wisdom to do the right thing and vote to help the guy who prosecuted the KKK terrorists get into the Senate instead of the deranged Trumpist who would be working to harm her every single day in every single way. But... a nice new poll from, of all places, Fox News. This looks like a very wide margin-- and is at odds with all the other polls we've looked at. Fingers crossed! We'll see how accurate they were mañana, won't we?

Feel sorry for "Miss Mitch" McConnell? Huh? Well, maybe if he's standing in the path of the Falling Anvil of Orange

If Looks Could Kill Dept.: Naturally in the above photo it's the World's Blowsiest Blowhard bloviating, while Senate Majority Leader "Miss Mitch" McConnell, er, sits silently by -- of course it could be that he's just thinking about the fun of going home to the company of Transportation Sec'y Mrs. Miss Mitch. (Note: If you have a suitably Photoshoppish imagination, feel free to visualize Miss Mitch with a hatchet buried in that odious head. Either odious head, actually.)

by Ken

Miss Mitch is one of the last people on the planet I would normally expect to be sticking up for. Nevertheless, that's kinda what I found myself doing the other day.

It all started when I noticed this link in a DailyKos roundup:

NYT: Trump yelled at McConnell for not protecting him from Russia investigations

That's not when I found myself feeling sorry, kinda, for Miss Mitch. Not yet. Oh, I suppose I was commiserating with him, kinda, but mostly I found myself seeing Trump, and maybe even kinda sorta feeling sorry, or something, for a poor horrendously damaged boy buried under infinite layers of crud. I dashed off an e-note I to the gang, in which I took care to note first:

I've never bothered to inform myself about our Donald's family history, since I've never wanted to know any more about those hateful people. I've always wanted to know LESS about them -- really, as little as possible. Just hoping they would all go away and I wouldn't have to think about them any more.

So I was surprised when The Donald not long ago rambled publicly about his druggie brother Fred. Then today I noticed this link in a DailyKos e-mail.

"Suddenly," I went on to explain:

this image of Trump yelling at McConnell gave me an image of Little Donnie growing up being persistently abused verbally by Big Fred. In the pictures of Fred I've seen he looks like a total wienie, but even the wimpiest guy wouldn't have much trouble bullying his kid for at least a certain number of years. And then, just maybe, there's a fleeting image of Little Donnie being abused who-knows-how by Young Fred.

I realize this isn't a deep thought, and of course merely a speculation rather than a fact. And even if it were an established fac, it wouldn't be an especially surprising one, since we know that men who engage in domestic abuse are overwhelmingly likely to have been victims of abuse. Still, for me something clicked into place here.

This is pure thumb-sucking, of course. I have no inside knowledge, no particular expertise, just a heap of instincts piled on by grizzled experience -- activated, I suppose, by some morbid curiosity as to how a human mind becomes this perverted.

Some of the response, though, targeted Miss Mitch, and included some skepticism about a possibly staged feud between these two pillars of the revered, harmoniously functioning U.S. federal government. What follows is a somewhat cleaned-up version of my reply. Again, it's all pure thumb-sucking.

A SOMEWHAT CLEANED-UP AND REJIGGERED
AND AMPLIFIED VERSION OF WHAT I WROTE

It's all so preposterous and unbelievable, I'm pretty much speechless. [Okay, the "pretty much speechless" part proved a faulty prediction. Is anyone really surprised? -- Ed.]

I don't have much trouble, though, believing that Trump is screwing with Miss Mitch, partly because showing people who think they're hot stuff that he can screw with them to his heart's content is one of the things he most loves to do and partly because, as people are noting, the Trump Faithful are so clueless that at least on the surface -- which is as far as Trump sees, and as we know he doesn't see that very well -- it looks like a winning face-saving strategy to trick them into believing that it's McConnell and Ryan who've betrayed them and not their messiah.

In my understanding of the situation, Miss Mitch surely understands exactly what Our Leader is doing to him but can't see a play for himself. Miss M, since achieving real power, has taken pride in being a pragmatist, working in the trenches with a good deal of success to make reality align with his wishes and goals. Then along comes Trump, who simply doesn't acknowledge reality, and Mitchie's whole history leaves him bereft of tools with which to counter.

Think back to January 2017, when Mitchie knew he was probably facing two years (at least) of hell, trying to "lead" a majority that had to look completely unleadable, even if the new president behaved sensibly. His "majority," already increasingly hard to deal with in the last Congress, was giving him pretty clear signals that he couldn't count on them for anything if it made the poor dears unhappy, and given the chasm that had opened up in the Republican Party, there were hardly any issues on which he could expect to make 50 of the buggers happy -- let alone find 60 votes where needed.

And then Trump turns out to be . . . TRUMP! All the things Mitchie has spent so many years learning about how the Senate works, and Congress as a whole, and Congress and the president -- it's all out the window, because Trump doesn't care. Fuck reality! Leaving Mitchie in need of some kind of play, any kind of play, and I assume he's discovered that he doesn't have any. By "a play" I mean something, anything, that in some way, shape, or form brings him even the tiniest bit closer to a good outcome for Mitchie -- and there isn't one.

Publicly oppose the president? What does that get him? Except a one-way ticket out of the circles of power. Consult the numerous variants of the proposition: If you try to kill the king, you better make sure he's dead. It's especially true, surely, with this particular imperial wizard.

Do we imagine that Mitchie has forgotten what happened to poor "Sunny John" Boehner, the ex-House speaker, when he merely tried to get the Tea Party crazies in his House GOP conference to be, you know, a little reasonable? Now Mitchie not only has this problem in spades in his conference (after all, his crazies are senators, and each of them knows better than anyone how much more powerful a single senator is than a whole wolfpack of House GOP crazies).

It's not a matter of "policy" as such. Beyond a general far-right agenda, after all, Miss Mitch has no policy, no principles to speak of except what's good for Mitchie. You'd think this might make him just the fellow to deal with Trump, who after all has no principles to speak of except what's good for Donnie, and certainly no policy; he's had so many positions on so many policies that he couldn't keep track of them if he cared. The thing is, though, that "what's good for Donnie" is good only for Donnie and his nearest and dearest. For most everyone else it's a living nightmare.

Take Obamacare repeal-and-replacement. As began to become clear with the dawn of the new administration, Obamacare repeal was going to be a vastly different feat to accomplish than it had appeared in those years when Republicans could ritually vote for repeal, knowing President Obama would veto any such bill. Once Obamacare repeal became a real, live issue, it became clear that it would have been hard enough to manage if all that Mitchie had to deal with was: (a) the House Republican crazies, and (b) the Senate Republican crazies. But Trump showed not the slightest understanding of that process, or seem to feel any more need to than he had any interest in what was actually in any repeal bill.

The one and only thing he cared about was being able to sign a bill that could be called "Obamacare repeal" because of the intense political pressure he felt to not break yet another campaign promise, especially one he'd make such a fetish of promising it to the voters who came to worship him, voters to whom he had lied so persistently and shamelessly. And throughout the process, he did nothing but make it even harder -- whether he was injecting himself into the process or withdrawing from it, lobbing grenades or sulking in his tent, cajoling and hectoring or ignoring and snubbing, everything he did was strategically wrong.

If you're Mitchie, you entered the Obamacare-repeal derby with a legislative position that was impossible, and at every twist and turn Trump did everything in his power to make it harder. At each of those twists and turns Mitchie kept coming up with new stratagems to make the thing doable, and each time Trump managed to make it, if you will, impossibler.

A few months into the Trump presidency, as the Man of Orange made it more and more abundantly clear that yes, this was how he planned to "govern," my sense formed that no, he's not going to be impeached but I also don't see how he serves out his full term. The only course I saw was that eventually enough DC Republicans -- and the people who bankroll them -- might come to come to the realization that the son of a bitch is killing us!!! He's so nuts and so inept that he's going to cost us our positions and whatever finger position we have on the levers of government. At that point the Trump exit I imagined would happen through behind-the-scenes persuasion: having him hear from all the people he trusts that the only way out for Donnie is to get the hell out of that damned White House. This I suspected, and still suspect, may be more possible than it seemed/seems, because by all accounts he's not having the fun time he was expecting.

Which wasn't/isn't an especially glad prospect for me, because it simply leaves us at the mercy of the Unspeakable Pence, who unlike Trump and Mitchie has a whole political agenda he believes deeply in. I've heard people say that a President Unspeakable would occupy the office in a weak position, I think that's nuts. Look how much the Right is accomplishing in Washington changing the nature and structure of the U.S. government even in these times of legislative stasis. Take Trump out of the equation, and I think Pence, in league with all those frothing-at-the-mouth loonies who chair the relevant House and Senate committees, is in a position to set in motion an orgy of legislative craziness.

So yeah, I feel kinda bad for Miss Mitch. It doesn't really matter what exactly the president is yelling at him about. The notion that there's something Mitchie could have done to shield his master from Special Counsel Mueller's investigations is totally nuts to everyone who has even the teeniest-tiniest contact with reality, but that number doesn't include POTUS. It might be suggested that Miss Mitch really doesn't have much to lose at this point, considering that right now the Senate majority leader's powers are pretty much zip, especially if he's going to find himself in the president's crosshairs as designated scapegoat.

Nevertheless, what can Mitchie do? I don't think he can even dare to offer the president a confidential opinion that he'd do well to get going while the going is still good. However incompetent Trump may be at actual constructive achievements, would you want to challenge his ability to make your life a living hell?

PS: IS IT POSSIBLE MUELLER'S INVESTIGATIONS
MAY ACTUALLY PROLONG TRUMP'S PRESIDENCY?

I didn't go into this in my original e-mail, but I've been thinking about it as I reread and tinkered with what I did write.

Remember when I wrote that "I suspected, and still suspect" that persuading Donnie to get the hell out of the White House "may be more possible than it seemed/seems"? Ironically, the apparently growing momentum of Special Counsel Mueller's investigations, with all those grand juries he's had impaneled, may make this persuasion harder, and harder still if Mueller shows signs of having the goods on Donnie.

Donnie, after all, knows why he take the monumental risk of resolutely refusing under any circumstances to release those tax returns. And Donnie surely has a pretty good idea of what looking into his business dealings can turn up. And it's not just the humiliation of being revealed as a lifelong fraud -- far from a master dealmaker and entrepreneur, a bumbling business halfwit who had certain public-relations talents but proceeded to fuck up every deal he touched and would have been a bankrupt and pauper if he hadn't gotten the inspired idea to start courting the world's sleaziest superrich scumbags to keep him afloat in exchange for aiding and abetting their international money-laundering and other fraudulent and/or illegal enterprises.

As desperately as Trump has been trying to sling mud at Special Counsel Mueller and his associates (who include a large number of lawyers and other investigators with a track record of investigating and prosecuting the very kinds of enterprises their current mandate calls for them to get to the bottom of), I can't help feeling that his real terror is that Mueller appears to be -- can you believe it? -- an honest man! And a competent one.

The legal point remains unresolved as to whether a sitting president can be indicted, and nobody has yet pressed the point. An ex-president seems like a whole other president, which could mean that Donnie has a special interest in not being pried out of the White House.

But he has to leave sometime. Doesn't he?


EPiLOGUE: 
NOAH'S VISION FOR THE FATE OF MISS MITCH

I would be remiss if I signed off without sharing Noah's vision of what's to come for our beloved Senate majority leader, shared as we were kicking this around via e-mail. "My version," he ventured, "would have Mitch ending up killing himself but taking out a few people with him at the W.H."

Later he clarified: "Of course my Viking ancestors cry out for the Blood Eagle treatment for all of these lowlifes." And he added this "PS":

According to a new Vanity Fair article, Buffy and Biffy Kushner are very depressed in Washington and feel their self esteem is under assault. I feel soooooo bad for them. It just makes me cry, I tell ya.

Now that's a note I feel utterly comfortable leaving on.

#

Wells Fargo CEO at Senate Banking Committee: Five Takeaways

Part two of Elizabeth Warren's grilling of Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf. The person Warren refers to at the start is Carrie Tolstedt, the Wells Fargo senior executive who managed the scheme.

by Gaius Publius

I want to revisit the testimony of John Stumpf, Wells Fargo CEO, before the Senate Banking Committee, even though it was covered in these pages here. The focus of the earlier article was to list which members of that committee took pay-offs (campaign contributions) from the banking industry in general and Wells Fargo in particular (do click; it's an interesting list).

Here I want to focus on Stumpf's testimony itself, thanks to a nice analysis by Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism. Smith is quite familiar with the finance industry, having been part of it for many years.

The backstory is that Wells Fargo has been accused of having fraudulently opened thousands of unwanted customer accounts — opening credit card accounts, for example, for its mortgage customers — in order to sweeten its bottom line (fees and charges) and also sweeten its stock price (telling analysts, "Look at how successful we are at engaging our customers in more of our products than other banks are.")

The Consumer Financial Services Protection Bureau, the Los Angeles City Attorney, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency fined Well Fargo a total of $185 million for opening unauthorized customer accounts, which the bank then used to charge fees. The bank has also agreed to make restitution to the defrauded customers. As the New York Times reports:

Wells Fargo employees opened roughly 1.5 million bank accounts and applied for 565,000 credit cards that may not have been authorized by customers, the regulators said in a news conference. The bank has 40 million retail customers.

This was an astonishingly brazen, large-scale effort, clearly a systematic, institutionalized campaign. It is virtually impossible for senior executives not to have known what was going on.

In the clip above Stumpf doesn't consider this a major problem, yet the scale of this fraud is breathtaking.

Now let's look at the aftermath, as Smith sees it. She begins her piece:

It’s a safe bet that Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf will be turfed out in the next ten days. Not only did he break the cardinal rule of executive survival, namely, throw someone under the bus when the going gets rough, but he couldn’t even manage a credible show of contrition and groveling after a massive fraud took place on his watch.

As one Senator noted, the Wells Fargo fake accounts scam achieved a difficult feat: “For the first time in ten years, you have united this committee, and not in a good way.” Even Republicans like Paul Toomey used the “f” word, as in “fraud”.

The chamber was packed, and the toughest interrogation came from Sherrod Brown, Bob Menendez, and of course, Elizabeth Warren, who reached new levels of bad-assery.

You can see that bad-assery in the clip. If you watch it, do stay for the last minute, in which Warren accuses Stumpf of allowing this scheme to continue because he personally benefited from it to the tune of a $200 million increase in the value of his Wells Fargo stock holdings. Control fraud at its best.

Here are four takeaways via Yves Smith, and one from me, regarding these hearings and Stumpf's appearance.

1. How Wells Fargo's Control Fraud Worked

Some of what Smith concludes, having listened to the hearings:

Wells Fargo had obvious, glaring control deficiencies that appear designed to give Stumpf and his fellow execs a “whocoulddanode?” excuse. The main audit functions sat in the business units, not the at the corporate level. It is a basic failure to have control functions report into profit centers. This is the structure that led to JP Morgan’s London Whale debacle and elicited incredulous reactions all over Wall Street. Tom Curry of the Office of the Comptroller confirmed that this was a serious deficiency. But that begs the question: how did regulators give this foxes run the henhouse organization a free pass?

Be sure to think that one through. The way this works is simple. If the auditors work for the boss of the profit centers, they're under the control of those bosses — hired, fired, promoted, demoted by them — and have every incentive to not blow the whistle. Again, control fraud.

Also:

Despite saying he’d take full responsibility, Stumpf did nothing of the kind. Even though the press had already found a branch manager (who was later fired) warning him of abuses in February 2011, he says he didn’t have any idea there was a problem until sometime in 2013....

Smith adds more to the argument, but the bottom line is simple. Even though he said he didn't know, there's evidence he did.

2. No One Who Benefited Will Have to Give Money Back

Now about clawbacks — the bank taking back the money it gave to its fraudulent executives, in this case Strumpf and Carrie Tolstedt, the Wells Fargo senior executive who managed the scheme:

Stumpf refused to consider clawbacks. Stumpf will go down over this issue. He’s clearly more attached to keeping his gains than keeping his job. But what was revealing was his refusal to entertain them even for the conveniently recently retired Carrie Tolstedt, who is leaving with an exit package of an estimated $125 million in cash and equity prizes. Note that the financial press has reported that $17 million could be clawed back under the bank’s rules. When pressed, even though Stumpf kept maintaining the party line that Tolstedt had resigned, he said that the bank “wanted to go in a different direction” which is code for “she was forced out”.

Senate Banking Committee chairman Richard Shelby rejected Stumpf’s refusal to consider clawbacks: “Explain to the public: What does accountability look like when an executive departs with millions of dollars?”

Tolstedt walks away (in retirement, not after being fired, as Warren discusses in the video above) with $125 million, almost as much as Wells Fargo will pay in fines ($185 million). Strumpf will walk away with his stock portfolio sweetened by $200 million. Much of his Wells Fargo stock was almost certainly given to him by the bank as part of his compensation package.

3. Criminal Charges?

Will there be criminal charges, at least against the bank?

Some of the actions look to set up a criminal case. I’m getting out in front of serious legal analysis, but some of the actions were so rancid that they would seem to set up criminal charges. The San Francisco bank would transfer money from deposit accounts to cover fees in unauthorized credit card accounts. In addition, bank employees would forge customer signatures to create phony accounts.

In many ways, this is worse than the robosigning scandal...

Again, Smith has more, including the fun fact that one of the products that was fraudulently "sold" to unknowing customers was ... fraud protection.

4. How Will Wells Fargo Undo the Damage to Customers?

Smith makes several more points (do click through), but I want to close with just one more from her before passing to a point of my own.

Keep in mind that part of the damage done to customers is this: Customer credit scores were negatively impacted by these accounts. Some customers with lower credit scores, for example, could easily have those scores dropped even lower simply by credit inquiries from Wells Fargo and by the appearance of even more credit accounts on their records. Others were certainly impacted by the appearance of unpaid late fees on these unwanted accounts.

That results in real monetary damage, since it impacts the cost of loans those customers might want to take out, including mortgage loans. So the question is, how is Wells Fargo going to repair the damage done to its customers' credit scores. Again, the scale is huge; Wells Fargo issued over 500,000 unsolicited credit cards.

Here's Smith's smart observation on Wells Fargo's proposed "remedy":

Stumpf conned the Senators and regulators about his credit score remedy, which is not about helping customers, but more damage control by the bank. Stumpf was pressed repeatedly on how he’d repair customer credit scores. And the correct answer isn’t hard: tell the credit agencies for each and every one of the over 500,000 credit cards that the credit reports should never have been pulled on them and that any late charges were the bank’s fault.

But that isn’t what Wells Fargo is planning to do. Stumpf instead said the bank will go through the far more labor-intensive effort of calling each and every customer! Now why would the bank do that?

To sell them again! That is, to try one more time to arm-twist the customers into saying that they will keep the cards, even if Wells faked their application....

In other words, instead of taking the cheaper and faster path — the bank contacts the credit agencies, delivers the list of fraudulent credit card numbers, and takes responsibility for any credit damage done — it wants to call each customer by phone instead. Smith's reasoning is, in my view, exactly right. The bank wants to get them to keep as many of those cards as it can.

Your predatory capitalists at work.

5. Will Stumpf and Tolstedt Go to Jail? Should They? 

Smith says in the comments that she doesn't think Stumpf will see a courtroom, much less jail (that comment section is worth a read, by the way). But he should. The Democratic nominee for president has issued a statement about the Wells Fargo fraud story, telling what she would do. One thing she didn't mention is ... putting John Stumpf and Carrie Tolstedt on trial.

Should she say that? You might contact her campaign and express an opinion of your own. I'm sure they'd be glad to listen to potential voters, since there's an election on.

GP
 

Celebrating the many positions of The Donald -- because you can never have too many positions

Plus some quick notes on my trip to Washington

DOONESBURY by G. B. Trudeau

[Click to enlarge.]

by Ken

Yesterday's trip to Washington was a resounding success -- and never mind that the famous 3am train out of NYC's Penn Station left more than half an hour late, and chugged into D.C.'s Union Station a full hour and half late. "Mechanical problems" is all we were told the first time as well as the two subsequent times that the Train That Didn't Seem Like It Could went into hibernation. What me worry? After all, I had a three-hour cushion built into my schedule, even if in truth I never really imagined having half of it eaten up.

On the plus side, however, the thunderstorms that the forecasters had insisted were planned for the area were apparently called off, if not the 90-plus temps under those unexpectedly beautiful blue skies. Not a drop of rain was encountered until, on the cheap-bus trip back (at something like a third of the advance-purchase senior fare for the train trip down) at about the latitude of the Lincoln Tunnel we drove into a deluge.

There's so much I'd love to talk about, but I don't want to try readers' patience, so before saying a few words, let me just note in connection with today's Sunday Doonesbury strip that, as I've pointed out repeatedly, multiple positions on every imaginable issue aren't a Trump invention. Taking on every imaginable position, including some of the candidate's own invention, on every imaginable issue was a hallmark of the 2008 campaign of Young Johnny McCranky. To give The Donald credit, though, he's orders of magnitude more flagrant, truculent, and unapologetic about it. As he is, come to think of it, about pretty much everything.

Now to return to yesterday morning, let me just say that with so much time to fill than I'd planned for before Francis Morrone's "Monumental Washington in the 1930s and 1940s")walking tour for the National Civic Art Society, the reason for the trip, which turned out to be one of the best I've done with Francis, which is saying a lot -- my goodness, the seemingly effortless command of so many different kinds of riveting material! Anyway, the trip was indeed accomplished in under 22 hours door to door (heading out at 1:25am and trudging back in about 11:15pm).


It's like you need binoculars -- to see from one end of the Russell Senate Office Building to the other. And it's not as if the subsequently added Dirksen and Hart Senate Office Buildings are exactly petite. (Click to enlarge.)

With so much less time than I'd imagined for pre-tour wandering, I just headed south from Union Station, after taking in its brackets to the west (the handsome old post office that now serves as the National Postal Museum) and east (the vaguely modern Federal Judiciary Center named for one of my heroes, the late Justice Thurgood Marshall). Meaning that I got to see, up close and personal, such sights as the cluster of Senate office buildings, starting -- in my ass-backwards route -- with Hart and only later, after strolling around the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress (not just the original, resplendent Jefferson building but the across-the-streets Adams and Madison), catching up with Dirksen and (gasp!) the palatial Russell (opened in 1909 and named for slimy Georgia Sen. Richard Russell in 1972). You almost need binoculars to see from one end of it to the other. Yikes!

Even though I've ridden past a lot of official D.C. buildings, I was still taken back -- taking them in at leisure on foot -- by the sheer scale of them. No wonder people who find their way to Washington with some kind of official title go kind of nuts! Of course, as Francis Morrone would point out later on our tour of the museums built in the '30s and '40s along the Constitution Avenue side of the Mall as well as the vast complex of government buildings that began taking shape at the same time in what became known as the Federal Triangle, across Constitution Avenue, that since buildings in Washington couldn't be built tall, in order to provide any decent amount of working space you had to build big, footprint-wise.

Still, I wasn't prepared for the megatastic size of the Supreme Court digs. I was thinking, you know, so you need nine suites, each containing a decent enough office for the boss, plus room for desks and files for the clerks. In actuality, though, it looks like you could provide office space for all the judges in the Americas and still have room for amenities like a video viewing space and maybe a nice rec room with Ping-Pong tables.


Can Justice Clarence come out and play? You can't begin to imagine from this view -- from all the way up top of the Capitol dome -- just how ginormous the Supreme Court building is. (If it helps, you can click on the picture to enlarge it a bit.)

While I was outside the Supreme Court palace, once I found the entrance (imagine my surprise to discover that the grandiloquent side I encountered first on my backwards route, facing 2nd Street N.E., is the back!), I had to fight the urge to shout out something like "Can Justice Clarence come out and play?" Yes, I know that on a Saturday morning in July you wouldn't expect to find a Supreme Court justice at the office, but I was thinking that Justice Clarence can never get too early a start preparing all those questions he'll be asking in next term's oral arguments.

#

Making the US a Petro-State: White House Keeps Alive GOP Hopes for Lifting the Oil Export Ban

Thanks to the people at ForestEthics, we have key Senate phone numbers for you in nice graphic form. Be sure to add Barbara Boxer to the call list — (202) 224-3553.

by Gaius Publius

Short and brutally ugly. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment. The White House is reportedly the chief negotiator on behalf of Big Oil's attempt to lift the crude oil export ban. As part of the government shutdown negotiation, the White House, in collusion with Democrats in the Senate, is willing to lift the crude oil export ban in exchange for "renewable energy ... conservation benefits ... and other party priorities" (see below for this language). More here; search for "oil".

To be clear, lifting the four-decades-old crude oil export ban would be a disaster. In particular, it would:

1. Give the GOP and the American Petroleum Institute (API) a huge win on a top-priority item.
    
2. Throw a lifeline to struggling U.S. oil producers, many of whom are terribly over-leveraged and would otherwise default on their debt. (This is one reason API wants the ban lifted so badly.)
    
3. Bail out the industry's debt-holders (banks and other entities), whose money is at risk should these oil producers fail (yes, another bank bailout).
    
4. Add a great deal to the carbon that enters the atmosphere by removing a choke-point for bringing extracted U.S. carbon to the global market. (Think of this as offsetting the Keystone pipeline rejection. Instead of preventing carbon from coming to the market, this would enable it.)
    
5. Offset any good Obama may be trying to do in Paris, by a lot.
    
6. Offset or destroy his attempt to create a "good on carbon" legacy. Obama, simply put, is acting like a "Big Oil enabler," and should the deal go through, he deserves to see that phrase on his tombstone every time he looks at it.

Bottom line, President "good on carbon" Obama and the White House are the driving force behind a Big Oil top priority, if it can traded for "other party priorities." For perspective, realize we have to strangle fossil fuel production and consumption, not enable it, to have a hope in hell of surviving the chaos that's about to be locked in. Obama, the Republicans, and every Democrat in Congress who votes Yes to lifting this ban is voting to end your children's future, not preserve it.

(They probably think their own climate-chaos exit is secure, as Chris Hedges notes here: "Those who are despoiling the earth do so for personal gain, believing they can use their privilege to escape the fate that will befall the human species." I'm not sure they're going to escape successfully. The carbon-enabling elites had better be living in Sweden, with Blackwater mercs surrounding their isolated compounds, when the cascading collapses occur — though I'm not sure Sweden, or Canada, will let them all in.)

Make no mistake. While the world works hard on a deal in Paris to stave off carbon emissions, the White House and the Senate are brokering a deal (currently S.1372) to "pave the way for the US to become a petro state," as one commenter put it.

Feeding the beast that kills us. Crude oil production needs to be strangled, not given new markets (source).

For more, here's Elana Schor, writing in Politico (no link; subscription only):

White House keeps GOP hopes for oil exports alive
By Elana Schor
12/08/2015 04:04 PM EDT

The White House on Tuesday declined to rule out accepting a Congressional measure to allow U.S. oil exports for the first time in four decades, a potential signal to senior Democrats who are considering striking a deal with the GOP to overturn the ban in exchange for other party priorities.

The White House "continues to oppose" a legislative provision rolling back the decades-old ban on exporting U.S. crude, spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters, "but I'm just not going to get into a detailed list of things we are going to veto or not veto." ...

Climate Hawks Vote political director Brad Johnson urged President Barack Obama to close the door to oil exports to reinforce the administration's goal of reaching a strong global emissions pact at the climate change conference in Paris this week.

"All the efforts of his climate negotiators in Paris could be blown away by this one boneheaded appeasement of Big Oil," Johnson said.

One official at a group fighting to preserve the export ban said environmentalists are concerned that the White House's "door [is] wide open for wheeling and dealing and trading."

Some in the White House "think there's a way to get a good conservation package" in exchange for allowing oil exports, said a source off the Hill who is closely tracking the talks who requested anonymity. ...

Though Johnson slammed as "unconscionable" the growing openness among some Democrats and green groups to a trade-off that would roll back the export ban in exchange for renewable energy and conservation benefits, that willingness to compromise showed no signs of abating on Tuesday.

The so-called "green groups" are not innocent bystanders. Many are enablers, along with so-called "liberals" like Barbara Boxer:

Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.), top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, shrugged off environmentalist fears about trading conservation and renewables' benefits for oil exports. There is "division" among green groups over whether to cut a deal, she said in a brief interview. "I've heard environmentalists say this is a great opportunity; others say it's not," she said.

Any deal would also likely include some type of aid for refineries in the Northeast that have benefited from cheap domestic crude that cannot be exported currently. Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) said he said he is in discussions for an approach "to make whole American refineries that in many cases would simply go out of business" should exports be permitted.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters that oil exports were not objectionable enough to sink a possible deal on their own.

Ending the 1970s-era ban on exports, the year's top priority for the American Petroleum Institute, is "not where we want to go," Hoyer said. "But on the other hand, if there were substantial agreements by the Republicans on some things that we thought were very important, that might be something" to consider during the budget talks.

Among the perps are some of the solar companies, who would get a small benefit for themselves from a Democratic "compromise." For example:

SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive, head of the nation's biggest rooftop solar power company, fueled talk of a deal that would marry clean-energy tax benefits with conservation funding - as well as other Democratic priorities - during an interview in Paris yesterday. If allowing exports "in return, enabled us to have long-term visibility into continuing to incentivize and promote solar, then I think that's a fair trade," Rive said.

Another perp is the National Wildlife Federation. Yes, NWF is supports the deal. Feel free to read their sell-out logic for yourself. One reason we can't have nice climate is our enemies. The other is our "friends," like NWF, Barbara Boxer, Barack Obama and the rest of that crew.

What You Can Do

The deal is not done, and the carbon part of the shutdown negotiation may be sabotaged for any number of reasons, including your opposition. But it's an all-hands-on-deck moment. If your senators are listed below, please call them now and say, "To keep the earth habitable, the ban must stand."

Democrats & Independents
Schumer (New York) — likely brokering the deal
Bennet (Colorado)
Booker (New Jersey)
Coons (Delaware)
Donnelly (Indiana)
Heinrich (New Mexico)
Udall (New Mexico)
Warner (Virginia)
Kaine (Virginia)
King (I-Maine)
Tester (Montana)

For good measure:
Carper (Delaware)
Reid (Nevada)

Republicans
Ayotte (New Hampshire)
Blunt (Missouri)
Collins (Maine)
Portman (Ohio)
Toomey (Pennsylvania)

Senate phone numbers here. You can also support the strongest pro-climate candidate in the presidential race, Bernie Sanders (adjust the split any way you like at the link).

The deadline for the biggest climate tipping point — irreversible warming to an uncivilized planet — is less than 10 years away, by my estimation, if we do nothing to stop the carbon industry and its lust for money. Ten years — which means we should be permanently decelerating emissions as aggressively as possible, and doing it now. Everything on the climate front is happening faster than anyone predicted — sea level rise, glacial melt, everything. Preserving the crude oil ban is at least as important is stopping the Keystone pipeline, and likely more so, given the number of other pipelines we continue to build.

This really needs to stop, these accelerating emissions — by which I mean, be stopped. Please, if they won't take action, you still can. Because frankly, if we don't manage the chaos that's on the horizon, it will manage us, and I hear chaos is a very bad manager.

GP

Merkley & Sanders Introduce Bill to End New and Non-Producing Oil and Gas Leases on Public Lands

Source: Bureau of Land Management. Does not show area available for offshore drilling

by Gaius Publius

The idea of ending the hypocritical role of the federal government in aiding and betting the warming of our planet is not a hard idea to hold, especially if you're a climate-aware citizen, or climate-aware president. Yet, for some reason, the federal government, the guardian of land owned by the public, is still in the coal, oil and gas business.

Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley want to end that, with a bill called the "Keep It In The Ground" Act. Meteor Blades at Daily Kos (my emphasis):

Merkley and Sanders introduce bill to end new and non-producing oil and gas leases on public lands

Flanked by Sierra Club president Aaron Mair, tribal rights attorney Tara Zhaabowekwe Houska‎, and 350.org founder Bill McKibben, Sen. Jeff Merkley and Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced legislation Wednesday to stop issuing leases to extract fossil fuels from on- and off-shore federal lands. Titled the Keep It in the Ground Act, the bill would also terminate all existing federal leases that are not producing. Co-sponsors of the legislation are Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer, Ben Cardin, Kirsten Gillibrand, Patrick Leahy, and Elizabeth Warren.

Behind the legislation is a simple message: When the common good depends on our adapting to and ameliorating the impacts of climate change, it makes no sense for public land meant for that common good to continue as a source of the fuels that are driving global warming.

Standing with a crowd of supporters near the Capitol in Washington, Sanders and Merkley praised the aggressive grassroots environmental movement that has been at the forefront of climate change activism, including opposition to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that looks closer than ever to extinction.

The two senators and Mair also spoke about ensuring that workers in the fossil fuel industry are not left behind. Merkely said their legislation, in particular, and fighting climate change, in general, by ending the extraction and burning of fossil fuels should not be an exercise in green vs. blue. Ours, he said, "must be a green and blue movement" with eco-activists working side by side with workers in the transition to renewable energy sources now underway.

Sanders said we have a "moral responsibility" not to bequeath a planet to our kids and grandkids "that is unhealthy and in some cases uninhabitable." You can't just "talk the talk" and then support extracting huge amounts of oil and gas from federal lands, he declared.

There's quite a bit more at the link, including this, about how to protect workers during the transition.

Mair, who has been president of the Sierra Club since May, said what is needed is a "green TARP" for fossil fuel workers, referencing the 2008 bail-out of financial institutions. Activists need to push a fully funded clean-green energy transition that protects workers, he added. He recommended "retooling" America just as was done to defeat the Axis powers during World War II. Houska, a member of the Couchiching First Nation, spoke in favor of the legislation, noting that indigenous people have been in the forefront of the climate change fight because they are among the most affected by those changes and by the extraction of fossil fuels.

Note the reference to World War II and its "retooling" of America. If I remember my history, that wasn't a "free market" effort — as in, General Motors didn't get to "free market decide" how many tanks and jeeps to build. The word for that kind of effort is "emergency mobilization." Stay tuned for more; this actually represents a way out of the worst of the mess we're headed for.

The article also notes that "Current extraction of fossil fuel from federal lands and waters accounts for nearly one-fourth of all emissions in the United States" (my emphasis) so this is not nothing. On the other hand, it will take quite a bit to get this passed.

How You Can Help

What this bill does:

1. It lays down a marker, a stake in the ground. "Keep it in the ground" is a moral obligation and a doable one. It's also easy to understand and an easy phrase to remember.

You can help — by asking, as the writer says, "every candidate for public office, Democrat or Republican—from city councils to state legislatures to Congress—whether they agree climate change has created what Sanders calls a 'major, major, major' crisis and if so, what they propose to do to meet the challenges that crisis presents." As the writer correctly notes, "Anybody who blows off such questions or treats them as a side issue is worthy of progressives' disdain, not our support."

2. It tells you what a President Sanders would strive to do if he achieves the Oval Office. That's big. Will any other announced candidate back this bill, and by implication, support the ending of climate-killing carbon leases on public land?

You can help — by supporting Bernie Sanders in his bid for that office. Adjust the split any way you wish at the link. You can also help by asking Mr. O'Malley and Ms. Clinton the same question. They deserve the right to answer.

GP