Since They All Do It, Republicans Refuse To Make It Explicitly Illegal To Take Foreign Campaign Cash-- What Kind Of A Banana Republic Have They Created Around Us?

The Democrats are corrupt enough, but the Republicans are on another planet entirely-- or at least in another culture, a culture of corruption. It's no wonder Trump thinks he can get away with giving the Russians a tacit green light to pay bounties on American soldiers stationed overseas. The Republicans have no intention of holding him to account and no matter what the House Democrats do, Moscow Mitch McConnell will not allow any accountability for Trump-- let alone the Russians-- in the Senate. And that's not all. Today, Senate Republicans made sure Republicans taking illicit campaign cash from Russia or China or Saudi Arabia or Israel-- or any flea-bitten country offering a bribe to a corrupt president or presidential candidate-- will face no consequences. Hard to believe, right?

CNN's Jeremy Herb: "The Senate will incorporate the annual intelligence policy legislation into the National Defense Authorization Act-- but only after stripping language from the intelligence bill that would have required presidential campaigns to report offers of foreign election help. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Tuesday that Senate Republicans forced the removal of the election reporting provision as a condition to include the intelligence bill on the must-pass defense policy legislation." Here's the back story:

Earlier this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved an amendment on an 8-7 vote from Warner and GOP Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, which added a provision to the Intelligence Authorization Act requiring campaigns to notify federal authorities about offers of foreign election help.

That bill, however, was unlikely to get Senate floor time on its own, which is why it's being included in the National Defense Authorization Act. The effort to strip the foreign election help provision from the intelligence bill was not a surprise, as acting Senate Intelligence Chairman Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, predicted earlier this month it would be removed before the bill was on the floor, because of an objection from the Senate Rules Committee.

Warner bemoaned what he called a "back-room deal" to strip out the provision.

"If my Republican colleagues want to strip this legislation out of the NDAA behind closed doors, then I'm going to offer it up as an amendment to force an up-or-down vote and put every member of this body on the record," Warner said on the Senate floor.

The amendment approved by the Intelligence Committee was an adopted version of Warner's FIRE Act, which he introduced last year. It would require all presidential campaign officials report to the FBI any contacts with foreign nationals trying either to make campaign donations or coordinate with a campaign.

Warner tried to bring up his bill on the Senate floor several times over the past year, but Republicans objected each time. When Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, blocked the bill in June 2019, calling it a "blatant political stunt." President Donald Trump applauded her efforts on Twitter.

It's not clear if Warner's amendment will get a vote. The Senate is debating the defense authorization legislation on the floor this week.

America is a nation in decline-- and the national response to the pandemic is just a symptom, not a cause. You feel it in your gut, don't you? Early yesterday morning Noah Smith laid out the whole sordid mess for Bloomberg News, pointing how we just gradually slid into it without even noticing. Our national decline, he wrote, "started with little things that people got used to. Americans drove past empty construction sites and didn’t even think about why the workers weren’t working, then wondered why roads and buildings took so long to finish. They got used to avoiding hospitals because of the unpredictable and enormous bills they’d receive. They paid 6% real-estate commissions, never realizing that Australians were paying 2%. They grumbled about high taxes and high health-insurance premiums and potholed roads, but rarely imagined what it would be like to live in a system that worked better." He pointed out that this seeping "decline in the general effectiveness of U.S. institutions will impose increasing costs and burdens on Americans. And if it eventually leads to a general loss of investor confidence in the country, the damage could be much greater."

Do you really want to be part of a country where your countrymen elected a blob like Donald Trump president? Moscow Mitch Senate Majority Leader? A country where the less bad choice will be Amy McGrath, Joe Biden, Collin Peterson, who, this week, joined Republicans to vote against expanding healthcare during the pandemic and against protecting renters from eviction for the duration?

The most immediate cost of U.S. decline-- and the most vivid demonstration-- comes from the country’s disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic. Leadership failures were pervasive and catastrophic at every level-- the president, agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration, and state and local leaders all fumbled the response to the greatest health threat in a century. As a result, the U.S. is suffering a horrific surge of infections in states such as Arizona, Texas and Florida while states that were battered early on are still struggling. Countries such as Italy that are legendary for government dysfunction and were hit hard by the virus have crushed the curve of infection, while the U.S. just set a daily record for case growth and shows no sign of slowing down.

This utter failure to suppress a disease that most other countries managed to contain will have real economic costs for Americans, as fear of the virus drives people back into their homes and businesses suffer.

...But the consequences of U.S. decline will far outlast coronavirus. With its high housing costs, poor infrastructure and transit, endemic gun violence, police brutality and bitter political and racial divisions, the U.S. will be a less appealing place for high-skilled workers to live. That means companies will find other countries in Europe, Asia and elsewhere a more attractive destination for investment, robbing the U.S. of jobs, depressing wages and draining away the local spending that powers the service economy. That in turn will exacerbate some of the worst trends of U.S. decline-- less tax money means even more urban decay as infrastructure, education and social-welfare programs are forced to make big cuts. Anti-immigration policies will throw away the country’s most important source of skilled labor and weaken a university system already under tremendous pressure from state budget cuts.

Almost every systematic economic advantage possessed by the U.S. is under threat. Unless there’s a huge push to turn things around-- to bring back immigrants, sustain research universities, make housing cheaper, lower infrastructure costs, reform the police and restore competence to the civil service-- the result could be decades of stagnating or even declining living standards.

And a biggest danger might come later. The U.S. has long enjoyed a so-called exorbitant privilege as the financial center of the world, with the dollar as the lynchpin of the global financial system. That means the U.S. has been able to borrow money cheaply, and Americans have been able to sustain their lifestyles through cheap imports. But if enough investors-- foreign and domestic-- lose confidence in the U.S.’s general effectiveness as a country, that advantage will vanish.

If capital begins to abandon the U.S. and the dollar in large amounts, the currency will crash and Americans will find themselves paying much more for everything from cars to televisions to gasoline to imported food. Interest rates will be raised in an attempt to lure back investment capital, and the country might undergo a period of stagflation worse than the 1970s. Large-scale unrest would undoubtedly result and-- in the worst-case scenario-- the U.S. could collapse like Venezuela.

This is an outcome to be avoided at all costs. But it’s an outcome that is no longer out of the realm of possibility, thanks to the complacency, arrogance and misplaced priorities of U.S. leaders and the deep and bitter divisions among U.S. voters. If the U.S. goes from rich, world-straddling colossus to floundering dysfunctional developing nation in just a few decades, it will be one of the most spectacular instances of civilizational decline in world history. Every mind in the country should be bent towards the task of reversing the decline and restoring national competence.

What the Democratic Party should be offering now is a bold, vigorous, reformist leader with a vibrant vision to drag the country out of this existential morass and to inspire the whole country and persuade it that turning to fascism is not the solution. Instead... well, you already know. A young filmmaker, less than a third my age, asked me if I ever consider going to live in another country. I did that while Nixon was president. I loved it and it was the best thing I ever did. I'm too old to do it again. He and his wife should consider it, though.

Traitor by Chip Proser