So What’s Next in the Trump Saga?

The son of the POTUS has pretty much admitted to breaking the law, in public.

In two tweets this morning, Donald Trump Jr. flatly confirmed that the son, son-in-law and campaign chairman of the president of the United States actively sought information that had been clearly and unequivocally described to him as coming from the Russian government — precisely because he believed it would damage his opponent in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump Jr. tweeted out the entire email chain of an exchange between him and publicist Rob Goldstone, who had sought to arrange a meeting for him with a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, at the behest of one of Goldstone’s clients, pop star Emin Agalarov. The exchange had previously been reported to show that Trump Jr. had cause to know that at this meeting, he would be given information about Hillary Clinton, the source for which was somehow the Russian government.

But is this really against the law?

“The emails are simply put damning as a legal matter,” explains Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department special counsel and current editor of the legal site Just Security. “The text of the emails provide very clear evidence of participation in a scheme to involve the Russian government in federal election interference, in a form that is prohibited by federal criminal law.”

Jens David Ohlin, a law professor at Cornell University, is even blunter: “It’s a shocking admission of a criminal conspiracy.”

Trump Jr.‘s decision to take the meeting in and of itself likely violated campaign finance law, which does not require you to actually get anything useful from foreigners. In other words, the mere fact that Trump Jr. asked for information from a Russian national about Clinton might have constituted a federal crime.

“The law states that no person shall knowingly solicit or accept from a foreign national any contribution to a campaign of an item of value,” Goodman tells me. “There is now a clear case that Donald Trump Jr. has met all the elements of the law, which is a criminally enforced federal statute.”

Per Vox, here is the statute in question. Here are a couple of pertinent passages:

A foreign national shall not, directly or indirectly, make a contribution or a donation of money or other thing of value, or expressly or impliedly promise to make a contribution or a donation, in connection with any Federal, State, or local election. …

… A solicitation is an oral or written communication that, construed as reasonably understood in the context in which it is made, contains a clear message asking, requesting, or recommending that another person make a contribution, donation, transfer of funds, or otherwise provide anything of value.

See also The Most Gobsmacking Details From Trump Jr.’s Russian Meeting Email Chain.

The question is, what happens next? Is somebody going to indict Junior? Who would that be? What’s the follow up? I honestly don’t know.

Donald Trump, Jr.: How Stupid Is He?

Although nobody comes out and says it, after Junior voluntarily admitted that he took a meeting with a Russian lawyer because she had promised information that would help his father’s campaign, the biggest question of the day must be, how dumb is this kid, anyway? 

The New York Times had a story that began this way —

President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., was promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton before agreeing to meet with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign, according to three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.

The meeting was also attended by the president’s campaign chairman at the time, Paul J. Manafort, as well as by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Manafort and Mr. Kushner recently disclosed the meeting, though not its content, in confidential government documents described to The New York Times.

But instead of denying that the meeting had anything to do with getting dirt on Hillary, Fredo Trump admitted it.

I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign. I was not told her name prior to the meeting. I asked Jared and Paul to attend, but told them nothing of the substance. We had a meeting in June 2016. After pleasantries were exchanged, the woman stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Ms. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.

Apparently, in Junior’s mind there was no collusion, since (he says) the Russian lawyer had no useful information. But he took the meeting with the Russian lawyer in the expectation that she would provide information to help the Trump campaign. Whether the information was of any actual use is beside the point.

Andrew Prokop writes for Vox,

Still, Trump Jr. has already changed his story about this meeting several times — first claiming he had no such meeting, then claiming it was about the topic of Russian adoptions, and only now admitting he agreed to take it because an “acquaintance” he met when Trump’s Miss Universe pageant was held in Moscow told him this person “might have information helpful to the campaign.”

This report comes after a pair of Wall Street Journal scoops revealing that a Republican operative contacted Russian hackers in an effort to obtain Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails — and that the operative suggested that Trump adviser Michael Flynn was involved with his effort.

Together, these stories provide our first real indications that high-level people on Trump’s team attempted to work with people tied to the Russian government to get information that could impact the campaign and hurt Clinton’s chances.

We don’t know if the Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was acting on behalf of the Russian government. We don’t know, really, what information she may have provided. Everyone involved insists that Donald Trump himself knew nothing about any of this. But Junior’s own admission tells us that he and other high-level elements of the Trump campaign were open to collusion with foreign nationals on behalf of the campaign, which is, by some accounts, a violation of federal campaign law.

And Jonathan Chait wrote,

Trump Jr.’s latest defense is that while he sought damaging information from Veselnitskaya, she failed to deliver any. However, the timing of events around this meeting is instructive. The hacker Guccifer announced the theft of Clinton emails the month before, and Guccifer’s only publicly known connection to Russia was his use of Russian proxy servers. But three days after the meeting with the Trump campaign, Julian Assange, Putin’s pass-through publishing source for email hacks, announced, “We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton … We have emails pending publication, that is correct.”

The most interesting follow-up question is, what was the nature of the damaging information that Veselnitskaya promised? Stolen emails, perhaps?

See also Josh Marshall:

The Timesreports that they got the information from “three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting and two others with knowledge of it.” They apparently talked after the release of the first story. This is highly, highly significant. Needless to say, advisors to the White House are not in the business of taking highly damaging stories and volunteering new information which makes them catastrophically damaging. The only reason a President’s allies ever do something like that is either to get ahead of something much more damaging or get a first crack at shaping the public understanding of something much more damaging. There’s really no other explanation. We don’t know yet what drove them to volunteer such highly damaging information. Five of them did it. It wasn’t a matter of one person going rogue.

Junior claimed the real purpose of the meeting was to enable U.S. adoptions of Russian orphans. Back to Jonathan Chait:

One of the Russian government’s highest priorities is to repeal an American law, named after a murdered Russian dissident who exposed corruption at the hands of Vladimir Putin, which allows financial penalties for Russian human-rights violators. Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with the Trump campaign, is spearheading this effort. Russia retaliated for the hated law by suspending American adoptions of Russian children: A discussion of adoption inherently implies a discussion of favors to be granted to Putin’s regime.

So there may be some truth to the adoption story, but that hardly makes it innocent. Obviously, Putin will want a quid pro quo. And this was before the election, never mind the inauguration.

And, as Josh Marshall wrote also, Junior’s claim that he thought that the DNC and Hillary Clinton might be colluding with Russians is preposterous. It’s the sort of excuse somebody with very little imagination might come up with, though.

See also Donald Trump Jr. just contradicted a whole bunch of White House denials of Russian contacts.

The Last Word on the G20 Summit

Chris Uhlmann of Australia Broadcasting Corporation sums up Trump’s performance at the G20 Summit better than anyone else.

See also:

ABC’s political editor Chris Uhlmann didn’t pull any punches when he delivered his wrap-up of Trump’s appearance at the conference, calling him an “uneasy, lonely, awkward figure” who was left “isolated and friendless” with “no desire and no capacity to lead the world”. …

Uhlmann also pointed out that given the uncomfortable divide between himself and the most of the other G20 leaders on the Paris Climate Accord, a “deft” President would have found a topic with which to rally them.

“And he had the perfect one: North Korea’s missile tests,” the reporter explained.

“Other leaders expected it [a statement condemning it], they were prepared to back it, but it never came.”

At the end of the two minute video, Uhlmann provided a chilling prediction for the future under this US President.

“Donald Trump has pressed fast forward on the decline of the United States as a global leader. Some will cheer the decline of America, but I think we’ll miss it when it’s gone — and that’s the biggest threat to the values of the West, which he claims to hold so dear.”

No More Leader of the Free World

I was curious to know where the term “leader of the free world” even came from, and found this:

The first time the phrase “leader of the free world” appeared in TheNew York Times was in a November 1948 essay by the British economist Barbara Ward, which urged Western unity against the communist threat. With its unchallenged economic might, the United States was “potentially the political leader of the free world.” The term was commonly employed to refer to the United States from the late-1940s onward because of the weakness of the other democratic states (and possible candidates for leadership) like Britain and France, as well as U.S. direction to the anti-communist coalition, including Marshall Aid, the formation of NATO, and intervention in the Korean War.

And just what was or is the “free world”? Why is that term still in use?

It was first widely employed in World War II to describe the countries resisting the fascist states. … The idea of a free world peaked during the height of the Cold War, when the U.S. government depicted a Manichean struggle between a democratic alliance and a communist realm set on world domination. At a press conference in 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “[T]he reason we call it ‘free world’ is because each nation in it wants to remain independent under its own government and not under some dictatorial form of government. So, to the basic ideals, all of us must subscribe.”

The President of the United States continued to be referred to as the “leader of the free world” even after the Cold War ended, although exactly why is a bit hazy. The United States has played a leadership role, for better or worse, in many international organizations, such as NATO and G20. The term mostly seems to have been a nod to the liberal world order that formed during World War II and the Cold War.

Well, that’s over now. The other big kids in the Free World room don’t consider Donald Trump to be a leader, but an annoyance to be worked around.

For years the United States was the dominant force and set the agenda at the annual gathering of the leaders of the world’s largest economies.

But on Friday, when President Trump met with other leaders at the Group of 20 conference, he found the United States isolated on everything from trade to climate change, and faced with the prospect of the group’s issuing a statement on Saturday that lays bare how the United States stands alone. …

…What recent events have underscored, though — and especially at the G-20 — is that no nation is today large or powerful enough to impose rules on everyone else. In advancing his views, Mr. Trump has alienated allies and made the United States seem like its own private island.

Trump is doing this in the name of creating American jobs, but seems to me this is a losing strategy. Our former allies (under Trump’s leadership, the U.S. has no allies) are threatening a trade war if he goes through with some of his protectionist plans.

Targets could include American whiskey imports. “I don’t want to tell you in detail what we’re doing,” Mr. Juncker said. “But what I would like to tell you is that within a few days — we won’t need two months for that — we could react with countermeasures.”

The Italian prime minister, Paolo Gentiloni, warned that new protectionist trade measures could bring “contagion” that would slow the growth of the world economy. “We cannot waste this moment of recovery, giving signals of protectionism or of incorrect trade behavior,” he said.

But as Mr. Trump contemplates protectionism, Europe and Japan reached a landmark free trade agreement this week. Mexico and China, two of the United States’ largest trading partners, have been mulling their own deal. The world is moving ahead regardless.

… and without the United States. See also “The End of the Anglo-American Order?” at the BBC, “G20 Closes With Rebuke to Trump’s Climate Change Stance” at CNN, and “Trump leaves leaders fearing the future as G-20 summit closes” at the Washington Post.

Trump’s meeting with Putin also proved to be an embarrassment. See Putin 1, Trump 0.

Hobby Lobby and the Bible Totem

After a stressful week I’m ready to indulge in some schadenfreude over Hobby Lobby’s recent tangle with the Justice Department.

The arts-and-crafts retailer Hobby Lobby has agreed to pay a $3 million fine for illegally importing thousands of ancient Iraqi clay artifacts smuggled into the United States, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.

In addition to the fine, Hobby Lobby will forfeit thousands of clay bullae, cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals that were falsely labeled and shipped to the company through the United Arab Emirates and Israel, according to a civil complaint and settlement agreement in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

Hobby Lobby says they didn’t know the tablets were stolen.

According to the complaint, Hobby Lobby got conflicting information about where the artifacts had been stored and never met or communicated with the dealer selling them. When it came time to pay, the company wired money to seven separate bank accounts. …

…Starting in late 2010, a United Arab Emirates-based dealer sent 10 packages to three different Hobby Lobby addresses in Oklahoma City, with shipping labels reading “ceramic tiles” or “clay tiles (sample),” according to the complaint. No formal entries were made for the shipments. Prosecutors said the use of multiple addresses was “consistent with methods used by cultural property smugglers to avoid scrutiny by Customs.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection later intercepted five additional packages, all of them falsely declaring that the artifacts inside came from Turkey. A final shipment containing about 1,000 clay bullae arrived at one of Hobby Lobby’s addresses from Israel in September 2011. That one also misrepresented the artifacts’ country of origin, according to the complaint.

They didn’t know the artifacts were stolen. They didn’t understand the laws about shipping antiquities into the country. Yeah, right.

Making all this even juicier is that the Green family that owns Hobby Lobby also is the main force behind a new Museum of the Bible, scheduled to open soon in Washington DC near the Mall. The Greens had promised to house more than 44,000 biblical texts and artifacts in this museum. Museum administration is in damage control mode, righteously declaring that all the tablets the Greens were importing were not intended to be put in the museum. So the Greens were going to line their driveway with them?

Or, maybe not.

Candida Moss, the co-author of a forthcoming book on the Green family’s rapid acquisition of Biblical antiquities and attempts to promote the influence of Christianity on public life, said that the museum has tried to distance itself from its chairman and his craft stores since the media began reporting on his antiquities acquisitions two years ago.

“The Greens remain very much involved. Green is still head of the board,” she said. “The fact is, they’re not as separate as they claim. Many of the artifacts will be on loan from the Green collection. There are other items in their collection that scholars are asking questions about.”

Brent Clark, an Oklahoma lawyer also working on a manuscript about the Green family, agreed: “Steve Green is going to be in charge of that thing, come hell or high water.”

The museum is still expected to be a popular tourist attraction, but scholars are likely to keep their distance.

Yates, the art crime expert, said that many major journals of archaeology research refuse to publish articles based on artifacts whose provenance can’t be proven, and researchers won’t be willing to do work that they can’t publish.

I’m not an archaeologist, but it’s not hard to imagine that if an artifact is looted from its original site so that its provenance is lost, its value for historical research is greatly diminished.

Candida Moss and Joel Baden, who are writing a book titled Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby, wrote an op ed for the New York Times that vigorously pooh-poohed the idea that the Green’s looted stuff was not intended for the museum. Further, they allege that a whole lot of the stuff that is scheduled to be displayed in the museum has a sketchy provenance as well.

Although we can now point to a large number of items in the collection that were illicitly acquired, there remain thousands and thousands more about which we can say nothing: not because their provenance is clean, but because it is unknown. Though scholars have been pleading for years with the Greens and the Museum of the Bible to provide all of the information for all of their artifacts, there has been no transparency whatsoever.

What part of “Thou shalt not steal” skipped your attention, folks?

The particular legal issue of falsified import papers is merely the tip of a much larger ethical iceberg. The real issue here is the black market in looted antiquities, a market that has loomed beneath the surface of storied museum collections and private holdings for many years, but that became especially visible during the first Iraq War and the period of regional destabilization that followed.

It is not the case, as some have alleged, that Hobby Lobby bought artifacts from ISIS. Though it is true that ISIS profits by looting artifacts and passing them on to dealers and collectors in the West, the shipments for which Hobby Lobby was scrutinized predate the rise of ISIS.

But Hobby Lobby did participate in and perpetuate the same market from which ISIS profits. If collectors like the Green family were unwilling to purchase unprovenanced antiquities — items that do not have a clear and clean history of discovery and purchase — the black market would dry up. As long as there are buyers, there will be sellers. It is because collectors like Hobby Lobby are willing to pay a premium and look the other way that looting continues. They dramatically expanded the market for biblical antiquities in the late 2000s.

Note that Moss is a professor of New Testament studies at Notre Dame, and Baden is a professor of the Hebrew Bible at Yale.

The point is not just that the Greens have been encouraging the looting of historical artifacts in the name of “preserving” them, they’ve also been breaking biblical law to stock their glorified Museum of the Bible. Yeah, that makes the Greens hypocrites of the first order, but what else?

The whole champions of Christianity pose may have just been a marketing ploy all along. But it’s also the case that for the more fanatical Christians in the U.S., the Bible ceased to be a scripture a long time ago. It’s become more of a totem, a sacred symbol assumed to have spiritual power that represents the tribe of self-proclaimed conservative Christians. What it actually says about anything is irrelevant.

More TechnoDukkha

The internet service went out Monday night. It was back briefly on Tuesday, but this is the first time I’ve been online since Monday. And I’m exhausted from yelling at people at the Cable company.

The phones were out too, and here in the country my cell phone coverage is spotty. The cable guys were not coming to the house unless they could call ahead and get confirmation someone was there. And we weren’t getting the calls. By this afternoon I was telling the poor people answering the phones that they had damn well better send someone over, confirmation or not, or I was going to eat their offspring.

I’ll post something tomorrow.

 

Stuff to Read Over the Fourth

Some articles I want to comment on before they scroll out of memory —

Lindy West, “Save Free Speech From Trolls

West calls out the Right for “weaponizing” the concept of freedom of speech to shout down dissent or criticism, especially when it comes from women.

Nothing is more important than the First Amendment, the internet men say, provided you interpret the First Amendment exactly the same way they do: as a magic spell that means no one you don’t like is allowed to criticize you.

In other words, they react to people expressing disagreement with them as an infringement on their free speech rights. This is something I’ve written about before; see “First Amendment Primer (for Righties)” from February 2013:

Righties do love their First Amendment rights, but they don’t understand them very well. For example, on the Right it is commonly believed the right to freedom of speech includes a right to not be disagreed with. (This is something I’ve written about before, so for examples, see “This Is Rich,” and “America Has Lost Its Mind.”)

People, read the First Amendment. It says Congress cannot infringe in freedom of speech or the press, and this prohibition has been extended to state government by the 14th Amendment. In a legal sense, this refers to censorship, and censorship is something that only government can do.  A privately owned newspaper or magazine has an absolute right to not publish everything submitted to it, and that is not censorship, either. I have a right to delete comments that irritate me, and that is not censorship, either.  And if somebody expresses disagreement with you, that is so not censorship.

By the same token, if a mob of people somehow prevent you from speaking, or thugs who don’t like your editorials come and smash up your printing press, that’s not censorship, although it would certainly be breaking other laws.

I’m sorry to say that some of this hairbrained thinking has crept into the Left. After Kathy Griffin’s recent, stupid “trump beheading” stunt, I saw a lot of “don’t censor Kathy!” and “stand with Kathy’s First Amendment rights” on social media. But I didn’t see anybody attempting to censor Kathy, nor did I see anybody saying she had no right to publish the dumb photo. All I saw was criticism. Criticism is not censorship. And just because you have a right to smear yourself with honey and sit on an anthill, that doesn’t mean you should.

McKay Coppins, “How the Left Lost Its Mind“ 

The Trump era has given rise to a vast alternative left-wing media infrastructure that operates largely out of the view of casual news consumers, but commands a massive audience and growing influence in liberal America. There are polemical podcasters and partisan click farms; wild-eyed conspiracists and cynical fabulists. Some traffic heavily in rumor and wage campaigns of misinformation; others are merely aggregators and commentators who have carved out a corner of the web for themselves. But taken together, they form a media universe where partisan hysteria is too easily stoked, and fake news can travel at the speed of light.

Before we go on, let me try to quiet the cries of “False equivalence!” before they begin: No, these personalities and publications do not yet wield the same influence in the Democratic Party that their counterparts do in the GOP. But ignoring them would be a mistake. In recent months, some of the most irresponsible actors in this world have proven alarmingly adept at influencing venerated figures of the left—from public intellectuals, to world-famous celebrities, to elected officials.

See also “The Rise of Progressive Fake News.”

I think trolls and fake news did a lot of damage to the Democrats last year, and people across the liberal-progressive spectrum were falling for it. Clinton supporters were being told Bernie Sanders was a friend to the NRA known to hate women; Sanders supporters were being told Hillary Clinton would be indicted any minute now. None of that helped. And it seems to be getting worse.

Aaron Blake: “The biggest winner in the current health-care debate: Single-payer

 … after weeks of debate, there is one clear winner so far: single-payer health care.

No, single-payer isn’t going to happen at the end of this debate — or even the end of this year or this decade, necessarily. But the logical foundations for it are being laid in our political debate just about every single day. And when you pair that with the rising public support for government-run health care, it’s clear in which direction this whole debate is trending.

This article cheered me up, needless to say.

The most surprising aspect of the current health-care debate, for me, has been how Republicans have essentially given up on making the conservative case for their bills. They aren’t even arguing that the free market would lead to higher-quality care, efficiency and medical advancements, as the GOP of old might have. Instead, they are trying to obscure the reality that their bills would cut Medicaid by hundreds of millions of dollars (versus where funding is currently set) and would increase the number of uninsured Americans by potential 20 million or more. …

…That political reality has also basically forced Republicans to concede this point: that people being uninsured is a very bad thing, and that cutting funding to Medicaid is a bad thing. They have basically conceded that government involvement in health care is a good thing — or, at least, a necessary thing. That wasn’t the argument they were making against Obamacare eight years ago.

Democrats, meanwhile, are gradually talking themselves into supporting single-payer, it would seem. Their laser-like focus on the number who are uninsured and the Medicaid cuts has a logical conclusion. There is only one way to make sure nobody is uninsured, after all.

We’re a long way from overwhelming public support for a taxpayer-funded national health care system, which is what the phrase “single payer” is shorthand for. There are very few, if any, “pure” single-payer systems on the planet, in which all health care is paid out of government funds. The majority of industrialized nations have some variation of a mixed public-private system, although in every case I know of people can get nearly any medical treatment they really need through the public system.

Andrew Mills, “The plane truth: How we caught Chris Christie sunbathing on a closed beach

Anatomy of a scoop.

Freedom’s Just Another Word for State Authority

After a fight of several years, St. Louis passed a law that would gradually raise the minimum wage to $11 per hour, and after that it would increase with inflation. The first stage, a raise from $7.70 an hour to $10 an hour, went into effect March 5. The $11 per hour was to kick in on January 1, 2018.

A couple of days ago, the governor announced that the state is stepping in and overriding St. Louis. The city’s minimum wage cannot exceed the statewide minimum wage, Gov. Eric Greitens announced. The minimum wage in St. Louis will revert to $7.70 an hour on August 28.

“It will kill jobs,” Greitens said of the increase. “And despite what you hear from liberals, it will take money out of people’s pockets.”

So the state is now going to take money out of people’s pockets. Some employers may choose to not take away the raises, but I’m betting that many will happily cut their employees back to $7.70.

Exactly why it’s skin off anyone’s nose that there might be a higher minimum wage in St. Louis than in the many small towns across the state eludes me. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, Gov. Greitens.

Today I read of something similar going on in Texas.

Gov. Greg Abbott (R), citing grave worries about “socialistic” behavior in the state’s liberal cities, has called on Texas lawmakers to gather this month for a special session that will consider a host of bills aimed at curtailing local power on issues ranging from taxation to collecting union dues.

Texas presents perhaps the most dramatic example of the increasingly acrimonious relationship between red-state leaders and their blue city centers, which have moved aggressively to expand environmental regulations and social programs often against the grain of their states.

Republican state leaders across the country have responded to the widening cultural gulf by passing legislation preempting local laws. The best-known example is North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” which was partially reversed this year. It was originally aimed at undercutting Charlotte’s efforts to expand civil rights laws to include LGBT people and to prevent cities from setting their own minimum wage.

But states also have gone after cities in more subtle ways. Ohio’s legislature last year attempted to block a Cleveland regulation that requires certain city contractors to hire local residents. A new Arizona law threatens to cut off funding to cities that take actions state officials deem to be in violation of state law.

Gov. Abbott is especially peeved at Austin.

“Once you cross the Travis County line, it starts smelling different,” Abbott joked at a recent gathering of Republicans, referring to the county that includes Austin. “And you know what that fragrance is? Freedom. It’s the smell of freedom that does not exist in Austin, Texas.”

Freedom? I don’t think that word means what you think it means, governor.

Austin is suing the state over its draconian “sanctuary cities” law, among other things. Austin is also fighting a developer who plans to destroy hundreds of trees, including some very old and beloved “heritage” oaks that are protected by city ordinance. The governor, naturally, takes the side of the developer, who appears to have won.

A heritage oak in Austin.

I personally think that if Texas doesn’t want to turn into a desert someday as the planet heats up, it had better hang on to every tree it’s got. But they don’t listen to me.

The people of Austin wonder about their rights to shape the quality of their own community. But when money talks, democracy walks.

Happy 4th of July, Republicans. What is it you’re celebrating, again?

What Really Happened With the California Single-Payer Bill?

Let me begin by saying I have never lived in California. I don’t know exactly how the state government works, and I don’t generally pay close attention to California news. If that’s true for you, too, then let’s explore this together.

A few days ago there were news stories about California possibly moving to a single-payer health care system within the state. There was a bill moving toward passage, the news stories said. Then there were stories about the bill being killed by California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. In progressive circles the death of the bill was attributed to Rendon’s being a corporate stooge who took money from the medical industry. David Sirota wrote in International Business Times,

As Republican lawmakers grapple with their unpopular bill to repeal Obamacare, Democrats have tried to present a united front on health care. But for all their populist rhetoric against insurance and drug companies, Democratic powerbrokers and their allies remain deeply divided on the issue — to the point where a political civil war has spilled into the open in America’s largest state.

In California last week, Democratic state Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon helped his and his party’s corporate donors block a Democrat-sponsored bill to create a universal health care program in which the government would be the single payer.

Rendon’s decision shows how progressives’ ideal of universal health care remains elusive — even in a liberal state where government already foots 70 percent of the total health care bill.

Now, you all know David Sirota’s work, I suspect. I’ve been reading his stuff for years. He’s one of “our” writers. Sirota goes on to say that although the bill had passed in the state senate, Rendon had quashed it before it could go on to the state assembly. Sirota continues,

Since 2012, Rendon has taken in more than $82,000 from business groups and healthcare corporations that are listed in state documents opposed the measure, according to an International Business Times review of data amassed by the National Institute on Money In State Politics. In all, he has received more than $101,000 from pharmaceutical companies and another $50,000 from major health insurers.

In the same time, the California Democratic Party has received more than $1.2 million from the specific groups opposing the bill, and more than $2.2 million from pharmaceutical and health insurance industry donors. That includes a $100,000 infusion of cash from Blue Shield of California in the waning days of the 2016 election — just before state record show the insurer began lobbying against the single-payer bill.

Well, that’s pretty damning, isn’t it? Another reason Dems always lose.

I didn’t think anything more of it until I read this article by David Dayen at The Intercept that gave a different view.

IN THE DAYS SINCE California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon shelved for the year SB562, which intends to establish a state single-payer health care system, he’s been subject to mass protests and even death threats. The bill’s chief backers, including the California Nurses Association and the Bernie Sanders-affiliated Our Revolution, angrily point to Rendon as the main roadblock to truly universal health care.

They’re completely wrong. What’s more, they know they’re wrong. They’re perfectly aware that SB562 is a shell bill that cannot become law without a ballot measure approved by voters. Rather than committing to raising the millions of dollars that would be needed to overcome special interests and pass that initiative, they would, apparently, rather deceive their supporters, hiding the realities of California’s woeful political structure in favor of a morality play designed to advance careers and aggrandize power.

And I’m thinking, holy bleep, what the bleep is going on here?

Did I mention this is David Dayen? I’ve been reading his stuff for years, too. He’s good. And he is known to be a wholehearted supporter of single payer healthcare.

Having done some digging, I’ve come to think the bill, SB562, was never a serious bill. It was more about grandstanding and legislative theater than actually initiating single payer in California. I could be wrong, but that’s what it looks like.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones provides some background.

Funding. Single-payer would cost something like $200 billion, give or take a few billions. This is nearly double the entire state budget, but SB562 blithely ignored it. It included no funding mechanism at all, and simply passed that responsibility to the state Assembly. It’s not surprising that Rendon was reluctant to shoulder this on his own over the course of the next few months.

Prop 98. Like it or not, California has a school funding law put in place years ago by Proposition 98. It’s insanely complicated, but basically requires that 40 percent of the state budget go to K-12 schools. Using round numbers, if the state budget is $100 billion, school spending has to be at least $40 billion. If state spending goes up to $300 billion, school spending has to be at least $120 billion. Aside from being ridiculous, it also leaves only $120 billion for the health care bill. Oops.

As far as I know, there is no tricky way to get around this. It would have to be dealt with by a ballot initiative. That’s obviously not going to happen in this legislative session.

Waivers. This is the issue nobody pays attention to, but is probably the most important of all. To implement single-payer, California would need $200 billion in new funding plus $200 billion in federal money that currently goes to Medicare, Medicaid, veterans health care, and so forth. Without federal waivers to give California access to that money, the plan can’t go anywhere. As Duke University researcher David Anderson puts it, “If there aren’t waivers, this plan is vaporware.” What do you think are the odds that the Trump administration will grant all those waivers? Zero is a pretty good guess.

Along the same lines, Michael Hiltzik points out that self-funded health care plans are governed exclusively by federal law. That means California would need an exemption from the law. What do you think are the odds that a Republican Congress will grant that exemption? Zero again?

Kevin Drum and David Dayen are both Californians, I understand, so they know the ins and outs of how California works a lot better than I do. And if Kevin Drum is right, then even if the bill passed the assembly and were signed into law, it still wouldn’t be implemented. There is language in the bill that would stop it from going into effect if funding isn’t available, and because of all the reasons stated above, it currently wouldn’t be possible for the funding to be available.

So what, exactly, is the point?

If any state could make single-payer work it ought to be California, which claims to have the sixth largest economy in the world. But it appears to be true that SB562 contains no mechanism for funding, and this is one of the reasons Anthony Rendon delayed the bill. This doesn’t strike me as being unreasonable.

Let’s go back to David Dayen:

There’s a reason that every California single-payer bill in the last 25 years — and there have been at least seven, two of which passed the legislature and were vetoed, so we in the Golden State have seen this movie before — never includes a funding mechanism. It’s not necessarily because of fear of voting for higher taxes, or even the two-thirds threshold to increase a tax in the legislature.

It’s because you can’t do the funding without help from the voters, because of California’s fatal addiction to its perverse form of direct democracy. The blame, in other words, lies with ourselves.

To figure this out, you need only turn to the actual legislative analysis of the Senate bill, which passed in early June. It states very clearly what Rendon alluded to in his announcement shelving SB562: “There are several provisions of the state constitution that would prevent the Legislature from creating the single-payer system envisioned in the bill without voter approval.”

 

Those provisions include California’s byzantine, previously mentioned Proposition 98, which Dayen explains in more detail. To make single-payer funding possible Prop 98 would have to be suspended.

Self-appointed experts have countered that the state can suspend Prop 98 with a two-thirds vote of the legislature. This has been done twice in the past, during downturns in the economy. But the suspension can last for only a single year; it would have to be renewed annually to keep single payer going. More important, as the California Budget and Policy Center explains, after any suspension, “the state must increase Prop 98 funding over time to the level that it would have reached absent the suspension.”

So legislators would have to vote year after year to suspend Prop 98, but add more money back to cover it in subsequent years. That backfill would grow with every budget, and over time lawmakers would need to vote for ever-increasing giant tax hikes. If this didn’t return Republicans to power in Sacramento within a few years, some enterprising lawyer would sue the legislature for violating the spirit of Prop 98. Suspension is not politically, legally, or financially sustainable.

So, again, it sounds as if SB562 couldn’t be put into effect even if it became law, a point its supporters stubbornly refuse to concede. And the many unacknowledged roadblocks are also being overlooked by progressive organizations eager to make points about corporate sellouts in the Democratic Party. Certainly the Dems have more than their share of corporate sellouts, but IMO in this case making a scapegoat out of Anthony Rendon is just wrong. Dayen continues,

The California Courage Campaign pleaded with Democrats in an email blast to “fight for single payer today, not next year.” But Democrats can’t pass single payer today or this year; under state law, ballot measures only occur during statewide elections in even-numbered years. [UPDATE: in a separate message to supporters, the Courage Campaign wrote “it’s certainly true that the Healthy California Act needs more work before it can achieve all our goals” and was more circumspect about the road ahead.] Even the chair of the state Democratic Party, Eric Bauman, insisted that “SB562 must be given the chance to succeed,” even though it, um, can’t succeed.

The California Nurses Association, when not posting “stabbed in the back” imagery in reference to Rendon, called his decision “heartless,” “unconscionable,” and “disingenuous.” But there’s nothing more disingenuous in this debate than failing to level with people that SB562 cannot become law on its own.

Did I mention that Anthony Rendon has actually received death threats? And I’ve been an admirer of the California Nurses Association since they took on Arnold Schwarzenegger awhile back. But this is wrong. Everybody needs to chill about Anthony Rendon.

I know everybody’s tired of being told that we can’t have nice things now because pragmatic incremental whatever. But it’s also the case that sometimes things aren’t possible until paths are cleared for them. While, in theory, California’s economy ought to be able to support single payer, it’s not going to be possible until other laws — like Prop 98 — are changed first.  And if you aren’t working on that, you aren’t serious about passing single payer.

I run into this a lot with lefties. Yesterday I ran into a rant that Bernie Sanders has his priorities wrong because he didn’t introduce a Medicare for All bill into the Senate this week. Would somebody explain to these puppies that a snowball has a better chance in hell than Medicare for All has in the current Congress? Because I don’t have the strength. And there’s been this little matter of stopping the passage of Trumpcare, which must have escaped their notice. That’s the priority.

I’m really tired of explaining why there can be no viable, national third party for progressives until we have significant voting and election reform that allows for proportional representation. I’ve tried and tried. They don’t listen to me. And like it or not, it’s way too soon to introduce a serious proposal to impeach Donald Trump into the House. This is not about whether or not he deserves it; it’s about the plain fact that such a proposal would go nowhere. The time may be ripe one of these days, but it isn’t now. And introducing unserious proposals now might make it harder to introduce a serious one later.

Bottom line, I fear that David Dayen is right on this, that SB562 was not a serious attempt to establish single payer in California, but instead was just legislative theater designed to aggrandize power within the progressive movement. Let’s stop doing this, people.