Aaron Blake, WaPo, Trump’s Historic Legal Jeopardy. Trump may really become the first ex-POTUS to be convicted of a crime. See also Peter Stevenson, WaPo, The special grand jury used in Trump’s case, explained.
Philip Longman, Washington Monthly, Sickness in Health. This is a review of a book I haven’t read titled The Hospital by Brian Alexander. This could be a great book, but the review is worth reading in its own right. Alexander presents a fly-on-the-wall narrative about a small, independent hospital in Ohio, and in so doing presents the bigger picture of how our health care system got so screwed up.
Also at Washington Monthly, see Bill Scher, If Roe v. Wade is Struck Down, It’ll Cost Republicans. I’ve been thinking the same thing.
Paul Krugman, NY Times, The Banality of Democratic Collapse. It’s not the crazies in the Republican Party who are threatening democracy, Krugman argues. It’s “the acquiescence of Republican elites” to the crazy.
Political scientists have long noted that our two major political parties are very different in their underlying structures. The Democrats are a coalition of interest groups — labor unions, environmentalists, L.G.B.T.Q. activists and more. The Republican Party is the vehicle of a cohesive, monolithic movement. This is often described as an ideological movement, although given the twists and turns of recent years — the sudden embrace of protectionism, the attacks on “woke” corporations — the ideology of movement conservatism seems less obvious than its will to power.
In any case, for a long time conservative cohesiveness made life relatively easy for Republican politicians and officials. Professional Democrats had to negotiate their way among sometimes competing demands from various constituencies. All Republicans had to do was follow the party line. Loyalty would be rewarded with safe seats, and should a Republican in good standing somehow happen to lose an election, support from billionaires meant that there was a safety net — “wing nut welfare” — in the form of chairs at lavishly funded right-wing think tanks, gigs at Fox News and so on.
Of course, the easy life of a professional Republican wasn’t appealing to everyone. The G.O.P. has long been an uncomfortable place for people with genuine policy expertise and real external reputations, who might find themselves expected to endorse claims they knew to be false….
… Matters may be even worse for politicians who actually care about policy, still have principles and have personal constituencies separate from their party affiliation. There’s no room in today’s G.O.P. for the equivalent of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, unless you count the extremely sui generis Mitt Romney.
And the predominance of craven careerists is what made the Republican Party so vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.
The fact that Mitt Romney has become sui generis among Republicans tells us a lot has changed in the past few years.
And speaking of crazy, see Jonathan Chait, New York, The Strange Anti-Semitism of the Pro-Jewish Right.
