In his late Sunday op-ed on FBI chief James Comey’s “murky” letter to Congress about the latest email contretemps, E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post takes note of the “hints” that certain Republicans have given that they will do to Hillary Clinton the same that Mitch McConnell has finally admitted was ordered done to Barack Obama even before he took office: Be utterly uncooperative. Obstruct and attack. The same for Hillary, that is, only more and worse.
In anticipation of her presidency, “impeachment” has been raised before most of the people who will vote this year have filled out their ballots, before Clinton has taken the oath of office, before she’s signed one executive order or formally proposed a single piece of legislation. Newt Gingrich raised the “I” word in an interview with Politico’s Mark Allen Friday. Of course, Newt’s a has-been, but at least one prominent sitting member of Congress has also said it:
[Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chair of the Oversight Committee] had already made clear that if Clinton wins, the GOP’s top priority will be to keep the Clinton investigative machine rolling.
“It’s a target-rich environment,” Chaffetz cheerfully told The Post’s David Weigel last week. “Even before we get to Day One, we’ve got two years’ worth of material already lined up. She has four years of history at the State Department, and it ain’t good.”
And on ABC Sunday, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), chair of the Judiciary Committee, gave the Republicans’ game away when he spoke of Clinton’s “potential impeachment” before correcting himself.
John Nichols at The Nation writes—Meet the Trumpkins: ‘Mainstream’ Republican Senators Who Sound a Lot Like Their Presidential Nominee:
Yes, Trump may be cruder, and slower to apologize, but how much does the billionaire’s approach to politics really differ from that of Mark Kirk in Thursday night’s Illinois US Senate debate?
Kirk, one of a number of Republican senators facing tough reelection fights this fall, identifies as “a fiscal conservative, social moderate and defense hawk on our national security.” On paper, there’s nothing “alt-right” about this guy. His social moderation, which places him roughly in the vicinity of Dick Cheney and Barry Goldwater on the historical continuum, leads some newspaper editorial writers to imagine that he is a reasonable guy. But Kirk is only “reasonable” on a political continuum that has tipped so far to the right that anti-labor zealots like Scott Walker and proponents of anti-LGBTQ discrimination like Mike Pence are imagined to be mainstream political figures. By that standard, Ronald Reagan would be suspiciously moderate and Richard Nixon would be a flaming liberal.
David Dayen at The New Republic writes—The Hillary Clinton Recession Is Going to Be Ugly: It won't be her fault: Republican obstructionism, internal divisions, and austerity fetishism will leave the next president no good options for dealing with a downturn:
I’m not making a prediction here. Many economists put the prospects of recession in 2017 as unlikely, around a 1-in-5 chance. And there’s no rule that economic expansions have a definitive end date; they can theoretically go on for decades. At the same time, a lot can happen over the next four years, so it’s reasonable to wonder about the consequences of an economic downturn in the next presidential term. And from where I’m sitting, that next recession is going to be ugly.
It won’t be because of Clinton’s policies or her politics. It won’t be because she doesn’t know how to handle a recession. It’ll be because the next president will have fewer options than George W. Bush and Barack Obama had for dealing with the last one. And the Republican divisions the left loves to celebrate represent one big reason why.
The economy is considered to be humming along right now, but there are signs of trouble ahead. Just look at one indicator weighing on economic growth right now—state and local government spending. The Wall Street Journal reports that state and local infrastructure spending in August plummeted 11 percent relative to a year ago, an especially big plunge after eight years of economic expansion. Infrastructure spending can be volatile, with a lot one month and less the next. But rising costs for health care and education have crowded out job-creating public investment in state and local budgets. And tax revenues have not rebounded in many areas since the Great Recession, leading to austerity in the states.
D.R Tucker at The Washington Monthly writes—The Way It Is:
Just as there are virtually no Trump supporters who plan to watch Before the Flood and Years of Living Dangerously on the National Geographic Channel tonight, there are virtually no Republicans who support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and others who object to the highly controversial Dakota Access pipeline (which Trump reportedly has financial ties to).
It’s fairly obvious who has the back of the self-described “water protectors” demonstrating against the nearly $4 billion North Dakota pipeline and who does not. In red America, Native Americans and their allies who are concerned about the severe damage the pipeline will do to their ancestral lands and their drinking water are viewed as enemies and extremists, blocking the path of energy independence.
To the extent that mainstream-media entities (with the courageous exception of Lawrence O’Donnell and Joy Reid of MSNBC) have ignored the Dakota Access controversy (tragedy might be a more appropriate word), it’s because they’re afraid of offending the sensibilities of red-staters. Covering this controversy comprehensively would be deemed a form of liberal media bias by conservatives; the broadcast and cable networks would be bombarded with complaints from disgruntled right-wingers who don’t want to see any “Indians,” “Hollywood airheads” or “radical environmentalists” on their television screens.
The editors of The Guardian write—The Guardian view on the FBI’s Clinton probe: exactly the wrong thing to do:
Mr Comey’s defence appears to be that justice must be done and that he would be damned if he made the announcement and damned if he didn’t. It is certainly true that US politics has become so polarised and so riddled with paranoia that the FBI director faced an unenviable choice. If he had carried out the new investigation behind closed doors and it had only become public after the election, whatever the result, one or both sides would be certain to cry foul. Conspiracy theorists would have had a field day. Yet by making it public now, he makes the investigation itself into a red-hot pre-election issue in a contest that will shape not just America but the world – and that’s awful. [...]
One of the recipients of Mr Comey’s report, Jason Chaffetz, announced even before the FBI director’s move that he intends to begin oversight hearings into Mrs Clinton as soon as she is elected, if she is. Incredible though it may seem to the outside world and many Americans, impeachment efforts by Republicans against Mrs Clinton are already a serious possibility. Law enforcement officials have to be completely scrupulous in such a world. Mr Comey has not been. It is a step towards a lawless process.
James Fallows at The Atlantic writes—Trump Time Capsule #150: James Comey and the Destruction of Norms:
Millions of people have already voted; in the nine days until official election day there’s not enough time to fully vet and consider what Comey may have found. Will the announcement re-energize Hillary Clinton’s supporters, making them worry that the race may be tightening again? Depress them? Motivate team Trump? Bolster the “they’re all terrible” case for third-party candidates?
We don’t know. But anyone experienced in politics, as Comey obviously is, would have known for dead certain that his intrusion would change the process in a way that cannot be undone. This is apparently what other officials in the FBI and Justice Department were telling Comey before he took this step. Two former deputy attorneys general—Jamie Gorelick, who served under Bill Clinton, and Larry Thompson, who served under George W. Bush—made that point in a new Washington Post essay that lambastes Comey for his self-indulgent decision (emphasis added):
Decades ago, the department decided that in the 60-day period before an election, the balance should be struck against even returning indictments involving individuals running for office, as well as against the disclosure of any investigative steps. The reasoning was that, however important it might be for Justice to do its job, and however important it might be for the public to know what Justice knows, because such allegations could not be adjudicated, such actions or disclosures risked undermining the political process. A memorandum reflecting this choice has been issued every four years by multiple attorneys general for a very long time, including in 2016. ...
They conclude that this move was so selfish on Comey’s part, potentially protecting him at the cost of broader institutional destruction
Doyle MacManus at the Los Angeles Times writes—What will Trump supporters do if he loses? A dispatch from Ohio:
In 1964, amid an earlier conservative insurgency, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Hofstadter wasn’t writing about mental illness, he explained, but “the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people.”
Its characteristics, he wrote, include a belief that the political system is rigged and that malign conspiracies are at work to thwart the popular will. That kind of thinking rises in “a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise,” he wrote.
But in most campaigns, such sentiments belong to the fringe. This year, the Republican nominee has made them his central theme.
Elizabeth Grossman at In These Times writes—New U.N. Report Shows Just How Awful Globalization and Informal Employment Are for Workers:
Freedom of peaceful assembly and association, says a new United Nations report, “are essential to human dignity, economic empowerment, sustainable development and democracy. They are the gateway to all other rights; without them, all other human and civil rights are in jeopardy.” But these rights, says the report, are being jeopardized by the recent dramatic rise in the power of large multinational corporations and their dependence on global supply chains and the growing informal and migrant workforce. While these rights are most imperiled in the world’s poorest countries, workers in the United States are also facing these problems.
Undertaken by the special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, the U.N. report singles out the plight of migrant, women and domestic workers, many of whom lack formal employment. In fact, worldwide, most workers are now without formal employment arrangements.
According to the report, an estimated 60.7 percent of the world’s workers “labor in the informal economy, where employment relationships are not legally regulated or socially protected.” In some countries this workforce rises to 90 percent. The report also notes that while such employment has always existed, the rise of global supply chains has “exponentially expanded its growth.” As a result, some 1.5 billion people or 46 percent of the world’s workers, now experience what the report calls “precarious employment.” More than 70 percent of people in Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa work this way.
Clay Jenkinson at the Fargo Inforum writes—How outsiders (and North Dakotans) see the pipeline:
North Dakota has fierce and endless winters. The great pipeline controversy unfolding on the boundary of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation is about to face its greatest test. Will the encampment of at times nearly 7,000 individuals be able to persevere against the boisterous winds and subzero temperatures that make even Dakotans shudder?
I believe it will. The encampment is a broad coalition of true believers who want Native Americans to win this century's docket of conflicts with the white Europeans who snatched the continent away from them, and, more broadly, of those who believe that any further advance of the military-industrial-petroleum complex will destroy the planet Earth. People from all over the world are hoping that the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy is the beginning of a pan-Indian renaissance (part Woodstock, part Lexington and Concord). In the centuries to follow, I believe the events now unfolding in southern North Dakota will be remembered as one of the pivotal moments in American history.
The Sioux would have preferred to make this controversy about tribal sovereignty. They have been joined, and in many respects, overwhelmed by the anti-carbon brigades from all over the world. My greatest concern is that the urgently-needed national debate about Native American sovereignty — what it is, what it means, what it permits, what it prevents — is being buried under a larger and (to my mind) distracting debate about our national addiction to oil, coal, and natural gas. Frankly, I wish that debate would find a different venue. The sanctity of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and its people deserves to be the focus of this unprecedented moment in North Dakota history.
Aaron Bady at the Los Angeles Times writes—The protests at Standing Rock are necessary. What happened at Malheur was nonsense:
The rancher-militia occupation last January at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon, and the ongoing Native American occupation of the site of a proposed oil pipeline near Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in the Dakotas make for interesting comparisons. On Thursday, for example, the same day that seven of the Malheur militia members were found not guilty of nearly all charges related to the Oregon standoff, 141 protesters in North Dakota were arrested by a law enforcement officers from at least seven states, using military-grade, anti-riot technology.
Watching the events unfold one after the other revealed a glaring racial double standard. It also showed a profound difference in what is at stake in the two movements.
In Oregon, white ranchers — dressed as cowboys, armed to the teeth, claiming to be clothed in the Constitution — protested what they consider to be creeping government tyranny, in the form of federal control of western lands. Law enforcement let them come and go at will, and sought not to provokethem, giving them time and space to stage their “insurrection.” By contrast, the attempt to derail the Dakota Access Pipeline was met by a stunning show of force: dogs, helicopters, LRAD sound cannons, military vehicles and hundreds of police officers.