My friend Ron Brownstein, who may be the sharpest political analyst plying the journalist’s trade, wrote some years back (in 2012, in fact) that the Republicans had become “the coalition of restoration” while the Democrats had become “the coalition of transformation.” In the Age of Trump, that assessment is even more on point. The Trumpified […]
Blog_Post
Posted inTAP
The True Constitutional Crisis Is Upon Us
Trump has now defined himself as simply above the law. Congress can issue all the subpoenas it wants, but if Trump stonewalls, it all ends up in courts. And the federal courts are increasingly as independent as, say, Poland’s, Hungary’s, Venezuela’s, or China’s. Robert Mueller must be kicking himself. He tried to play it straight […]
Posted inTAP
Don’t Mess with LGBT Texans
The Texas legislature is considering a bill that would allow any person in a licensed occupation, such as plumbers, opticians, pharmacists, and even non-emergency doctors, to refuse service to someone who happened to be LGBT because it offended their religious sensibility. You know, God created Eve from Adam’s rib, marriage is between a man and […]
Posted inTAP
Trump and China: The Art of the Cave-In
Several leaked reports from people “close to the negotiations,” suggest that Trump will soon announce a trade deal with the Chinese government pretty much on China’s terms. This will serve Trump’s goal of changing the subject for one news cycle. But it will not serve the American economy. All the indications are that China will […]
Posted inTAP
The Malign Cluelessness of the Billionaire Bourgeoisie
One of our nation’s more festive rites of spring convenes every April or May at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills. The Milken Institute’s Global Conference, presided over by Michael Milken himself, is a kind of domestic Davos, minus the swarm of elected officials and social movement leaders who are occasionally brought in to the […]
Posted inTAP
In Which the Superb Tom Edsall Gets One Big Thing Wrong About Unions
New York Times contributing columnist Tom Edsall is a national resource. In column after column, he provides encyclopedic research both scholarly and journalistic, extended interviews, astute insights, and hard questions for progressives on politically urgent topics. His most recent column, on the political consequences of the decline of unions, is no exception. As Edsall demonstrates, […]
Posted inTAP
Why Democrats Aren’t Passing Trump’s New, Unimproved NAFTA
Democrats in both the House and Senate are resisting President Trump’s request that they approve his successor agreement to NAFTA (the clunky name to which is the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA). The main sticking point, they say, is that the proposed new accord doesn’t do nearly enough to ensure the rights of Mexican workers—failing […]
Posted inTAP
This Is What a Constitutional Crisis Looks Like
After the midterm elections of 2018, many of us comforted ourselves that democracy had held after all. Democrats took back the House, and there was no outright theft other than the structural theft of gerrymandering and voter suppression. But Democrats had won by a theft-proof margin. Elsewhere, adult minders at the White House, the Justice […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Building the Right Narrative to Win the Next Recession
When Obama took office in 2009, senior administration officials equivocated over how to jump-start recovery amid the Great Recession. “Because monetary policy had been the key anti-recessionary tool for the previous 20 years, we had little knowledge of exactly how well fiscal stimulus would work and which type of stimulus would be the most effective,” […]
Posted inTAP
Trump’s Infrastructile Dysfunction
Donald Trump is cornered. In his increasingly desperate efforts to bully and bluff the House investigations of leads provided by the Mueller report, Trump oscillates between bluster and changing the subject. His latest gambit is infrastructure. The American people, he insists, don’t want to hear about obstruction of justice. They want to hear about infrastructure. […]
