Allies Fear Trump Could Go Postal and Fire Mueller

Two things continue to strike me as the shock waves continue from yesterday's FBI raid on Donald Trump consigliere, Michael Cohen.  First, if Trump is completely innocent of collusion with Russia or other crimes, why is he acting increasingly obsessed with closing down Robert Mueller's investigation and acting as if he has cataclysmic secrets and misdeeds he is trying to hide?  Second, if Trump is in fact guilty of crimes or collusion, why did it never seemingly occur to him that once he occupied the White House, eventually all of his dirty linen would eventually come out?  Personally, I suspect that Trump is likely guilty of any number of crimes, treason perhaps being one of them.  Trump's increasingly desperate behavior and attacks on the nation's legal and criminal justice systems only add to my gut feeling in this regard.  Now, as two piece in Vanity Fair - one here and one here - report, fearful that Michael Cohen might be "flipped," Trump may be edging closer to firing Mueller, Rod Rosenstein and/or Jeff Sessions, thereby igniting a constitutional crisis.  Here are excerpts from both pieces:

It was supposed to be the most somber and impressive of presidential moments, a gathering of the national security team at the White House to discuss military options to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for a suspected chemical weapons attack on a Damascus suburb that killed at least 60 people, including children. But as the meeting began, Donald Trump was more enraged by a crossed red line much closer to home: the F.B.I.’s raid on his longtime lawyer Michael Cohen.

There have been times during Robert Mueller’s investigation—Mueller’s subpoenaing of Trump business records, for instance—when White House advisers worried Trump seemed on the verge of triggering a constitutional crisis by firing Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, or Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The stunning Cohen raid is another one of these moments. “He’s sitting there bitching and moaning. He’s brooding and doesn’t have a plan,” a Republican close to the White House said last night. “I could see him having a total meltdown and saying, ‘Fuck it, I’m firing all of them,’” a Trump friend told me. “This is very dry tinder. If someone strikes a match to it, you could see it catching fire,” added a former official.

In the past, Trump’s impulses could be tempered by the calming presence of loyal aides like Hope Hicks and longtime security chief Keith Schiller. But both Hicks and Schiller are gone, leaving Trump to operate largely unchecked. His legal team remains leaderless following the resignation of Trump’s personal lawyer John Dowd . . . .

The second piece looks at why Trump's desperation level is growing:

The implications, for Cohen and for Trump, are potentially explosive. “I suppose you could say that it is Trump’s moment of truth,” Bob Bauer, the former Obama White House general counsel, told me. “It is the red line he always seemed to draw in his bitter complaints about the Mueller investigation—now here we are. Cohen would not be a subject or target that Trump would wish to have flipped against him.” Legal experts agree this is a major development. “It’s an enormously aggressive move for any prosecutor to make, particularly given Cohen’s client,” said Sol Wisenberg, a deputy special prosecutor during the Starr investigation. Neal Katyal, who served as acting solicitor general under Obama, described it as “very bad news” for Cohen. “D.O.J. only raids once they have concluded that lesser options—like cooperation—aren’t working and that there is a risk that evidence may be destroyed,” he said.

The barrier to convincing a judge to approve a search warrant would be even higher in a case involving a sitting president. More significant, a judge would require evidence of potential illegal behavior between Trump and Cohen before approving the seizure of any communications involving both of them. “If the warrant specifically authorized the seizure of attorney-client communications, the government would have had to convince a federal magistrate that the crime-fraud exception was in play,” Wisenberg added. . . . . if the client is attempting to use the lawyer, or the lawyer is volunteering to be a part of an ongoing crime, there is no attorney-client privilege.” [O]utsourcing the raid could mean “there is some aspect to what is in Cohen’s office that is outside of Mueller’s jurisdiction,” he added. If the latter is true, Wisenberg noted, “Then it is no longer part of Mueller’s case.” That logic is unlikely to soothe Trump, who is reportedly itching to fire Sessions, Rosenstein, and Mueller. Still, it provides the special counsel with at least one degree of separation from the initial raid. “To criticize Mueller misses the mark,” Wisenberg continued. “It was wise of Rosenstein to assign the case to another office to take the heat off of Mueller.”

It also establishes a protective barrier between Mueller and one of the seedier Trump scandals. “It is wise that Mueller and Rosenstein avoided the fatal mistake of Ken Starr when he decided to expand his jurisdiction to the Monica Lewinsky matter, a tawdry subject, but not highly serious to the welfare and security of the American people,” William Jeffress, a white-collar defense attorney who worked on the Valerie Plame leak case, told me. “There are several possible crimes that might have been committed by the circumstances of the hush money, but these are appropriately investigated by a U.S. attorney, not by special counsel appointed to investigate Russian interference in the election.”

Will Cohen flip? “You just need to break one weak link to do it,” Hall said. But don’t expect new indictments too soon. “I think that things are going to sound like they are slowing down for a little bit because all of this information has to be pulled, digested, analyzed, inputted into a bigger picture,” he cautioned. “Nixon didn’t resign because of the Ellsberg Papers, but that led to the Watergate break-in, that led to the cover-up, and Nixon’s resignation was tied directly to the cover-up . . . So, to me, as things heat up, the next big thing will be a shift from things like ‘What was the Russian involvement in the campaign?’ to ‘Has the cover-up begun and where is it?’” 

Wednesday Morning Male Beauty

After Huge Give Away to Wealthy, Republicans Target Medicare and Social Security

Republicans celebrating the $1.5 trillion tax cut.

While it is very difficult to outdo Donald Trump when it comes to lying incessantly, Paul Ryan and other Republicans are trying hard to meet he Trump standard of dishonesty by blaming Social Security and Medicare for the ballooning national debt conveniently forgetting the $1.5 trillion give away  to the obscenely wealthy and huge corporations that they enacted only a few months ago.  How these despicable individuals have the gall to claim that they stand for "Christian values" when their agenda to slash the social safety net is the antithesis of Christ's gospel message.  A piece in the Los Angeles Times looks at the lies, deceit and desire to harm average Americans being pushed by Paul Ryan - who hypocritically claims to be a "devout Catholic" - and similar despicable liars.  If you believe Ryan and "conservative" economists, I have some swamp land to sell to you.  Here are article excerpts:

One would have thought that after saddling the U.S. economy with a tax cut costing $1.5 trillion over 10 years, conservatives and their patrons in corporate America would soft-pedal the usual attacks on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

One would be wrong.

Recently, the drumbeats for cuts in social insurance benefits have been sounding louder. As is traditional, the call for cutbacks is placed in the context of concern about rising federal deficits. Just two weeks ago, five economists and thinkers at the conservative Hoover Institution evoked the "debt crisis" in the pages of the Washington Post.

"To address the debt problem, Congress must reform and restrain the growth of entitlement programs and adopt further pro-growth tax and regulatory policies," wrote the Hooverites, Michael J. Boskin, John H. Cochrane, John F. Cogan, George P. Shultz and John B. Taylor. As for the tax cut bill enacted in December, the sages said not to worry: They called it "a good first step, as it sharply increases the incentive to invest and grow businesses, which will increase incomes." [T]he Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget . . . reckon that the cuts could cost as much as $1.7 trillion over a decade, net of any economic gains it might engender. The Hoover fellows aren't alone in calling for cutting social programs, effectively to pay for tax cuts that go overwhelmingly to corporations and the wealthy. We've documented how Republicans such as House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida started calling for benefit cuts even as the tax bill was making its way through Congress. For the record, the Congressional Budget Office projects that Social Security will rise from an average share of 4.9% of gross domestic product now to an average of 5.5% over the next 10 years. Medicare and Medicaid together will rise from 5.4% now to an average of 6.3% in the same period. To place these figures in context, the CBO also expects GDP to nearly double in that time period, to $29.8 trillion. The tax cuts, by the way, will help push the federal deficit over $1 trillion next year, according to the CBO, which makes clear that they won't pay for themselves. "The tax cuts passed last year actually added an amount to America's long-run fiscal challenge that is roughly the same size as the preexisting shortfalls in Social Security and Medicare," wrote Martin Neil Baily, Jason Furman, Alan B. Krueger, Laura D'Andrea Tyson and Janet L. Yellen. "It is dishonest to single out entitlements for blame….The primary reason the deficit in coming years will now be higher than had been expected is the reduction in tax revenue from last year's tax cuts, not an increase in spending." As is invariably the case, the brief against "entitlements" is peppered with misconceptions and outright untruths. The biggest scam related to the tax cuts is the assertion that they'll provide an "incentive to invest and grow businesses," as the Hoover fellows wrote. The CBO projects that the tax act will increase real GDP by an average of 0.7% and nonfarm employment by an average of 1.1 million jobs a year through 2028, but says those effects are front-loaded and will fade as the decade wears on. The evidence thus far is that the shareholder class will receive gluttonous wedges of the pie, while working stiffs will get crumbs. According to a study by the progressive group Americans for Tax Fairness, Fortune 500 corporations will pocket a total annual tax cut of more than $57 billion a year. Those companies have announced wage increases and employee bonuses totaling about $5.7 billion, and stock buybacks of nearly $201 billion.
Indications that businesses of any size will use their tax cuts to make capital investments are hard to find.

The politicians unsheathing their paring knives for Social Security and Medicare undoubtedly are hoping that Americans' memories are short — that when they claim that it's social programs like these that are driving the deficit, no one will recall that the single biggest driver of red ink is that tax cut delivered to the very members of society who needed help the least.

More Tuesday Male Beauty

Michael Cohen's - and Trump's? - Serious Legal Jeopardy

We can expect more lies and posturing from the White House today in the wake of an FBI raid of Trump consigliere Michael Cohen's home, law office and hotel room (where he was staying during home renovations) that included seizing Cohen's computer, records and emails.  This is NOT something that happens with regularity and the fact that a warrant was issued by a federal judge is telling because the U.S. Attorney's office would have had to convince a judge that (i) there is a likelihood that a crime occurred, and (ii) there was a strong likelihood that evidence would be destroyed or go missing if the normal course of issuing a subpoena had been followed.  Having been a witness for federal prosecutors on two occasions and worked as a consultant on another case, these folks do NOT fool around.  Cohen - and possibly Trump - is in serious legal jeopardy as a column in the Washington Post lays out.  Here are highlights:

When your lawyers need lawyers, it’s usually a bad sign. When your lawyers have their offices and homes raided, it’s a really bad sign. News that federal investigators on Monday took the extraordinary step of executing a search warrant at the legal office of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal attorney, indicates that Cohen is suddenly in serious legal jeopardy of his own. And although the investigation is not directly related to the Mueller probe, it’s yet another example of the legal walls closing in on one of the people closest to Trump — someone who may have a wealth of information about the president’s own conduct. The first thing to note about this striking development is that the warrant was not obtained by Mueller himself. Whatever the subject matter of this particular investigation, it apparently falls outside of Mueller’s jurisdiction and thus resulted in his referral to the New York prosecutors. So we know the potential crimes that led to the search today do not directly relate to Mueller’s inquiry into any conspiracy with Russians to influence the election or related crimes such as obstruction of the special counsel’s investigation. We also know that a search warrant, unlike a grand jury subpoena, requires prosecutors to go before a federal judge to demonstrate probable cause that a crime has been committed and evidence of that crime can be found in the premises to be searched. Before approving a search of a lawyer’s office, a judge would want to be satisfied that there was some substance behind the prosecutors’ allegations. This is not just some prosecutorial fishing expedition; it bears the imprimatur of a federal judge. This was not just any search warrant; that the raid took place at a lawyer’s office further highlights the seriousness of the investigation. Searches of an attorney’s office are extremely rare and are not favored, due to their potential to impinge on the attorney-client relationship. Prosecutors must jump through multiple hoops to get such a warrant approved, both within their own office and at the criminal division of Main Justice. (Notably, this would likely have included approval by Trump’s own guy, the new interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Geoffrey S. Berman, who was just appointed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions this past January.) Approval of a search warrant suggests prosecutors were able to demonstrate not only the gravity of the potential case but also the risk that evidence might be destroyed or otherwise go missing if they pursued a less aggressive option. Cohen, and perhaps the president, will likely argue that this raid violates the attorney-client privilege. . . . . There is an exception to the attorney-client privilege if communications to an attorney are used in furtherance of a crime or fraud; that could come into play here as well. And documents related to anything Cohen did on his own — after all, Trump has deniedknowing about the payment to Daniels — are likely not privileged if they do not contain attorney-client communications. Documents are not automatically privileged simply because they passed through an attorney’s hands. There may well be litigation concerning whether particular records seized during this search are protected by privilege. But seizing the records now allows prosecutors to ensure that the integrity of the evidence is maintained while those legal issues are sorted out.

Cohen, someone extremely close to Trump and who has been known as the president’s “fixer,” appears to have serious legal problems. If federal prosecutors feel they have enough on you to execute a search warrant, it’s never a good sign — just ask Paul Manafort. . . . . we can’t rule out the possibility that his own legal troubles could induce him [Cohen] to cooperate in the Russia investigation.

FBI Raids Office of Trump’s Personal Lawyer

Trump and consigliere, Michael Cohen.

In previous posts I have noted the difficulty that Donald Trump has experienced finding reputable legal counsel to represent him in the Russiagate investigation.  The reasons are many, not the least being that having Trump as a client could get one possible disbarred or, worse yet, criminally prosecuted due to the questionable things client Trump might demand.  Today, the FBI raided the offices of Michael Cohen, Trump's long time personal lawyer and, if stories swirling around the Stormy Daniels  scandal, equivalent of a Mafia don's consigliere.   In addition to Cohen's office, federal agents raided also raided Cohen's Park Avenue hotel residence.  Among the materials seized were emails, tax documents and business records.  As expected, Der Trumpenführer ranted and raved about the raid being " a witch hunt" and "disgraceful" even as many wonder what damaging information Cohen's materials may yield.  First, the New York Times looks at the raid itself.  Here are highlights:

The F.B.I. raided the Rockefeller Center office and Park Avenue hotel room of President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, on Monday morning, seizing business records, emails and documents related to several topics, including a payment to a pornographic film actress.

Mr. Trump, in an extraordinarily angry response, lashed out hours later at what a person briefed on the matter said was an investigation into possible bank fraud by Mr. Cohen. Mr. Trump accused his own Justice Department of perpetrating a “witch hunt” and asserted that the F.B.I. “broke into” Mr. Cohen’s office.

It is not clear how the F.B.I. entered Mr. Cohen’s office, but agents had a search warrant and typically would have presented it to office personnel to be let in. The documents identified in the warrant date back years, according to a person briefed on the search.

The prosecutors obtained the search warrant after receiving a referral from the special counsel in the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, according to Mr. Cohen’s lawyer, who called the search “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.” The search does not appear to be directly related to Mr. Mueller’s investigation, but most likely resulted from information that he had uncovered and gave to prosecutors in New York.

In his tirade against the F.B.I., Mr. Trump mused about the possibility that he might soon fire Mr. Mueller. Last June, the president vented internally about wanting to fire Mr. Mueller, but was talked out of it. The president once again railed against Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, for recusing himself in the Russia inquiry, and blasted the F.B.I. for failing to investigate Hillary Clinton, “where there are crimes.” He criticized Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who is overseeing the Russia investigation, . . .

In order to obtain a search warrant, prosecutors must convince a federal judge that agents are likely to discover evidence of criminal activity.

As for the basis behind the raid, the Washington Post fleshes out where prosecutors may be headed, including bank fraud. Here is a taste:

Michael Cohen, the longtime attorney of President Trump, is under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations, according to three people with knowledge of the case.

FBI agents on Monday raided Cohen’s Manhattan office, home and hotel room as part of the investigation, seizing records about Cohen’s clients and personal finances. Among the records taken were those related to a 2016 payment Cohen made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels, who claims to have had a sexual encounter with Trump, according to another person familiar with the investigation.

Investigators took Cohen’s computer, phone and personal financial records, including tax returns, as part of the search of his office at Rockefeller Center, the second person said.

In a dramatic and broad seizure, federal prosecutors collected communications between Cohen and his clients — including those between the lawyer and Trump, according to both people.

One person familiar with the probe said investigators have been gathering material on Cohen for weeks, including his bank records.

Two of the potential crimes being investigated — bank fraud and wire fraud — suggest prosecutors have some reason to think Cohen may have misled bankers about why he was using particular funds or may have improperly used banks in the transfer of funds.Cohen has acknowledged facilitating a $130,000 payment in October 2016 to Daniels, who claims she had a sexual relationship with Trump in 2006.

Cohen has said he used a home-equity line of credit to finance the payment to Daniels and said that neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign reimbursed him for the payment.

Banks don’t usually require much explanation from customers about how they use such credit lines. However, Cohen may have been asked to provide explanation for the large-dollar transfers he made when he moved the money to a shell company and then to a lawyer for Daniels.

“A search warrant for a law office is extremely rare,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor at the New York University School of Law. “Lawyers are given the courtesy of producing documents in response to a subpoena or a request unless the government believes a lawyer will destroy or conceal the objects of the search.”

To serve a search warrant on a practicing attorney, federal prosecutors are required to obtain approval from top Justice Department officials. That means the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, Geoffrey S. Berman, who was appointed to his role by Sessions in January, as well as Justice Department officials in Washington, probably signed off. 

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

More Monday Male Beauty

The Extinction of "Intellectual" Conservatives

Once upon a time the political and social right had serious intellectuals.  Those day are gone as what now passes as intellectualism on the right is embodied by hacks and mental midgets on Fox News and even more insane types at Breitbart and more scurrilous "news" outlets (what intellectual conservatives that existed have more or less exited the right wing media as if they were fleeing the sinking Titanic or Lusitania).   This reality was recently underscored by the hiring of a "conservative" columnist by The Atlantic who was then fired once some of his heinous views came to light.  Obviously, more serious vetting should have been undertaken, but the saga shows the danger of giving a platform to demagogues and misogynist in the quest for "balance."  A column in the New York Times looks at both the debacle at The Atlantic and the extinction of intellectual conservatism.  Here are excerpts:

The hiring-then-firing of Kevin Williamson followed a familiar script. A mainstream media organization hires a conservative in the name of intellectual diversity, then is shocked, shocked to discover that he’s dishonest and/or holds truly reprehensible views – something that the organization could have discovered with a few minutes on Google. But when the bad hire is let go, the right treats him as a martyr, proof of liberal refusal to let alternative viewpoints be heard. Why does this keep happening?

As others have pointed out, the real problem here is that media organizations are looking for unicorns: serious, honest, conservative intellectuals with real influence. Forty or fifty years ago, such people did exist. But now they don’t.

To understand why, let me talk about what I know: the field of economics. This happens to be a field with a relatively strong conservative presence compared to other social sciences, and as far as I can tell even contains considerably more self-identified conservatives/Republicans than hard science. Even so, trying to find influential conservative economic intellectuals is basically a hopeless task, for two reasons.

First,. . . What the right wants are charlatans and cranks, in (conservative) Greg Mankiw’s famous phrase. If they use actual economists, they use them the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination.

The appointment of Larry Kudlow to head the National Economic Council epitomizes the phenomenon. . . . under Obama the director was always someone who was interested in real policy research, listened to what experts had to say, and was willing to change views in the face of evidence.  Obviously none of this is true in Kudlow’s case. He’s basically a TV personality, whose shtick is preaching the magic of tax cuts, and nothing – not the Kansas debacle, not the Clinton boom, not the strong job creation that followed Obama’s 2013 tax hike – will change his mind.

All this means that if you get a conservative economist who isn’t a charlatan and crank, you are more or less by definition getting someone with no influence on policymakers. But that’s not the only problem.

The second problem with conservative economic thought is that even aside from its complete lack of policy influence, it’s in an advanced state of both intellectual and moral decadence – something that has been obvious for a while, but became utterly clear after the 2008 crisis. . . . By the time the Great Recession struck, the right-leaning side of the profession had entered a Dark Age, having retrogressed to the point where famous economists trotted out 30s-era fallacies as deep insights.

But even among conservative economists who didn’t go down that rabbit hole, there has been a moral collapse – a willingness to put political loyalty over professional standards. We saw that most recently in the way leading conservative economists raced to endorse ludicrous claims for the efficacy of the Trump tax cuts, then tried to climb down without admitting what they had done.

What accounts for this moral decline? I suspect that it’s about a desperate attempt to retain some influence on a party that prefers the likes of Kudlow or Stephen Moore. People like John Taylor just keep hoping that if they toe the party line enough, they can still get on the inside. But so far this keeps not happening – and for sure it won’t get better under Trump.

Am I saying that there are no conservative economists who have maintained their principles? Not at all. But they have no influence, zero, on GOP thinking. So in economics, a news organization trying to represent conservative thought either has to publish people with no constituency or go with the charlatans who actually matter.

And I think that’s true across the board. The left has genuine public intellectuals with actual ideas and at least some real influence; the right does not. News organizations don’t seem to have figured out how to deal with this reality, except by pretending that it doesn’t exist. And that’s why we keep having these Williamson-like debacles.

The Changing Face of Protests in the Trump Era

For years now Republicans have used slim electoral wins to claim a mandate and had proceeded to inflict on a majority of citizens agendas that harm the majority or which are not consistent with the views of the majority.  They have been able to do this in no small part because far too many Americans have been too lazy to get to the polls and vote.  Indeed, in the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, lost the popular vote and only garnered the vote of less than 28% of registered voters.  Only in the GOP bubble or Trump's ego driven world would that  be counted as a mandate.  The result, based on protests that we have been witnessing and the Democratic victories in many special elections, may be that the majority is learning that sit home and lazily say "I don't like politics" is leading their communities and the country to ruin.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at the protest since Trump entered the White House and how they increasingly target GOP policies and what they may portend.  Here are highlights:

In the past month, teachers in three conservative and comparatively poor states have gone on strike, and, in that short time, certain patterns have developed. . . . . the strikes have been organized on Facebook rather than called by union leaders, and, in West Virginia and Oklahoma, the teachers have rejected lawmakers’ initial offers of pay raises; they have said that they also want to change the systematic underfunding of education. “The real midterms are happening right now, in Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona,” the left-wing political theorist Corey Robin tweeted on Sunday.

The tenor of liberal mass protest has changed in the fifteen months since Donald Trump became President. The early demonstrations (the counterprotests at the Inauguration; the vast and furious crowds at the Women’s March, a day later; the more anxious ones that gathered at airports, calling for the release of sequestered Iranian graduate students and Iraqi grandmothers, after the President issued his first travel ban targeting predominantly Muslim nations) had a feeling of holding the country back from a precipice. There was talk of creeping fascism, and a sense that the Trump Administration was a bad dream from which the country might awake if people pinched themselves hard enough.

The protests in the second year of the Trump Administration have taken on a different character. For one thing, they have been somewhat less about Trump. As a gun-control movement coalesced in the aftermath of the massacre of seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, its villain was not Trump but the National Rifle Association and the influence it exerts in Washington and state legislatures around the country. The student activists from Parkland have been careful to argue that their call for gun control is in the reasonable mainstream, in contrast to the inflexible, extreme positions taken by politicians loyal to the N.R.A.

The Parkland protests were sophisticated not just in their messaging but in their sense of how local political power can be. In Sacramento, California, during the past two weeks, there have been demonstrations in response to the police killing of Stephon Clark, a young, unarmed African-American man who was shot after allegedly running away from officers who had confronted him in the yard of his grandmother’s house. The protests have aimed to shut down civic life in the city . . . A few days before the shooting, a leader of the local Black Lives Matter chapter, Tanya Faison, had called for volunteers to follow police officers around Sacramento, recording what they did, as a method of citizen surveillance.

The red-state teacher revolts have been especially precise in their tactics. They have focussed on the long-running matter of how conservative states, some of which require legislative supermajorities to raise any tax at all, pay for their schools. A common refrain in Oklahoma, where school funding has been so aggressively cut that about a fifth of schools now open for only four days each week, has been that many teachers have taken home about the same pay for a decade or more. The images that have circulated are of textbooks so old that they must be held together by duct tape. Schools are in bad shape all over, not just in states run by conservative politicians; . . . Hillary Clinton won nineteen of the twenty states where teachers are paid the most in the 2016 election, and Trump won nineteen of the twenty where teachers are paid the least.

The world of American politics right now is bracing for two events: the outcome of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the midterm elections.

[T]he midterms are beginning to take shape—or, at least, the stakes of the elections are. Since the ascendance of the Tea Party, in 2010 (and, in some places, since long before then), politics in many parts of the country have been arranged around a program of cutting taxes and radically limiting governmental services. In November, we will know quite a bit more about whether that approach will continue to be a major part of our politics, or whether it will prove to be an ideological fad that took over for a while, and then dissipated. . . .  the confidence of teachers in red states has grown: in Oklahoma, they rejected an offered fifteen-per-cent pay raise; in Arizona, they are demanding a twenty-per-cent hike. Those are not the bargaining positions of people who assume that the public will abandon them. It is the posture of those who assume, like the student activists from Parkland, that they are taking the common-sense position, that, even in red states, they have behind them a critical mass of support.

[T]he demonstrations of the past few months have suggested not a split country but a broken political system: in a less toxically partisan time, a slightly more restrictive gun-control regimen or a steadier rate of funding for the schools could be resolved by subcommittees, instead of through marches. The increasingly extreme Republican regimes of this decade—Scott Walker’s in Wisconsin, Sam Brownback’s in Kansas, Mary Fallin’s in Oklahoma, and Paul Ryan’s and Donald Trump’s in Washington—have tended to act as if narrow electoral majorities were a mandate for vast political change, and as if those groups who supported their opponents should have no voice at all.

For the past decade, these politics have redesigned actual towns and cities, leaving them with books with rotting bindings and schools that close on Fridays because they can’t afford anything more. But people live and teach in those towns, and they take notice of changes like these. Eventually, a bill comes due.

Let's hope the bill for Republicans at all levels is very, very high come November, 2018.