Norm Ornstein swings and misses

 I have seldom seen Norm Ornstein be wrong. But I found myself shaking my head at a recent piece he wrote in the Atlantic. The headline reads: “How Far Would a Republican Majority Go? Not just democracy is at stake this fall.” One must be wary of headlines, especially in a clickbait world. But this one seems reasonably on point. Ornstein is arguing that not only would the Republicans likely destroy democracy, but they could also tank the economy. 

He writes:

When it comes to the House, FiveThirtyEight has found that so far, at minimum 117 House Republicans with at least a 95 percent chance of winning are full-blown election deniers or questioners, a good leading indicator of radicalism and a willingness to ignore facts and embrace fantasy. In turn, they are willing, if not eager, to blow up institutions and government itself to accomplish their goals.

. . .The concessions demanded by the new MAGA extremist radicals will be non-negotiable. And this time, if Republicans win, a lot more members will be ready to push us over the cliff—and the speaker, McCarthy, with no ability or willingness to stop their juggernaut. Of course, other major disruptions could occur, including government shutdowns and costly investigations. But it is the tangible threat of default that looms largest.

Hey! Lock your doors at night! Otherwise, someone could break in and murder you in your sleep! And steal your TV!!! Ornstein argues we can’t allow them to break in and steal our TV.

I say let them have the TV. And here’s why:

Republicans are going to take power again. I’m doing my bit to try to prevent it, and so are you. But we’ve got to look soberly at our chances. Republicans’ obvious readiness to destroy our democracy has not been enough to deprive them of the support of half the electorate. The slam dunk case made by the January 6 committee has not noticeably moved the needle on support for the man who attempted a coup d’etat. Overthrowing Roe moved the needle maybe a couple of percentage points but the Republicans are still poised to take over the House; still poised to dominate state legislatures and governorships; still within a heartbeat or two of taking the Senate. Herschel Walker is neck-to-neck with Senator Warnock in purple Georgia. 

It seems clear that no matter how clearly the Republicans while out of power broadcast their intentions to destroy our institutions, the electorate will not consider that disqualifying. And whether in this election, or the next, or the one after, the electorate will give them the opportunity to deliver on that promise.

The glass is already broken. 

It seems to me that’s the reality we need to reckon with. And so. We should be thinking about what happens in the aftermath. And here’s why I think Ornstein is wrong. If a Republican House forces a default, the consequences could be truly catastrophic. It’s possible–though maybe not likely–that such a catastrophe could satisfy the electorate’s bloodlust and wake it from its facist-tolerating fever-dream. Maybe, just maybe, if the Republicans actually destroy our economy, that will be enough to convince voters to turn away. If we escape from our current predicament with only an economic catastrophe, we should consider ourselves most fortunate.

The alternatives are worse.

(opinion by Dan T)

News bits

Federal judge forced to make a crackpot ruling

by a crackpot Supreme Court ruling

As radicalism and crackpot reasoning engulf the federal courts, one can watch the rot set in and deepen over time. Watching democracy and the rule of law rot away is sort of like a spectator sport if one adopts the right mindset. Salon writes:

For decades, federal law has forbidden gun owners from scratching out the serial numbers that manufacturers are legally required to place on firearms. The reason is obvious: These serial numbers help state and federal law enforcement trace guns that are used in crimes and identify suspected shooters. Indeed, the only apparent reason anyone would remove a serial number is to avoid becoming a suspect after their gun is used illegally. On Wednesday, however, a federal judge ruled that the law prohibiting alteration of serial numbers violates the Second Amendment. Why? Because serial numbers were virtually nonexistent when the amendment was ratified in 1791, so the government has no power to mandate them today.

This decision in United States v. Price by U.S. District Judge Joseph R. Goodwin, a Bill Clinton appointee, may sound shocking. But it is a perfectly plausible application of the Supreme Court’s June ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. In that case, Justice Clarence Thomas declared all gun restrictions presumptively unconstitutional if they infringe on “the individual right to armed self-defense.” (The Constitution says nothing about “self-defense,” but Thomas gleaned this right from its penumbra.) A gun restriction may only survive legal scrutiny, the justice declared, if it had an “analogue” in 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified, or 1868, when it was imposed on the states. The burden falls on the government to prove the existence of a historical analogue.  

Thomas’ test has already wreaked havoc in the lower courts. One judge has struck down a Texas law that prohibits 18 to 20-year-olds from carrying a handgun outside the home. People under 21 are significantly more likely to commit gun homicides—but in Bruen, Thomas announced that courts may never consider the real-world, life-saving impact of gun safety laws when gauging their constitutionality. A different Texas judge invalidated a federal law barring individuals from purchasing a handgun while they’re under indictment, even for a violent felony offense. Just last week, another judge struck down New York’s ban on concealed carry in airports, train stations, domestic violence shelters, summer camps, the subway, and other “sensitive locations.” Now Goodwin, who sits in West Virginia, has joined the chorus of lower court judges who feel that Bruen obliges them to strike down longstanding, widely accepted firearm laws.  

Goodwin acknowledged the “argument” that “firearms with an obliterated serial number are likely to be used in violent crime and therefore a prohibition on their possession is desirable.” But he explained that this argument “is the exact type of means-end reasoning the Supreme Court has forbidden me from considering.” Even if the serial number law demonstrably saved tens of thousands of lives each year, that fact would be totally irrelevant to the constitutional analysis.

A single crackpot radical right Supreme Court ruling based on rigid ideological “reasoning” made-up in the fly has forced the entire federal judiciary into crackpottery and rot. Make no mistake fellow spectators, this is just the beginning of the rot, not the end.

A spectator watching the rot set in

Bill Mahr gets in a snit about The Herschel

The Hill writes:

Political commentator Bill Maher slammed Georgia GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker as “unfit for office” and called him a “f—ing idiot.”

On his HBO show “Real Time” on Friday, Maher pointed to numerous statements Walker has made and reports about him that have come out that he said show why Walker should not be elected to the Senate.

“He’s just a f—ing idiot on a scale on a scale almost impossible to parody,” Maher said.

He said Walker has admitted to threatening violence against multiple people around him, including his ex-wife. He said Walker has lied about his past on numerous occasions, including by falsely claiming to have been a police officer and an FBI agent.

What set Bill of seems to lie in the difficulty of parody a creature as bizarre as The Herschel. Poor Bill. He’ll get over it. Send him thoughts and prayers.

Bill’s frustration

In other The Herschel news 

In a different article, the Hill writes:

The Memo: Walker gives GOP hope with Georgia debate performance

Republican Herschel Walker won a moral victory by avoiding disaster at his sole televised debate with Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) Friday.

In the process, the former football star will have given his party hope that he can overcome a checkered campaign to prevail in the race, which could plausibly determine control of the Senate.

There you have it. The Herschel wins by not being a disaster in a debate he clearly lost. 

Poor Bill

Send thoughts and prayers

About those exorbitant drug prices

ars Technica writes:

A new study finds no correlation between R&D spending and outlandish drug prices.

Americans, though, probably weren’t shocked. Prescription drugs in the US cost about 2.5 times what they do in other countries, and a quarter of Americans find it difficult to afford them. Almost every new cancer drug starts at over $100,000 a year. And a 2022 study found that every year, the average price of newly released drugs is 20 percent higher.

How drug prices are set in the US is a mysterious black box. When rationalizing their lofty price tags, one of the most common reasons pharmaceutical companies will cite is that a high price is needed to make good on the money invested in research and development.

But is that true? “You hear it so much,” says Olivier Wouters, an assistant professor of health policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. “That’s why I was like, well, let’s get some data, because I don’t believe it. I don’t think anyone believes it.”

To anybody in the field, the response to the paper’s finding is: Well, duh. We know what drives drug pricing, says Ezekiel Emanuel, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s, ‘How far can I go? What will the market bear?’” Still, Emanuel says, it’s important to have empirical data like this study to refute the industry’s claim.

Every so often, there are small glimpses behind the curtains into how pharmaceutical companies actually decide on a drug price. An example of this is the hepatitis C drug Sovaldi, which was put on the market in 2013 for a steep $84,000 per 12-week course. In 2015, an 18-month-long US government investigation that reviewed some 20,000 pages of internal company documents revealed that Gilead, the company that owned the drug, had set the high price as a way “to ensure its drugs had the greatest share of the market, for the highest price, for the longest period of time”—in essence, that it was prioritizing profit. In response Gilead said it “stand[s] behind the pricing of our therapies because of the benefit they bring to patients and the significant value they represent to payers, providers, and our entire healthcare system by reducing the long-term costs associated with managing chronic [hepatitis C virus].”

The 1/6 Committee today: The evidence is clear that Trump is a traitor

Once again, the evidence the 1/6 Committee is presenting or repeating so far makes it clear and undeniable that the ex-president never had any intention of accepting a loss in the 2020 election. He was planning to subvert his loss before the election. After the election, he knew he had lost but kept lying about it to the public. An open question is whether anything will come of this in court.

Any Republican politician who continues to support Trump is complicit in treason, a liar and unfit for any elected office. 

The Republican Party is a deadly enemy of democracy, truth, the people and the state.

Q: Are rank and file Republicans who still support Trump complicit in treason and lies? 

News bits: Attacks on democracy, wildlife in decline

The radical right empire that Leonard Leo quietly built

The NYT writes:

Behind the scenes, though, these groups have something in common: They are part of an ambitious coalition developed in recent years by the conservative activist Leonard A. Leo, who until now has been best known for his role in pushing the appointments of conservative judges to the center of the Republican Party’s agenda.

Most of the initiatives were financially supported, or in some cases launched, by an opaque, sprawling network shaped by Mr. Leo and funded by wealthy patrons, usually through anonymous donations that critics call “dark money.”

An investigation by The New York Times of Mr. Leo’s activities reveals new details of how he has built that network, with relatively little public attention, into one of the best-funded and most sophisticated operations in American politics, giving him extraordinary influence as he pushes a broad array of hot-button conservative causes and seeks to counter what he sees as an increasing leftward tilt in society.

The network represents a dramatic expansion of tactics and focus for Mr. Leo, who spent nearly three decades working mostly behind the scenes to pull the judiciary to the right as an executive at the Federalist Society. His success in that effort, and expansion into other polarizing fights, is rapidly making him a leading target of criticism from the left.

His philosophy is defined by a belief that the federal government should play a smaller role in public life and religious values a larger one, and that institutions and individuals should be challenged for embracing what he sees as subversive liberal positions.

His expanded effort focuses on a variety of causes, including restricting abortion rights in the states; ending affirmative action; defending religious groups accused of discriminating against L.G.B.T.Q. people; opposing what he sees as liberal policies being espoused by corporations and schools; electing Republicans; and fighting Democratic efforts to slow climate change, increase the transparency of money in politics and expand voting access.

This is more evidence of (i) the increasingly radical Christian theocratic nature of the Republican Party, (ii) Christian nationalist desire to discriminate against those it deems unworthy, e.g., the LGBTQ community, and (iii) its staunch resistance to doing anything about climate change. That is radicalism. 

The NYT’s assertion that Leo wants to expand voting access is puzzling. The article linked to discusses Republican efforts to restrict voting access, not to expand it. That may be a typo. 

Note that Leo wants to gain power to oppose and reverse what he sees as liberal tendencies in society and business, e.g., concern for climate change, defense of civil liberties for the LGBTQ community, etc. Those changes are what is happening naturally in American society and commerce. That is evidence that Leo is an autocrat or authoritarian, not a democrat.

Declines in wildlife

Declines in wildlife by humans and the climate change are increasing. The NYT writes:

Researchers Report a Staggering Decline in Wildlife. 

Here’s How to Understand It.

It’s clear that wildlife is suffering mightily on our planet, but scientists don’t know exactly how much. A comprehensive figure is exceedingly hard to determine. Counting wild animals — on land and at sea, from gnats to whales — is no small feat. Most countries lack national monitoring systems.

One of the most ambitious efforts to fill this void is published every two years. Known as the Living Planet Index, it’s a collaboration between two major conservation organizations, the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Zoological Society of London.

The assessment’s latest number, issued Wednesday by 89 authors from around the world, is its most alarming yet: From 1970 to 2018, monitored populations of vertebrates declined an average of 69 percent. That’s more than two-thirds in only 48 years.

.... start with three populations: birds, bears and sharks. The birds decline to 5 from 25, a drop of 80 percent. The bears fall to 45 animals from 50, or 10 percent. And the sharks decrease to 8 from 20, or 60 percent.

That gives us an average decline of 50 percent. But the total number of animals fell to 92 from 150, a drop of about 39 percent.

The index is designed that way because it seeks to understand how populations are changing over time. It doesn’t measure how many individuals are present.

So, is it still bad?

Yes. Some scientists think the report actually underestimates the global biodiversity crisis, in part because devastating declines in amphibians may be underrepresented in the data.

And, over time, the trend is not turning around.

“Year after year we are not able to start improving the situation, despite major policies,” said Henrique M. Pereira, a professor of conservation biology at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research who was not involved in this year’s report.