Politix

This week, just as Donald Trump was placed under arrest and arraigned for stealing and concealing troves of state secrets, House Republicans advanced a resolution to censure Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, who’s been one of their main boogeymen since the early days of the Trump administration. The resolution, which failed Wednesday afternoon, is best viewed as a diversionary tactic, and an attempt to pin Trump’s legal woes on Schiff, who was instrumental to Trump’s first impeachment and one of the Democrats’ most effective communicators about Trump’s corruption. The Congressman joins host Brian Beutler to discuss the latest Trump indictment, how vulnerable Trump is now, and what the Republican party’s continued loyalty to the former president means for their political future.

If the debt limit fight was any indication, President Biden appears to be minimizing setbacks, pausing his forward-looking policy agenda, and focusing on the stuff he enacted last Congress. But is that the best he can do? After all, low-hanging fruit remains within reach of his executive power. No one expects the president to spend the next 17 months bombarding the political world with executive orders. But it’s worth asking what he’s capable of doing in theory, and why he isn’t doing those things now. Would Biden need to change how he conceives of politics and governing in order to make the most of his administrative power? The American Prospect has been keeping track of what Biden has chosen to do and what he’s left on the table ever since he took office. David Dayen is the executive editor of the magazine, and he joins host Brian Beutler to explore the limits of the possible in this divided government, and how Biden could use this moment to reconsider the full powers of his presidency.

In the past few years, the Republican politics of crime and racial scapegoating have given way to the outright glorification of vigilante killers like Kyle Rittenhouse, Eddie Gallagher, and most recently, Daniel Penny. Last week, Penny choked a Black street artist to death for the crime of being mentally ill on a New York subway. In response, Ron DeSantis called him a “Good Samaritan” and said America has his back. Why has this trend taken hold? Is it new? And, most importantly, to what end? Host Brian Beutler welcomes Matthew Dallek, a professor at George Washington University and author of the new book Birchers, which details the founding of the far-right John Birch Society and its attempt to take over the GOP. Brian and Matt discuss the ever-shrinking line between violent right-wing extremists and mainstream Republican politicians, why the GOP is turning racist vigilantes into folk heroes, and how the groundwork for MAGA to take over the Republican Party was laid 50 years ago by a group of wealthy, extremist bigots.

The World Health Organization and U.S. government have declared an end to the COVID-19 public health emergency. And it’s not hard to understand why: the herd got pretty immune. As great as it is that fewer people are getting sick and dying, memory-holing COVID has perverse consequences for people who are suffering from long-term effects of the disease. What happens to them now? Is there any progress towards a cure? And is the back-burnering of COVID-19 slowing that progress down? These questions are top of mind—for us, at least—because both host Brian Beutler and Associate Producer Emma Illick-Frank have different species of long COVID. They discuss the current state of long covid discourse, treatment, and research with Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, a physiatrist who developed the Post-COVID Recovery Clinic at University of Texas Health San Antonio.

Joe Biden released his first re-election campaign video and it was…actually good. Instead of touting minimum wage or Medicare protection, Biden characterized this election as a fight for freedom––the freedom to choose when to become a parent, to be an out and healthy trans person, and to safely inhabit schools and other places of learning. It’s a big move considering Republicans have had a near monopoly on emotionally resonant rhetoric for the last 40 years. So what will Biden’s “freedom” re-election campaign look like in practice? Does coopting this rhetoric from Republicans represent something greater than savvy politics? Will the Democratic Party share the courage of Biden’s convictions? Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent joins host Brian Beutler to talk about what freedom means in American politics today, and why this campaign message is not only shrewd, but also philosophically correct.

Clarence Thomas has been accepting lavish gifts from a Republican mega-donor for almost as long as he’s been on the Supreme Court, while disclosing none of it. Or rather, he initially disclosed some of it, but stopped when reporters got wise to the relationship. Meanwhile, his real-estate tycoon patron, Harlan Crow, has had business before the Supreme Court, and Thomas did not recuse himself. Since these revelations came to light, Thomas has shown no indication of remorse, or that he’ll change the nature of this relationship—he enjoys the same kind of impunity as Donald Trump, with the added benefit of lifetime tenure on the bench. We’ve never lived in a world of perfect political accountability, but the Clarence Thomas problem is new. Richard Nixon had to resign the presidency. Spiro Agnew went down. Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas was forced to resign in 1969. What changed, and why? Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman joins host Brian Beutler to discuss her role on the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate scandal, and what it would take to hold public figures accountable for their corruption at least some of the time, like we were able to in the 60s and 70s.

Republicans in the Tennessee assembly expelled two of their colleagues for joining a protest for new gun laws at the state capitol after a nearby school massacre. And the whole stunt blew back at them righteously. The country saw a party that responded to a mass shooting by exerting maximum punishment on gun control supporters and their democratically elected colleagues (but only the Black ones). What’s happening in Tennessee might be remembered as a clarifying moment when voters had to pick a side and sided against reactionary politics and authoritarianism and racism. Yet these clarifying moments are starting to feel all too familiar. Similar moments happened in the 2010’s with the rise of the Tea Party, and continue today through as Donald Trump retains total control of the GOP. Has anything changed since the Tea Party? Why did Democrats struggle so much to make Republicans own their extremism then, but seem to be faring better now? Are Democrats, or at least state-level Democrats, getting better at illuminating these important choosing moments for voters? Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler knows how to beat reactionary politics better than anyone, and he joins host Brian Beutler to discuss how Democrats can build on victories and public enthusiasm in Wisconsin, Tennessee, and other states.

Donald Trump got arrested and the world didn’t end. The fear of backlash that seemingly paralyzed so many of our institutions of accountability now seems mostly like a figment of the imaginations of the people who run those institutions. What took so long? Some of that is attributable to corruption, to former Attorney General Bill Barr and other Trump loyalists who ran interference for him while he was president. But some of it looks more like cowardice. People were anxious about doing something hard, and talked themselves into reasons why they didn’t have to. So with the Band-Aid ripped off, what could decision makers have done differently? Former FBI counterterrorism investigator Peter Strzok joins host Brian Beutler again to discuss how we can improve our accountability systems so that threats like Donald Trump aren’t left beyond the reach of the law until it’s too late.

A social media app is causing a bipartisan furor in U.S. politics, and it’s the one where young people make funny dance videos. Because TikTok is owned by the China-based company Bytedance, Congress is concerned the platform is more of an espionage front than an entertainment medium. TikTok at least theoretically allows China to collect private data from Americans, sow division in U.S. society for geopolitical gain and even inundate U.S. users with propaganda to influence our elections. On the other hand, it isn’t hard to think of reasons why banning TikTok might be a bad idea. Are we just cowering to anti-China demagogues? What are the implications for free speech? And what are the political costs of banning an app that tons of Americans, particularly young Americans, love? Add it all up, and it’s hard to figure out the least-bad option. Data-privacy specialist Julian Sanchez joins host Brian Beutler to stress test the pros and cons of banning TikTok, and add nuance to what looks like a stark choice between either flooding our society with more anti-democracy propaganda or engaging in the kind of censorship we’d normally decry if another country did it.

Silicon Valley Bank failed and it remains to be seen what unintended consequences we may have unleashed by bailing it out. What’s clear, though, is that SVB’s risk exposure could probably have been detected and its failure prevented, and SVB’s richest, most powerful depositors tried to whip up a broader banking panic in order to build pressure on the government to save them from their poor decisions. They warned of everything up to civilizational collapse if the government didn’t announce that they’d be held harmless. And they got exactly what they wanted, with no strings attached, no new regulation, no new legislation, no symbolic tax on their standing in public life. They’ve gone right back to pretending to be masters of the universe, and they grow seemingly more enthralled with fascist politics every day, as if the Democratic government didn’t just bail them out. Economist Dean Baker joins host Brian Beutler to discuss the stakes of the bail out, and if economics can account for the moral hazard of caving to demands of extremely powerful political activists, openly allied with the political right, who threaten to break the system if they don’t get their way.