Democrats take Virginia, evil defeated in Kentucky

Last night, Democrats took control of the Virginia state legislature and won the Kentucky Governor's race. (More good news: New York City adopted ranked-choice voting for municipal elections.)

Virginia Republicans hadn't won a statewide race for ten years, but had gerrymandered state legislative districts to keep themselves in power. A court ruled against the gerrymander before the 2019 elections. That was enough for Democrats to win what looks like a 55-45 majority in the state House and a 21-19 majority in the state Senate. The agenda includes a minimum wage increase, various health care improvements, and gun control.

If you enjoy the defeat of evil, enjoy the defeat of Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin. He tried to cut teachers' pensions, and when they responded with a work stoppage, he called them "ignorant" "selfish" "thugs" who were exposing students to child molesters by not operating the schools. (This is not a single remark, but a series of disgusting utterances on different occasions.) After a previous Governor enacted one of the nation's best-run Obamacare-linked Medicaid expansions, Bevin tried to shut down the health care website and impose work requirements for Medicaid eligibility that cost hundreds of millions of dollars in additional administrative fees.

Bevin tried to win the election by tying himself to Trump, who won Kentucky by a 62-32 margin in 2016. With 100% of precincts reporting, pro-choice Democrat Andy Beshear has 49.2% of the vote, and Bevin has 48.8%. Bevin refuses to concede. But all major news organizations agree that he's the Republican Governor who somehow managed to lose re-election in deeply red Kentucky.

Nancy has the votes

This week, the House voted 232-196 to formalize procedures for impeaching Donald Trump.

On the morning of the vote, Kellyanne Conway went on TV saying that Democrats didn't have the votes to pass the resolution. I liked DC political journalist Dave Weigel's comment: "You don't have to be a 'yaaas kween' Pelosi fan to know that 'I bet Pelosi won't have counted the votes' is a prelude to being embarrassed".

Despite being a "yaaas kween" Pelosi fan of 14 years, I didn't expect such a large margin of victory. But I can tell you a little about what made it happen. It requires a lot of trust between Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Congresscritters* from Republican-leaning districts. There are 36 of them, 34 of whom voted for the impeachment resolution.

Congress has long operated with an economy of favor-trading. Sometimes the favors are tangible things, like voting to fund a highway your district wants. Sometimes they're intangible things, like having the Speaker make it clear that you're not committed to something that Fox News might otherwise blast you for in the next election.

Earlier this year, vulnerable Democratic Congresscritters wanted that sort of clarity about not being committed to impeachment. I expect that they still want it on things like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Pelosi gave them the clear uncommitted positioning they wanted by looking negative on impeachment. She maintained that up until September, when the Ukraine scandal emerged and she saw the opportunity.

What does Pelosi ask in return? That they vote her way if the time comes to do so. The time came, and they held up their end of the deal.

Back in 2010 when Pelosi was trying to pass Obamacare through the House and betting markets had it at a 1 in 3 chance of passage, she was beaming at cameras and talking about what a historic event it would be. She knew she had the votes. The moderates owed her. The media didn't know how many votes she had. But she did.

*A gender-neutral and species-neutral term favored by mid-2000s lefty bloggers.

Mixed economy is best economy

The Cold War is often described as a struggle between capitalism and communism. The winner, though, was the mixed economy.

That's how it had to be. How to organize human productive activity is too complex and contingent a question to be answered by any grand theory. We do things in many ways, as we should.

Markets are good for producing consumer goods like smartphones. Government is good for building infrastructure and redistributing wealth so that the poor aren't doomed. Families operate to satisfy all kinds of human needs. Charity isn't as strong a force as others above but it's usually pointed at doing very nice things. And sometimes, somehow, groups of people spontaneously generate Wikipedia.

Depending on the conditions, any of these systems may be optimal for organizing some sphere of activity. I doubt any economic theory that unduly constrains our options, so that we can't use all these systems or invent others. And I doubt any theory of rights so proprietary to one of these systems that it would treat the others as unjust.

Last Dance With Mayor Pete (Indiana Boys On An Indiana Night)

Pete Buttigieg has started attacking Medicare for All and talking up Anthony Kennedy as a model Supreme Court Justice. I used to have him behind Warren and Sanders as a serviceable third choice. I'd still take him over Biden, and of course I'll vote for any Democrat against Trump, but this makes him a much worse option for the primary.

What explains his abrupt shift? The most obvious answer is that with Biden fading in the polls, fundraising poorly, and looking less electable, Pete is trying to become the top centrist option. It might be his best strategy for winning the nomination, even if the crass opportunism is obvious.

I see another reason. If Mayor Pete loses, his political future is in Indiana. All nine statewide offices in Indiana are controlled by Republicans, testifying to the state's conservatism and leaving Democrats with a weak candidate pool. I don't know if Pete would have time to jump into this year's Governor's race, but there's also a Senate race in 2022. Both are against undistinguished Republicans who won their last races with barely over 50% of the vote.

Those are races where we could use an ambitious, media-savvy small-town mayor with centrist credentials and a military record. If selling out in the primary improves his fundraising connections with corrupt interests, that may help too. And if he's a skilled opportunist, so much the better! So let's use our primary votes to send Mayor Pete where he'll be best for maximizing aggregate utility -- his home state of Indiana.

The quid pro quo scandal ends the Biden electability argument

I'm a Biden electability skeptic of long standing, and recent events have only deepened my skepticism.

My old argument was that Biden was just enjoying the reflected glory of Obama, and his mediocrity would emerge as soon as he had to be his own man. He lost Democratic primaries a couple times because he's bad at campaigning. The passage of time would not make him better at this.

Now there's a big new problem. Through no great fault of his own, the right-wing smear machine has its biggest guns pointed straight at him. They have to defend Trump from the quid pro quo scandal, and the best way to do it is to shoot at Biden.

(I like calling this the 'quid pro quo' scandal. Say we discover more quid pro quos. With the Saudis? With Erdogan? With Uncle Vladimir? The name rightly weaves them into the scandal. And it supports an obviously important rule: No trading public stuff for private favors!)

If I were in charge of defending Trump, and Biden was my general-election opponent, I'd go for the 2-for-1 that defends Trump as it attacks Biden: Deep Biden skulduggery was going on in Ukraine, and Trump was heroically fighting it.

Obviously this involves making up nonsense. But Fox News can easily push made-up stories about Ukraine. Americans are not knowledgeable about matters in Ukraine. And Putin might be of assistance.

So. The right-wing noise machine getting an early start against an establishment democrat? On nonsense that Uncle Vladimir is in good position to help push? And we chose the candidate for electability! Do you know how this story ended last time?

If you don't, I can send you some emails.

How did Mark Milley feel when Pelosi said, "All roads with you lead to Putin"?

Donald Trump tweeted this photo with the caption "Nervous Nancy's unhinged meltdown." Pelosi then maximized utility by making it her Twitter cover image.

Mark Milley is the Army general next to Trump -- one of the many men on Trump's side of the table wishing they were somewhere else. He's serving his first month as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after being confirmed by the Senate in an 89-1 vote. I think it's most interesting to imagine the meeting from his perspective.

Early in the meeting, Trump handed out copies of the blustery letter he had written to Erdogan, which begins "Let's work out a good deal! You don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don't want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy -- and I will." Apparently Erdogan put the letter in the trash. Milley has a Masters in International Relations from Columbia, and he knows that this is utterly ridiculous.

Trump then called former general James Mattis "The most overrated general in the world. You know why? He wasn’t tough enough. I captured ISIS. Mattis said it would take two years. I captured them in one month." Milley has been in the military for 39 years, and I doubt he enjoys hearing this language from a man who claimed bone spurs to avoid military service.

Milley had warned during the meeting that ISIS was "not destroyed" and could "reconstitute" if Erdogan's attack on the Kurds freed captured ISIS fighters. Trump then claimed that only the least dangerous ISIS fighters had escaped. When Chuck Schumer asked Defense Secretary Mark Esper if any intelligence confirmed this, Esper said there was no such intelligence.

Schumer then asked Trump, “Is your plan to rely on the Syrians and the Turks?” Trump replied, “Our plan is to keep the American people safe.” Pelosi told him, “That’s not a plan. That’s a goal.”

Trump then complained about Obama and started insulting Pelosi. She told Trump that he gave Moscow a foothold in the Middle East. As far as I can tell, the photo is taken as she says, "All roads with you lead to Putin."

There are many other ashen-faced men on Trump's side of the table. But it's Milley's torment that seems the most exquisite to me. His boss has just been arrogantly stupid on issues his entire career has trained him to understand. Now he is forced to contemplate working for a President who has been compromised by the enemy.

If he thought Pelosi's remark was unfair or wrong, he might be glaring back at her, or at least sitting with a straight-necked military bearing. But he isn't. His head is bowed, his hands are clasped, and his eyes are squeezed shut.

The marble bust of Benjamin Franklin stares sternly over his shoulder. Behind Pelosi in the photo is a statue of George Washington. I wonder if he tried not to meet their eyes when he left the Cabinet Room.

Legislative leadership

I often make boasts like like "I've been a Nancy Pelosi superfan ever since the Ice Age." Just for verification / trivia purposes, here's me blogging in the Washington Monthly back in 2008 about how she had defeated Social Security Privatization three years before. You might have heard me tell this story before.

Most people understand politics in terms of Presidential elections, probably because those are the most-publicized political events. But for determining policy, legislative politics is no less important. Good legislative leadership is about counting votes, trading favors, and having a good sense of political possibilities. Speechmaking and PR are secondary considerations.

Presidents are outdoor politicians. Speakers and Majority / Minority Leaders are indoor politicians, operating from their proverbial smoke-filled rooms. If you watch legislative politics for a while and try to grasp what's driving the outcomes, you start to learn what makes a good indoor politician.

In the case of my recent conversion on impeachment, the issue was just thinking I can trust Pelosi on when coordination is likely to break down with Republican Senators. It's a matter of understanding when votes might move around -- not necessarily to remove, but to get a worthwhile outcome. Understanding instabilities in the other side's caucus is part of what she did to beat privatization. I trust she can do that again.

Pelosi supports impeachment, so I do too

Nancy Pelosi has initiated a formal impeachment inquiry. I've been an impeachment naysayer all year. But when Pelosi changes positions, I change too. I'll explain.

I opposed impeachment because the Senate trial looked like a disaster. Several Senate Democrats (Manchin, Tester, Jones) seemed ready to vote for acquittal. This would marginalize the charges against Trump going into the 2020 election and make it harder to put pressure on Republicans.

Moreover, most of the rules for conducting an impeachment trial can be changed by a Senate majority vote. This lets Mitch McConnell turn the trial into whatever he wants, if he can hold a majority. After the Kavanaugh confirmation, I anticipated the horror of my Democratic friends when the impeachment trial became whatever celebration of Trump's innocence McConnell wanted. It would be a hideous mockery of accountability.

All of this comes down to Senate vote totals. Get 4 Republicans to join united Democrats, and you have a majority that takes control out of McConnell's hands. And a bipartisan majority vote against Trump -- while insufficient for removing him -- would at least send the right message rather than the wrong one.

Pelosi counts votes better than any politician in my lifetime. Remember McConnell losing Obamacare repeal on the Senate floor after John McCain gave him the thumbs down? Pelosi doesn't let that happen. What she does is governed by her knowledge of the vote totals -- what they are, and what they'll become in a variety of possible future situations.

I think she's moving now because the Ukraine scandal has finally loosened things up in the Senate to where we have a shot at winning over Republicans. Senate Republicans are more fractured over this scandal than anything else, with Burr, Sasse, Romney, and Toomey cited in the media as alarmed. If this doesn't hold up for some reason, Pelosi might wait for a better setup in the future. But this as good an opportunity as anything we've seen.

This scandal hits close to home for Republican Senators. They don't want a future Democratic President using federal money to bribe foreign rulers for dirt on them. If only they cared so much about brown children in cages! But if this is what will make them turn on Trump, it's what we go with. It's how to get an impeachment process that really damages him and his party.

I've been actively following Congressional politics for 15 years now. It's been 15 years of watching Pelosi make the right move on every big issue, because she could see how the votes would go. It's how she stopped Bush from privatizing Social Security, how she turned the Democratic Party to favor withdrawal from Iraq, and how she passed Obamacare when everyone thought it was doomed.

Now she's on the march. I march with her.

Veggie mutton biryani

Apparently I have the Buddhists to thank for fake mutton, one of the best veggie meats I’ve encountered in Singapore. This biryani plate and a cheap mango lassi went for $5 SGD ($3.62 USD) at a university cafeteria.

Ibid

In my first year of college, I encountered "Ibid" in a footnote. I had heard of an ancient poet named Ovid, so I assumed that Ibid was one of his contemporaries. As the footnotes continued, I was impressed by how significant Ibid's work had been -- he was getting cited again and again!