7 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread”

1. Heather Cox-Richardson was (and always is) interesting today.

   It is a truism in studying politics that it’s far more important to follow power than it is to follow people. Right now, there is a lot of power sloshing around in Washington, D.C. 

   Trump is trying to convince the country that he has scooped up all that power. But in fact, he has won reelection by less than 50% of the vote, and his vice president is not popular. The policies Trump is embracing are so unpopular that he himself ran away from them when he was campaigning. And now he has proposed filling his administration with a number of highly unqualified figures who, knowing the only reason they have been elevated is that they are loyal to Trump, will go along with his worst instincts. With that baggage, it is not clear he will be able to cement enough power to bring his plans to life.

   If power remains loose, it could get scooped up by cabinet officials, as it was during a similarly chaotic period in the 1920s. In that era, voters elected to the presidency former newspaperman and Republican backbencher Warren G. Harding of Ohio, who promised to return the country to “normalcy” after eight years of the presidency of Democrat Woodrow Wilson and the nation’s engagement in World War I. That election really was a landslide, with Harding and his running mate, Calvin Coolidge, winning more than 60% of the popular vote in 1920.

   But Harding was badly out of his depth in the presidency and spent his time with cronies playing bridge and drinking upstairs at the White House—despite Prohibition—while corrupt members of his administration grabbed all they could. 

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2. The Golden Era of MAGA Incompetence. Brad DeLong.

   TIME FOR A RANT: Today's Republicans is very weird; in this case, deeply weird about the Federal Reserve, & deeply, deeply confused about money & banking, & the Federal Reserve's constitutional basis…

   Digging too deep into new weird arguments about “taxation without representation”, legal tender, the Congressional power to “coin money”, central banking, and the peculiar voting structure of the FOMC, with the context being a corrupt Supreme Court majority with no guardrails and no expertise.

   TL;DR: The claim that the Fed is unconstitutional because Congress can no more delegate its power to “coin money” than it could delegate its power to declare war immediately fails on the grounds of logic and reason out of its historical stupidity.

   The original intention & the clear public meaning of the Constitution text is that giving Congress the power to coin money gives it the power to direct the making of coins.

   At the time of the Constitution, “paper money” was a new idea, to cover the case when “the circulating notes of banks and bankers… [because of] confidence in the fortune, probity and prudence… come to have the same [circulating] currency as gold and silver money”. Such bearer obligations of banks—effectively endorsed checks—were called “paper money” as a metaphor because they had come to act like money in the payments system, not because they really were money. They were just bearer obligations of banks, the kinds of things that arise in banking business. And they were in no sense “coined” by the government, as they were issued not by the governments but by banks doing banking

   Federal Reserve Notes are bearer obligations of the twelve private government-chartered corporations that are the regional Federal Reserve Banks, not “money” in the eyes of the Constitution. The Congress has chosen to make them legal tender as part of its regulatory powers. Congress’s regulatory powers cover which banks are allowed and which are not allowed to issue such bearer obligations that can function like coins. And Congress has not delegated the power to decide what is and isn’t legal tender to anyone.

   But there are no real originalists, believers in plain public meaning, or textualists on the Supreme Court, are there? The majority is composed of six tame and corrupt ideologues and Professional Republicans who could decide anything, isn’t it?

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3. Annals of “Retribution, Corruption and Destruction” David Kurtz at TPM.

   If we use the Trump II trifecta of retribution, corruption, and destruction as the analytical framework, Hegseth probably best slots in under the destruction theme. He is someone with nowhere near the management experience expected of someone running the Pentagon; he is eager to root out “wokeness” in the military; and he comes to the job with a passel of other right-wing notions and agenda items.

   I should note that the MAGA impulse towards destruction is closely connected to the corruption threat. Grifters prey on the chaos, the breakdown of normal policies and procedures, and the undermining of watchdogs and other accountability mechanisms. The enormous amount of money coursing through the Pentagon is ripe for even further abuse than we’ve become accustomed to.

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4. What will curtail Yammie-pie’s grandiose plans for his second term? We just can’t afford them: https://apnews.com/article/trump-national-debt-inflation-economic-growth-spending-895ec1551122a0e1babf24b657f650bb

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   1. According to birders I know the Yellow Bellied Deficit Hawk has entered a prolonged migration pattern and won't be seen while a Republican is in office. 

      Also good tool on the topic of economic concerns: 

      https://fred.stlouisfed.org/

      Wonderful graphs and data sets galore 

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5. Curious to read some of the post-election polling.  Pew Research sent me an email with links to their findings: 

   Public narrowly approves of Trump’s plans; most are skeptical he will unify the country

    

   Roughly half of Americans (53%) approve of President-elect Donald Trump’s plans for his second term, while 46% disapprove. And while the vast majority say it’s at least somewhat important that Trump reach out to supporters of Kamala Harris to try and bring the country together, relatively few (31%) say he’s done well in this area.

   • What Americans think about: Trump’s personal traits, handling of policy | His plans and transition conduct | The state of the country
   • After Trump’s victory, Democrats are more pessimistic about their party’s future

   Half approving of his plans — and I'd bet that 30-50% of those wouldn't be able to accurately describe the pros and cons of Trump "plans" of any three they are concerned about.

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   1. Most Americans – I'd venture to say at least two-thirds of them – are economically illiterate. They do not understand demand and supply, let alone the causes of inflation or the reasons that international trade increases wealth in both trading nations' societies.

      And then there's the tendency of Americans to confuse fact with opinion and propaganda with news. So I doubt these polls are particularly useful.

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