Where is our corrupt system when you need it?

I keep waiting for Big Pharma plus the rest of the medical industry to take out the RFK Jr. nomination. Seriously, what point is there to spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy up most of our politicians if you can't use that influence to end the nomination of a man who threatens to destroy their entire business?

The man had a worm in his brain! He once beheaded a whale! He also did this bizarre cover-up of the death of a baby bear in Central Park! And that's not even mentioning the sexual misconduct. The man is the lowest-hanging fruit of vulnerable nominees. Aren't our capitalist overlords good for anything?!?!?!

plus ça change...

I wonder if the *new* Republican Congressional majority is any better at electing a speaker than the old one was.

Opportunity for Tehran

I wonder if Iran might have a shot at reconciling (or at least getting better relations) with the U.S. in the second Trump term. The first term was terrible for Iran. Trump backed out of the nuclear deal it negotiated with Obama and Trump assassinated Qasem Soleimani. But there are several factors that make it more likely that Trump will reconcile with Iran in his second term:

First, Trump very few actual principles, which makes it easy for him to make complete reversals of his prior positions.

Second, Trump has fallen out with old guard neo-cons like John Bolton. Bolton is extremely hostile to Iran and was Trump's national security advisor. After he left the Trump administration, he has become a harsh critic of Trump, calling him "unfit" to be president. Without Bolton and his cohort, there will not be the same anti-Iranian whispers in his ear.

Third, Russia is now an ally of Iran. If Putin is friends with someone, Trump is more likely to go along.

Fourth, the Saudis hostility towards Iran is less severe than it was in his first term. Saudi Arabia is not as influential on Trump as Russia is, but it is another dictatorial regime that has learned how to manipulate Trump. While the Saudis won't necessarily push him to reconcile with Tehran, they are likely to be less hostile to the idea than they were between 2017 and 2020.

Fifth, there is no agreement with Iran with any opponent's (Obama or Biden's) fingerprints for Trump to be hostile about.

Sixth, Trump really wants to be a peacemaker in the middle east. He claimed he could do it, and that's a lot harder to do without involving Iran.

The only major impediments I see to Trump improving relations with Iran is the Israelis will hate the idea, and because Iran was so thoroughly demonized in the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s (when Trump seems to have formed his opinion about most things). But if Iran butters him up enough, I don't think that stuff will really matter. Hell, I bet Iranians can get sanction relief if they just let Trump build a Trump Tower in Tehran.

Laws may not be honored in Trump 2.0 but they should matter

I get that the Trump train is coming, so we're going to have a whole new level of lawlessness in this country, but can people at least acknowledge that the legal limits on what Trump can do exist? I've read a few pieces about what tariffs Trump may impose soon after inauguration day. I've kinda sought them out. I know, it's masochism. But we all cope in our own ways!

Anyway, most of these articles talk about the tariffs Trump will slap on Mexico without ever noting that legally he doesn't have the power to unilaterally impose a tariff on Mexico. It's not even a gray area. Trump can't do it without passing legislation through Congress because of a law that Trump himself signed.

To explain this, I need to back up a bit. The Constitution defines what powers each branch of government has. Article I sets out what Congress has the power to do, Article II sets out what the President has the power to do. On the question of who gets to impose tariffs, the answer is crystal clear: only Congress has that power. Article I, Section 8, Clause 1 gives Congress the power "to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises" (a "duty" is a tariff on imported goods).  So how did Trump slap tariffs left and right in his first term? Since the 1930s, Congress has delegated its authority to levy tariffs to the President through various laws. Most importantly, through the Trade Act of 1974 Congress gave the President the power to impose tariffs on foreign countries to counteract "injurious and unfair" foreign trade practices. That law was the statutory basis for most (if not all) of Trump's tariff-imposing executive orders between 2017 and 2020.

But subsequent laws passed by Congress override whatever prior laws say. After the Trade Act of 1974, Congress ratified various trade agreements with Mexico which set a different tariff regime for U.S.-Mexican trade. Most recently, the USMCA, the successor to NAFTA, that the Trump administration negotiated with Canada and Mexico, and which was ratified by Congress and signed into law by Trump in 2020. The USMCA now defines the tariffs that can be imposed by the U.S., on Mexican imports. It does not fall under the delegation of tariff authority under the Tariff Act of 1974 like other nations' imports do.

I have no doubt that if imposing tariffs on Mexico is important to Trump he will try to do it anyway. I doubt he understands the USMCA at all. But doing so would not be legal. Whether the increasingly trumpy courts find some way to bend the law into a pretzel to rationalize allowing him to do it is another question. But still, when journalists write articles about the possibility that Trump may slap tariffs on Mexican imports, they should at least mention that unless he gets Congress to pass a new law authorizing him to do that, that tariff would be illegal.

Check out these sooths!

As you can see from the map I posted the other day, I can see the fucking future. Okay, in my defense, I'm no worse than any other random-ass person babbling about stuff I could not possibly know.

With that in mind I will now turn my immense power of soothsaying to predict what will happen in the second Trump presidency:

• Trump will not survive to the end of this presidential term. I don't mean metaphorically. I think he is a lot more unwell than he is letting on (and he really is pretty obviously unwell) and will end up dead or incapacitated before the end of 2028. JD Vance will be the 48th President.
• The trans crackdown will be half-assed, at least on the part of the federal government. The Department of Education will change some regulations removing protections from trans kids, and there will be new rules about federal funding of gender affirming care. The federal government won't do much more than that. But it will give private transphobes and local officials permission to go after trans people. Which means there will be places in the U.S,. where it is safer and a whole lot less safe to be trans. (That is already true to some extent, but I predict that will be even more true under the new administration) And of course the change in tone will encourage private violence against trans people, which the federal government will do nothing to stop.
• The crackdown against immigrants will not be half-assed, but it also won't be consistent. Wealthy immigrants, even if they used to be "illegal" (like Elon) will be left alone. But for others, especially non-white immigrants, the crackdown will be methodical and extremely cruel. It will not be limited to people who are undocumented either. Legal immigrants will have their legal status removed and even those who have become citizens might face denaturalization and deportation. Any non-wealthy person who was not born in the U.S. is potentially at risk and whoever ends up in their crosshairs are not going to have any of their rights respected.
• There is going to be major erosion in the rule of law as the courts end up blessing Trump's moves that seem to blatantly violate the laws or constitution, and as Trump resumes packing the courts with fresh out of law school Federalist Society members.
• The economy will go into a major recession before the end of Trump's term. The loss of immigrant labor and tariffs will bring back inflation. People will be upset but Trump, and the Trump-compliant media, will work hard to spin it into a hangover from Bidenomics.
• Trump will try to withdraw from NATO, maybe even announce that the U.S. is, but that will be a lot more complicated than he realizes (75 years of military/intelligence/diplomatic infrastructure built on the assumption that there is a NATO alliance and a network of NATO facilities will be had to untangle). I'm not sure how far he will get into that project before he stops being President and any successor is unlike to be as anti-NATO as Trump is.

Those are my thoughts at the moment. Since I said it, every single one will be 100% correct, right?

Shitty morning

Ugh.

Election day is weird

For months all the news leads up to this one big day building up to this massive crescendo. And then we get here and there's basically no news to report until 8pm.

For what it's worth...

...here is my prediction of how the presidential election will go.

Of the swing states, I'm predicting that Harris wins PA, WI, AZ, NC, and NV, but loses GA and MI (also that Harris will get that one electoral vote from NE and Trump will get that one from ME). I am least secure about my prediction for NV. If I had made that map 10 minutes earlier, I might have colored that state red. But even without NV, I predict that Harris wins.

How confident am I about the above prediction? Not very. More than in prior years, this year feels more like a guess than a reasoned conclusion. The main reason for that is that I think polling is fundamentally broken right now. Now that everyone uses cell phones with caller ID and we have a well-entrenched culture of not answering phone calls from numbers we don't know, response rates are abysmally low. To compensate, pollsters have used expanded the small adjustments they used to make to assure it was a representative sample into huge adjustments. That change magnifies the effects of their assumptions to such an extent that the polls are more about the assumptions than actual data. In other word, I no longer think that polls are an accurate snapshot of candidate's support. Instead they are more about the biases and group-think within the polling industry. And yet, what else do I have to go on? I can rely on the pollsters biases or my own. I don't think either are likely to be accurate. And yet, this map is a hybrid of both of those unreliable things.

I should add, I created my first draft of this map before the Selzer poll came out showing Harris in a surprising lead in Iowa. I get that Selzer has a better track record than other polls. And I understand that in 2016 and 2020, her poll was one of the few (or maybe the only) one that detected determinative shifts in the electorate. But Selzer's polls still have the same low-response issue that all the other polls have. And two prior good calls is too low of a success rate to definitively establish her poll as more predictive than the others. The N is too low. It could just be two lucky guesses.

However, if Selzer was on to something, then the whole map would look different. Not just a blue Iowa. If Iowa is going for Harris because of a surge of women voters motivated by reproductive rights, then other red states on my map will be blue too. I would love it if Harris did win by a total blowout. That may be the only scenario that saves the country from Trump's post-election shenanigans posing a serious threat to democracy. But I'm not willing to rewrite my prediction on the basis of a single poll, even if it is the famed Selzer poll. It is still just a poll with a low response rate.