It’s tempting to think that we are living in a new era of lawlessness, but that would fail to capture the change staring us in the face. This is not about the lack of law. It’s about the remaking of the law. What Trump and leaders like him seek is not so much to destroy the law as to colonize it, to possess the law by determining its parameters to serve their interests. For them, the law exists to bend to their will, to destroy their adversaries, and to provide an alibi for behavior which, in a better version of our world, would be punished as criminal.
- Moustafa Bayoumi
"The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world"
This week's featured post is "Trump only has ICE for you".
This week everybody was talking about Trump's bill
The featured post covers how the massive $170 billion appropriation for immigration enforcement could lead to ICE becoming Trump's Gestapo and immigrant detention centers turning into concentration camps. I understand how alarmist that sounds, but I'm drawing on some pretty reliable folks: Timothy Snyder, Theda Skocpol, and others.
That leaves coverage of the rest of the bill here. Ignoring the implications for democracy, the big thing to know about the bill is that it robs from the poor to give to the rich.
One snarky meme I saw Friday hoped that "Big Beautiful Bill" will be the nickname of Trump's cellmate some day. I suspect the poster has more faith in God's justice than I do.
But anyway, the Republicans got it done, without a single Democratic vote in either house of Congress. Up until a few weeks ago, I honestly thought they wouldn't. The bill hurts so many Republican voters (see the note below on Frontier County, Nebraska) and the GOP's margins in Congress are so small. I thought that a few more Republicans would vote against a bill they obviously knew was wrong for the country and for their constituents.
Back in May, for example, Josh Hawley wrote an op-ed describing in detail what was wrong with cutting Medicaid. He blamed the GOP's "Wall Street wing" for a bill that was "both morally wrong and politically suicidal".
If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care. And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will replicate in states across the country.
But he voted for the bill, morality be damned.
Research backs up the point he was making. The University of Pennsylvania's health economics institute calculated that the bill would lead to 51,000 preventable deaths annually. The idea that Americans die for lack of health insurance has long been denied on the Right, going back to 2012 when presidential candidate Rick Santorum rejected "completely ... that people die in America because of lack of health insurance."
Santorum and others often point to rules that require emergency rooms to care for people regardless of their ability to pay. So no, you won't die from a car accident because you aren't insured. But you may skip a regular check-up that would have saved you from a heart attack, or go without the blood-pressure meds that prevent a stroke. Spread over a nation, those cases add up.
It's hard to know what to do with people like Hawley. They don't need to be convinced; they know. They just don't care enough or have the courage to do anything about it. After she provided the deciding vote that got the bill through the Senate, Lisa Murkowski wrote:
But, let’s not kid ourselves. This has been an awful process—a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline that has tested every limit of this institution. While we have worked to improve the present bill for Alaska, it is not good enough for the rest of our nation—and we all know it. My sincere hope is that this is not the final product. This bill needs more work across chambers and is not ready for the President’s desk.
But of course the House passed it without amendment and the President signed it, so the bill Murkowski voted for is now law. As so often happens -- remember Mitch McConnell, after voting to acquit Trump in his second impeachment, saying that Trump hadn't gotten away with anything "yet" -- Murkowski hoped somebody else would save the country from Trump, when she had the power to do it and would not.
Lots of last-minute horse-trading happened, including a bunch of Alaska exemptions to nail down Murkowski's vote, so what does the final bill actually do?
What I believe is the only hospital in Frontier County, Nebraska will close down in response to "anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid".
These are Trump voters. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump beat Harris 1213-185 in Frontier County. (On the map, Frontier County is the third county from the left in the second row from the bottom.) Frontier County's congressman and both Nebraska senators voted for the Big Beautiful Bill.
They did it to themselves.
The fig leaf Republicans are wearing is that Medicaid and food stamps will only be denied to able-bodied people who won't work. However, when states have instituted a work-requirement with a similar explanation, the resulting savings have come mainly from kicking out eligible people who get behind on their paperwork. (Implementing a work requirement means monthly forms verifying that you are working. The working poor tend to have very little free time for filling out forms. Many are poorly educated and have trouble understanding the rules or following the instructions.)
Paul Krugman provides a very well-constructed graphic about Medicaid recipients.
Finally, let's think about the 3% of recipients who are of working age but don't work. Let's assume the worst about them, as Mike Johnson does: They're lazy bums who sit around playing video games all day.
Do I approve of their lifestyle? No. Do I think that if they get sick they should be left to die? Also no.
Taking away people's health insurance is not an appropriate form of discipline.
and trade
After Trump's extreme "Liberation Day" tariff announcements on April 2 panicked global markets, he retreated by announcing a 90-day pause on the tariffs so that trade deals could be negotiated, promising "90 deals in 90 days".
In fact, no deals have been completed. The administration has made much of "frameworks" of trade deals with China and the UK and Vietnam, but in trade agreements the devil is in the details, which are still being worked out. Georgetown Professor Mark Busch says:
These aren’t real trade deals. These are cessations of hostility. These are purchasing agreements that may or may not appease Trump for maybe a little while, thrown in with some aspirational stuff.
Well, the 90 days run on out Wednesday. But now officials are talking about August 1 as the real deadline. Will TACO Trump chicken out again, or will we see another stock market collapse? Stay tuned.
and the flash floods in Texas
Storms have been unpredictable since the days of Zeus and Thor, so it's always hard to know exactly where to place the blame for a weather disaster. But Friday's flash flood of Texas' Guadalupe River (which so far has resulted in 82 dead, including 28 children, with ten girls from a Christian summer camp still missing) has at least two fingers pointing back towards the Trump administration.
The first finger, of course, is climate change, which raises the likelihood of any sort of extreme weather event.
Rainfall intensity in central Texas has been trending upward for decades, and this week’s rains were enhanced by the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, which made landfall in northern Mexico last week. Barry’s circulation pulled record amounts of atmospheric moisture up to central Texas from the near-record warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
The mix of Barry’s circulation and climate warming helped create conditions of record-high atmospheric moisture content over central Texas – in line with the trend towards increasing atmospheric moisture content globally as the world warms and the air can hold more water vapor.
Trump has consistently played down climate change, occasionally referring to it as a "hoax". His first administration emphasized "drill, baby, drill", i.e. producing and burning more of the fossil fuels that cause climate change. In his second administration, he has rolled back nearly every effort President Biden made to set us on the path to a more sustainable economy. The League of Conservation Voters referred to the "big beautiful bill" he signed Friday as "the most anti-environmental bill of all time", which "will do extreme harm to our communities, our families, our climate, and our public lands."
Would a full-bore government focus on climate change since 2017, combined with putting the full pressure of the United States on other nations to phase out fossil fuel dependence, have prevented, or at least mitigated, the Guadalupe flood? As with any individual weather event, it's impossible to say for sure.
But then we get to the second finger. If extreme weather events are going to be more and more frequent -- and they are -- common sense would lead us to invest more heavily in weather prediction, so that we see these events coming and have more time to get summer-campers out of harm's way.
But Trump has been doing exactly the opposite. Tuesday -- three days before the flood -- The Guardian lamented:
As the weather has worsened, there have been fewer federal scientists to alert the public of it. Cuts to the weather service by Trump and the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) have left NWS local forecast offices critically understaffed throughout this year’s heightened severe weather. In April, an internal document reportedly described how cuts could create a situation of “degraded” operations – shutting down core services one by one until it reaches an equilibrium that doesn’t overtax its remaining employees.
Did NWS drop the ball here? Local officials claim they did, predicting 4-8 inches of rain rather than the 12 that actually fell. But maybe mistakes on that scale are inevitable and the local officials are just deflecting blame. Again, who can say?
The point is that this kind of thing is bound to keep happening: As our country's policies work to increase bad weather events while cutting back on our ability to predict them, more and more often disaster is going to take us by surprise. And sometimes girls at summer camp will pay the price.
and the Fourth of July
Trump hasn't been in office half a year yet, with 3 1/2 to go. But he has already done so much damage to American democracy that July 4 had a melancholy edge this year. Is the United States still worth celebrating in its current form? And if so, for how much longer?
Jay Kuo tries to reach past his patriotic sorrow:
While the lighthouse shining the way is admittedly hard to make out through the cruel fog that envelopes us, it is out there, sturdy upon the shore, and still blazing brightly. We must trust that we will rediscover its guiding power and, together, steer this ship safely home. We’ll do it together, and in our strong and welcome company we will find the courage and conviction we need.
Jennifer Rubin notes that the list of grievances in the Declaration of Independence seem particularly relevant this year.
The signers railed about exclusionary immigration policies that hurt the colonies (“He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither”). They inveighed against barriers to trade (“cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world”). And they condemned imposing “Taxes on us without our Consent,” which, if we remember that unilaterally imposed tariffs are a consumer tax, also sounds familiar. Tyrants, then and now, seek to dominate and micromanage commerce to the detriment of ordinary people seeking a better life.
And notice the common problem, then and now, when a tyrant attempts to corrupt the rule of law by seeking to intimidate and threaten members of the judiciary (“He has obstructed the Administration of Justice…. He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices”); seeks to impair due process (“depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury”); and even ships people out of the country for punishment (“Transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”). The tyrant playbook has not changed much in nearly 250 years.
Using the military improperly has always been a go-to move for tyrants. “He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures” (or in our case, the governor of California) and tried to make “the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power” (by, among other things, threatening to deploy them to silence protests). “Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us” is still going on in Los Angeles. And “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us …”—or in Donald Trump’s case, incited violence, called it an insurrection and then used it as a pretext to send in the military.
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The most thought-provoking thing I read this week was "The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world" by Moustafa Bayoumi, which is the source of this week's top-of-the-page quote. The "world" Bayoumi is talking about is the post-World-War-II rules-based order, and he sees it breaking on multiple levels. International rules against genocide or using starvation as a weapon of war somehow don't apply to what Israel is doing in Gaza. Similarly, US laws against supplying weapons to countries that block US humanitarian aid don't apply to Israel. American principles of free speech don't apply to people who protest for Palestinian rights.
Along the same lines: Peter Beinart notes how fast the conventional wisdom about Israel in American politics is changing.
The more Democratic elites continue their near-unconditional support for Israel despite overwhelming public opposition, the more vulnerable they will be to a Mamdani-style political insurgency in the next presidential primary.
He warns that Israel/Palestine could become a "moral consistency" issue that holds symbolic value even for many who feel no strong connection to either Israel or Palestine.
But unquestioned support for Israel has become, for many, a symbol of the timidity and inauthenticity of party elites — and that leaves them vulnerable to political insurgents who don’t compromise the values of equality and anti-discrimination.
A depressing read is last Monday's article in the NYT about the energy strategies of China and the United States: China is leading the world in clean energy development, while the US is pushing fossil fuels. China is building for the future, while the US is trying to hang onto the past.
Tuesday, the federal government was supposed to release $7 billion in money Congress appropriated to fund summer and after-school programs.
But in an email on Monday, the Education Department notified state education agencies that the money would not be available.
The move is probably illegal, but the administration should be able to stall action in the courts until the programs would have ended anyway.
In his members-only editor's blog, Josh Marshall calls attention to the pro-Trump advertising that is paid for by your tax dollars. Reproducing part of a report from AdImpact, he observes that "The top advertiser in this political cycle so far is the Department of Homeland Security running political ads with taxpayer dollars on behalf of Donald Trump." The total: $34 million.
Meanwhile, the Social Security Administration sent out an email praising (and lying about) Trump's Big Beautiful Bill. (I received it myself.) "Social Security Applauds Passage of Legislation Providing Historic Tax Relief for Seniors" was the subject line. This claim in particular is just blatantly false:
The bill ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits, providing meaningful and immediate relief to seniors who have spent a lifetime contributing to our nation’s economy.
Actually:
the legislation provides a temporary tax deduction of up to $6,000 for people aged 65 and older, and $12,000 for married seniors. These benefits will start to phase out for those with incomes of more than $75,000 and married couples of more than $150,000 a year.
So if your monthly Social Security check is more than $1000, you'll pay at least some tax on it. The average benefit is about double that.
Jeff Nesbit posted on X:
Unbelievable. I was a deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration. Appointed by President Biden. The agency has never issued such a blatant political statement. The fact that Trump and his minion running SSA has done this is unconscionable.
Tesla's sales are falling, which is a weird thing to stay about a company whose stock has a price/earnings ratio of 170. Investors appear to be buying the story that someday Tesla's driverless taxis will be huge money-makers. I think I won't be attending that party.
and let's close with something refreshing and adorable
Feeling too hot this summer? Need more cuteness in your life? The Cincinnati Zoo offers this video of red pandas playing in the snow.
