Virginia always provides a test for a new President. Indeed, Virginia's Governorship may not run for a second term -- so there is never an incumbent advantage. As a consequence the race for the post often has a fascinatingly hot contest the year after the election of a new President to work out of the Oval office right across the river. In 2005, a year after the clear victory of George W. Bush's re-election campaign (so much clearer than the way W ended up with his first term -- but we will speak naught of that) -- Democrat Tim Kaine (pictured) won the Governor's seat in Richmond. In 2004, W had received 53.68% of the popular vote in the state, while Dem. John Kerry received just 45.48%. Kaine's victory a year later indicated the political tides were shifting, and that Bush's post-9/11 momentum was spent. Likewise, in 2021, a year after the victory of Joseph Biden over Donald Trump, Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia gubernatorial contest. Th...
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On the 10th of the month, the US Supreme Court heard arguments on "whether the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" violates the First Amendment. One week later, the Supreme Court issued per curiam opinion with no dissents upholding the law. Sotomayor and Gorsuch each filed a concurrence. By way of reminder: this case arose because President Trump, in his first administration, sought to make it impossible for TikTok to continue in the US. He purported to ban it by executive order. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-addressing-threat-posed-tiktok/ But a district court judge struck down the ban on the ground that there would have to be a statutory mandate. Under the Biden administration, Congress passed a statutory mandate, and that is the law that (oddly, with Trump's blessing) the PRC backed management of TikTok was seeking to have declared unconstitutional on first amendment ground...
Diane and I were talking recently about how the incumbent President, Joseph Biden, has seemed to do relatively little campaigning for his Vice President, Kamala Harris. We both agree on that observation, but we had different interpretations. My initial thought was, "Maybe Joe is grumpy. Yes, he has supported her and done everything he had to as a party guy, but he was dumped over and may be ticked off." Diane thought this must be wrong. The reason is more likely not that he is grumpy about campaigning but that she and her team have decided he is more a liability than an asset on the trail. Whatever. Looking at this from a broader PoV. Harris is in a familiar position in US presidential history. She cannot seem to be disloyal to the incumbent president whose mantle she has inherited -- nor can she present herself as a mere acolyte. She has to be both her own woman and a loyal party gal. It is easy to get this wrong. George H.W. Bush ...
During the now-infamous debate between the former President and the incumbent President, the debate that forced the incumbent, Joseph Biden, out of the campaign altogether, there was a moment that looks a lot different now than it did at the time. There was a moment when Donald Trump was going on about the wonders that would be worked for America by his, Trump's, great relationship with Putin. He said, for example, that by a simple phone call he, Trump, would get the Wall Street Journal reporter, then being held in prison by the Russians, released. In fact, Trump even spoke some kind words about that reporter, Evan Gershkovich. I don't remember the words -- and I'm too lazy to look them up-- but they were an exception to the general rule of calling reporters "enemies of the people". As is his wont. Except, apparently, when praise is convenient. Anyway ... it would only take one phone call.... At the time, Biden simply kept his head down and stayed silent. Th...
According to one prominent political-science theory, a candidate of the party that is incumbent in the White House is nearly certain to win an election if he possesses at least six of 13 possible "keys". He does not need all, or most, or even a majority. He needs six. Each key is a binary question, allowing only yes or no answer, though sometimes the answer will require an exercise of judgment, not mere arithmetic or observation. For clarity -- for many of these keys the ABSENCE of something is taken as a positive. So a "yes" answer has the form, "yes, it is true that X did not happen." With that understood, let us start through the list and its 2024 application. We are looking at each election from the point of view of the political party incumbent in the White House during the election. 1. Mandate from the House of Representatives. After the last election (the mid-term election prior to the Presidential election under study) did the incumbent Presi...
Nebraska is one of just two states that does NOT follow a winner-take-all rule with reference to the allocation of its electoral votes in a Presidential contest. [The other is Maine.] Part of Nebraska's allocation of electors works by congressional district. [It gives out two of its five votes on a statewide basis and the other three by virtue of the presidential votes of its three congressional districts.] The result of this is that Nebraska sometimes votes in the electoral college four to the Republican candidate, one to the Democratic, because of the blue political tint of the district that includes the city of Omaha. Now, there is one plausible breakdown of the state-by-state results this November that has Biden winning by 270 to 268. THAT scenario involves Biden winning that one vote in otherwise deep red Nebraska. If the Trump forces can change the law in Nebraska, as they are now endeavoring to do, then that scenario yield a 269 to 269 result....
Pence doesn't want to talk to the Justice Department about reasons why it might want to prosecute Donald Trump in connection with the Capitol Hill riot on Jan. 6, 2021 that nearly killed Pence. Let us not discuss, just for now, WHY he doesn't want to talk. Let us simply take it as a given that he doesn't want to talk about this under oath. That way we can move on to this point: We have evidence now that his lawyers are pretty good. Consider: Donald Trump's lawyers keep invoking "executive privilege" in situations like this. They keep invoking it and they keep losing. Courts have acknowledged that executive privilege exists (one finds such an acknowledgement in the US v. Nixon opinion, for example). But the actual decisions rather than the dicta consistently go against it. Perhaps this consistent losing record has some relationship to a fact about the text of the US constitution. That text does not say anything that, in a simple and direct reading, bestow...
President Biden's pick to be the new administrator of the US Agency for International Development (AID) has received Senate confirmation, by a 68 - 26 vote. I'm assuming this means 6 (Republicans) did not vote so she received the votes of all Democrats plus 18 Republicans, with 6 Republicans NV and the others No. I can assume that without looking it up because this is my blog, dammit. At any rate, if she did receive a supportive vote of 18 Republicans, roughly 1/3d of the caucus, that is a remarkable show of bipartisan support as such things go in 2021. One neat fact about the now confirmed nominee, Samantha Power: she was a reporter for US News and World Report before she was either an academic or a civil servant. She was a war correspondent covering the Yugoslavian helter-skelter in the years '93 to '96. I went to the US AID website, in search of a simple explanation for what the AID does, and accordingly for what Power will now be responsible. I ca...
One can hardly act surprised that Mr. Outgoing is not going to be at the inauguration of his successor this year. There have been surprisingly few comments about the LAST time that happened. So it is worth being explicit. The last such snub took place in March 1869, when Andrew Johnson left town ahead of the festivities for incoming President Ulysses S. Grant. Andrew Johnson (pictured here) and Donald Trump share a lot else for the history books, too. Each was impeached by the House during his first-and-only term in office. Each defeated the prosecutors of that impeachment in the Senate and completed his term. And now, we see that each has declined to stick around for the ceremony that would formally end that term. This means that Bill Clinton is the only impeached and tried President who did show up for his successor's inauguration, that of George W. Bush, in January 2001. And that situation was different. Clinton was impeached in his second term in office. So he se...
Well, I was right last week when I said that it wasn't going to be Bass! Victory lap taken. Allow me a moment of reflection on former Vice-President Biden's choice of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. Actually, I don't have a lot to say on this, except that what the Orange Dynast has been saying about it strikes me as unusually odd, even for him. It seems that President Trump and his acolytes have heard that Harris has a "tough cop" reputation, developed because her upward path through Californian politics was a path through various prosecutorial offices. So there are people to her left (for lack of a better concise term), who are unhappy with Biden's choice. They are for the most part containing their unhappiness, because they have their eyes on the November prize. But they are unhappy. At any rate, Trump's circle is at least vaguely aware of this, and they are trying to benefit from it. In 2016 they did benefit by the unhappiness of ...
Really? Senator John Walsh of Montana, responding to reports that portions of his master's thesis had been plagiarized, said that at the time (2007) he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after a tour of duty in Iraq. He then employed this weaselly turn of phrase: "I don't want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor." How is that different from saying: "I don't want to use PTSD as an excuse if that will annoy you, but I am okay with using PTSD as an excuse if you are willing to buy it as such, dear voter."? Indeed, this seems so blatant that I apologize to weasels for my own turn of phrase above. He can certainly take heart from the demonstrated fact that plagiarism scandals are not fatal to political careers in the U.S. He'll probably never be president, but he could be vice president some day.