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Its my party now. Photo: Pool/Getty Images

One of the more remarkable political developments of the last six months the culmination in some ways of the last 18 months is the transformation of the Republican Party into the Party of Trump.

Think back toearlylast year. Close to every major Republican politician regarded Trump as an excrescence that would eventually go away. Today, the GOP owns Trump completely and Trump owns the GOP. In Gallup, he receives around 85 percent support of Republicans, with only some minor softness around the edges. At his inauguration, he had 86 percent support. Thats the key reason why his general approval ratings have leveled off at around 40 percent. That seems to be the floor.

Think back over what we have learned these past six months, and let that sink in. This solid 85 percent is despite a deeply unpopular Obamacare replacement, which clearly targets Trumps core voters, and would wreak real havoc in their lives. Its despite fading prospects for any kind of tax cut. Its despite a failureto make tangible progress in building theborder wall,boostingeconomic growth, orbringingback any manufacturing jobs. This is despite almost complete legislative failure while controlling both House and Senate. Neil Gorsuch is his only solid victory. And that came only becauseRepublicanstrashed the judicial filibuster for the Supreme Courtand, prior to that, Senate tradition by denying Merrick Garland a hearing.

But the loyalty endures even deepens. For now, theres no way out, only through, and through it together, writes Rich Lowry, explaining why he, and his magazine, National Review, are now in favor of party over country. Lowry was, you may recall, a prominent Never Trumper, throwing the entire Buckley legacy against the parvenu narcissistduring the Republican primaries. This was not just because, as Bret Stephens notes, Trump represented the death rattle of anything that might be called a conservative intelligentsia, although he did. It was because it was hard for any Republican to back a candidate and now a president who equivocated on NATO, morally equated Russia with the U.S., preferred autocracies to democratic allies, embraced America First as a rallying cry, and was threatening to slap a crude tariff on all steel imports. Can you imagine if Clinton ran on that? And yet Trumps chief propagandist, Sean Hannity, is now being honored with the William F. Buckley Award for Media Excellence.

How did Trump manage this takeover? First, he demagogued the base, simply deploying the anti-establishment lines that had been honed and tuned to perfection in the GOP for years, against thepartyitself. Second, in an amazing stroke of luck, the Democrats gave him an opponent only slightly less despised than he was, and infinitely less talented. Now, in his latest twist, Trump is usingthe mainstream media as his foil to cement party loyalty behind him. In other words, he picked three things every Republican hates the D.C. Establishment, Hillary Clinton, and the MSM and made himself the only alternative to each. Brilliant when you think about it.

And in his latest war against the media, he is clearly winning. Close to 90 percent of Republicans believe the most patently mendacious president in history over the flawed, but still generally earnest, CNN. More to the point, as one new paper suggests, they support himeven when they know hes lying. And he has used this near-blind support to construct, in just six months, the close equivalent of a disciplined state-run media, across various platforms, from Fox toTMZ, to Sinclair and One America,fromthe National Enquirer to talk radio across the country, and potentially even Time Inc. in the future. In some ways, this media complex operates for Trump the way RT does forPutin. Yes, in America, unlike Russia, theres a vibrant alternative, but, in some parts of America, that alternative barely peeks through, as this report from rural Iowa notes:

Most people here watch Fox News, and have for a generation. Fox News is always on the TV in diners and other restaurants. In bars, if there isnt a game on, Fox News is there. If there are a couple of televisions or more, one will most likely be tuned to Fox. And its not only TV. Its radio. Our big blow torch conservative radio station out of Des Moines blasts conservative indignation and self-righteousness for hours a day and serves up Sean Hannity for hours every night.

The point of Trumps otherwise super-stupid tweets is clear: to signal the new party line which his internet underlings and media flacks then repeat. This can, of course, require them to contradict themselves in no time at all, as Trumps moods shift. But the willingness to say black is white when party discipline requires this, as Orwell noted, is key to authoritarian success.

The Republican Party elites defense of all this their only faintly honest argument is usually along the lines of: Stop going nuts. Yes, its all pretty appalling, but not a big deal. We can ride this tiger, and dismount when necessary. As Ben Shapiro argued: Themedia are wrong that their liberties are under some sort of existential assault from a president who is merely mouthing off the way he has his entire career.

Which is to say: Theres no difference between a New York mogul mouthing off and the president of the United States. Im sorry but I beg to differ. This decadent insouciance is recklessly complacent about democratic norms, dangerous in what it is prepared to tolerate, and, at best, a form of collective denial.

A president can come and go. But when he remakes one of the two major political parties into a threat to liberal democracy, its a far deeper and more durable shift. Let us just note for the record that, in this first Trump summer, the mainstream conservative Establishment has, like conservative Establishments in other countries before it, averted its eyes from or openly endorsed this transformation every single step along the way.

Heres a book review I just came across that seems to me an intellectual shift. Its a review of a new book by Fordham law professor John Pfaff, Locked In, about mass incarceration in America, and it upends a plank of conventional wisdom on the left. The book argues strongly against the notion that our vast and indefensible prison-industrial complex was deliberately created by an explicitly racist war on drugs that swept up nonviolent drug offenders, primarily black, from the 1980s on. The data dont back it up:

All told, low-level, nonviolent drug offenders, the focus of much reform rhetoric and effort, make up only about 1 percent of all inmates in state prisons. If we released every prisoner who has been sentenced solely for a drug crime, we would still be the world leader in incarceration. Most strikingly, the racial disparities of our inmate population would barely budge: in state prisons, the percentage of white inmates would go up one point, the percentage of black inmates would go down one point, and the Hispanic percentage would remain the same.

The War on Drugs was not, in other words, a decision by white supremacists to respond to the end of segregation by rounding up random black men on the streets and creating a new archipelago of racial separatism behind bars (see Michelle Alexanders 2010 book, The New Jim Crow) or to construct a new system of modern slavery (seeAva DuVernays 2016 documentary13th). The War on Drugs was a terrible, awful idea but it didnt create mass incarceration. Neither did theoretically longer prison sentences (which Pfaff shows were, in reality, mostly reduced to one to three years).

So what did? Heres the emotionally unsatisfying answer: unsupervised and unaccountable prosecutors seeking tougher sentences all over the country, and given many more options, under the law, to do so. Heres the gist (my italics):

Consider, for example, the period from 1994 to 2008, when per capita incarceration rose every year. Over that period, reports of violent and property crimes fell steadily. So, too, did the number of arrests. The probability that a felony case, once charged, would lead to incarceration did not change. And the average time actually served stayed pretty much the same. What changed was the number of cases that prosecutors charged as felonies in state court: the likelihood that an arrest would lead to a felony chargedoubledover that time. In other words, it was not crime rates, arrests, or sentence lengths, but admissions to prison, driven by decentralized prosecutorial decisions, that accounted for most of the growth in incarceration.

No racist conspiracy; just tougher prosecution. And no top-down policy shift; a bottom-up change in felony charges. And then another key factor from James Forman Jr.s new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America: the insistence by African-American communities and civil-rights leaders in the 1970s and 1980s that the police protect them from the ravages of drug-related violence which began with heroin in the late 1960s. DuVernay lightly touched on this but only to minimize it. But it was a core factor in a shift in policing: Among those who embraced a war on drugs in response to crack cocaine were D.C. mayor Marion Barry who called drug dealers the scourge of the earth Jesse Jackson, who bragged that he would out-tough George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis in fighting the war on drugs; and Harlems congressional representative, Charles Rangel. Honorable mention: Eric Holder. They were responding understandably to black democratic pressure not caving to white supremacy. Yes, there was racism in many whites enthusiasm for a crackdown. But you also tend to find that members of communities destroyed by heroin and crack are also serious prohibitionists and fans of law and order on the streets.

In case you think Im just rehashing a conservative critique of the excesses of todays racial left, I should let you know that this review was written by David Cole, the national legal director of the ACLU. Its published by The New York Reviewof Books. And its aim is toward prosecutorial reform, rather than racial grandstanding. It seems to me we need more of the former, and a good deal less of the latter.

The Democratic Party is the lamest political organization in the West. But you knew that. It was briefly saved and given some coherence by the genius of Obama, but is now in its default state of listless mediocrity. People keep asking me if I see anyone out there who might be able to offer a clear and appealing message in a manner that could win over the center. The answer is no. Worse, its inability to face why it lost last year suggests an eight-year term for this nutjob. The other night I was talking to a solid Democrat who, when asked to defend Clinton, still actually said that whatever her faults, she was, at least, competent. A party that can still be this deluded deserves to be doomed.

But even I could not have come up with their attempts this week to create a new 2018 bumper sticker. Only months after running a campaign whose only real message was Trump is a nightmare, and Shes your only real option, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee offered: Democrats 2018: I Mean, Have You SeenThe Other Guys? After a dreadful campaign that began with the toe-curlingly smug Im With Her, theyre now proposing: She Persisted; We Resisted. For fucks sake. And please understand please that Elizabeth Warren, for all her virtues, is Trumps dream opponent. Another inspiration: Make Congress Blue Again. Seriously, guys. Thats all you got?

If you are reassuring yourself that next year will be a wave election, just remember: Never, ever underestimate the Democratic Partys capacity to screw it up. A much larger anti-Trump coalition has to make sure they dont.

See younext Friday.

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Why Republicans Let Trump Take Over Their Party - New York Magazine

Chris Christies 15 percent approval rating the lowest recorded for any governor in New Jersey could drop even lower, perhaps into the single digits. | Andrew Mills/NJ Advance Media via AP

Most New Jersey Republicans have been unfailingly loyal to Gov. Chris Christie over his nearly eight years in office.

By Matt Friedman

07/07/2017 05:00 AM EDT

It was already tough being a Republican in deep blue New Jersey when Chris Christie took office in 2010, and the governor hasn't made things any easier for his party during nearly eight tumultuous years in office.

Now, on the way out, Christie has thrown yet another hurdle in his fellow Republicans' path: a state government shutdown and a trip to the beach that turned into a public relations disaster.

Story Continued Below

It's a bitter bill for some New Jersey Republicans who have been unfailingly loyal to Christie and who had hoped the governor, with his 15 percent approval rating, would finish out the last six months of his second term quietly and leave office.

Christie made demands on Democrats who control the state Legislature for a bill to restructure the states largest health insurer, a move that ultimately led to a three-day state government shutdown. Then, a photo of the governor lounging with his family and friends on a beach that was closed to the public because of the shutdown went viral.

Were not in good shape financially or in the publics eye, Republican state Sen. Christopher Kip Bateman said. Its going to be a very difficult year for Republicans.

Republicans failed to gain any seats in the Legislature even as Christie scored a landslide re-election victory in 2013. Some grumbled that the governor had cut a deal with Democratic political boss George Norcross the patron of Democratic Senate President Stephen Sweeney to keep Norcross' machine from working against Christie in exchange for the governor's inactivity on the legislative campaign trail. Christie denied it.

I can only speak for myself and say that I believe there has been an unholy alliance between Governor Christie and Senator Sweeney, which I dont believe is in the best interest of the people I represent in Atlantic County or this state," said Republican Assemblyman Chris Brown, who's running for state Senate in one of New Jersey's most competitive legislative districts.

Again and again over the last eight years, Republicans have taken difficult votes so as not to override the governors vetoes sometimes reversing their previous "yes" votes on uncontroversial bills that, had Christie signed them, would have damaged his presidential ambitions. Those votes helped cost the GOP four seats in the state Assembly in 2015.

That's not all.

New Jersey Republicans stood by Christie during the Bridgegate scandal, even as some of his closest aides and allies were implicated. Most supported his ill-fated presidential bid, even after he drained state GOP resources laying the groundwork for it, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for Christie's flights aboard private jet flights around the country out of party coffers, after it had shelled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bridgegate-related legal fees.

As of April, the Republican State Committee had less than $30,000 on hand and more than $39,000 in debt, yet paid nearly $12,000 for the governor and his staff to stay at a five-star hotel in Washington, D.C., for President Donald Trumps inauguration.

And after all that, some fear the governor salted the earth for Republicans with that one trip to the beach last weekend. Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno, who has served under Christie during his entire time in office and is the party's nominee to succeed him as governor, even released a statement saying the beach visit was beyond words.

I was disappointed he didnt understand the message he was sending by enjoying a beach he closed for everybody else, said Brown, the GOP assemblyman.

Still, there are few New Jersey Republicans who will speak out publicly against the governor, who, by the nature of his office, retains extraordinary powers that can make their political lives difficult if they openly criticize him. But the frustration has long been palpable, often expressed in private conversations.

Bateman, the Republican state senator, saw the judicial nomination for an ally of his held up by Christie because he had gone against the governor, voting with Democrats several times to override Christie's vetoes.

Im glad I took some of the votes I did, where I voted to override him in several cases where I thought it was right, even down to Planned Parenthood funding, Bateman said. I was taken to the woodshed more than once.

During part of the three-day shutdown, Assembly Republicans appeared to have had a message: They were unified while Democrats were consumed by infighting over whether to concede to Christies demands.

The beach picture ensured that narrative wouldnt take hold.

As much as he (wanted) to spread the responsibility over to the Assembly and (Speaker Vincent) Prieto, hes the guy that generates the most media and hes the guy caught sunning himself on the beach when everyone else was denied access, said Krista Jenkins, director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University PublicMind poll.

Christies 15 percent approval rating the lowest recorded for any governor in New Jersey could drop even lower, perhaps into the single digits, Jenkins said.

The optics of this are terrible, she said. Yes, its certainly possible.

Christie said last month he didnt care about his approval rating since hes not seeking re-election. But theres evidence its hurting Guadagno.

In a June Quinnipiac University poll, a majority of voters 54 percent said Guadagnos time serving under Christie made their opinions of her more negative. By contrast, 56 percent said Democratic nominee Phil Murphys background as a high-ranking Goldman Sachs executive did not affect how they felt about him. The poll also showed Murphy leading Guadagno 56 percent to 26 percent.

At the same time, New Jersey Democrats have improved their massive voter registration advantage in the state. There are now 800,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in the state, up from 700,000 at the beginning of Christies first term.

As unpopular as Christie is, Mike DuHaime, the governor's chief strategist in both his gubernatorial elections and presidential campaign, said Christie won't be the center of this year's gubernatorial election.

I think we have to look at this in a much bigger picture sense. The election is going to be in five months, DuHaime said. The things that will be much more impactful ... at that point is whats going on between Murphy and Guadagno, whats going on at the national level and the individual legislative races.

DuHaime said that if New Jerseyans elect Murphy, giving Democrats control of the governors office as well as both houses of the Legislature even Guadagno has acknowledged Democrats will retain control of the Legislature theyll warm up to Christies legacy.

I feel good about where the party is, DuHaime said. If you go forward a year from now, if were not successful in the governors race, I think people will look back on these days and say boy it was nice when we had a Republican governor.'"

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Christie kicks sand in NJ Republicans' faces, once again - Politico

Republicans finally seem to be figuring outthat taking health care from the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich isnt exactly popular.

Indeed, less than 20 percent of people support the Senates plan, which would do just that. Ithas been enough to make some Republicans startconsidering what for them is the ultimate heresy: What if they didn't cut taxes as much as possiblefor wealthy investors? What if, instead, they used some of that money to cover a couple million more people and keep costs down a little more for everybody else kind of, you know, like Obamacare does?

Now, as big a positional shift as that would be on health care, it actually wouldn't be one on taxes. That's because whatever taxes Republicans don't cut in their health-care bill, they can cut in their tax reform one. That might sound pretty obvious, but it's not. Republicans had thought that they couldn't do that at least not in a way that was worth doing because of the special rules for passing a bill with less thana filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.They've realized, though, that they can just. . . change those rules, and do one big tax cut later rather than breaking it up into two smaller ones. That certainly seems to be what Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) washinting at when he said that Obamacare's taxes on investment income should not be repealed in this bill. Notice that he's not saying that they should not be repealed at all just that now is not an auspicious time.

The idea, of course, is that cutting taxes for the rich after you've taken health care from the poor doesn't look as bad as doing them all at once, because one isn't explicitly paying for the other. It's the difference between class antagonism and class war.

But, again, that's only as far as appearances go. If Republicans really do make it easier for themselves to cut taxes, then they can get all the ones they want even if they don't get any now. How would that work? Well, the important thing to understand is that Republicans can cut taxes with just 51 votes in the Senate instead of the 60 it takes to beat a filibuster as long as they meet one, and only one, condition: that they don't add to the deficit outside of the budget window. Their tax cuts, then, either have to be fully paid for, or else arrive with an expiration date.

The Republicans' time-crunched effort to pass a health-care bill is hitting a lot of resistance in the Senate. The Post's Paige Cunningham explains five key reasons the party is struggling to move their plan forward. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Republicans, though, don't want to waste control of government they may seize only once every 15 years on tax cuts that would last only 10.They want a more permanent victory than that. Which, strange as it may seem, is where their health-care bill comes in. Republicans, you see, know there aren't enough tax loopholes they're willing to close to pay for all the tax cuts they're waiting to enact. So they need to find other "pay-fors" on which they could agree pay-fors such as health-care spending cuts. Think about it like this: If Republicans use $700 billion of Medicaid cuts to cover the cost of their tax cuts, then that's $700 billion in tax breaks they don't have to get rid of.

That, at least, was the plan until they found an even more politically palatable way to pay for their tax cuts than by taking an ax to Medicaid. That's not paying for them. Why would they do that when it would mean their tax cuts would have to be temporary? Because it turns out that they can change the definition of temporary to something that's a lot closer to permanent. The trick is that although their tax cuts have to be paid for past the budget window, there's nothing that dictates the length ofthat budget window. It's 10 years now, but it could be 15 or 20 or even 30 years if they wanted it to be and some of them, like Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), do.

Not paying for their tax cuts would really solve their problem for how to pay for their tax cuts. Republicans could stop tryingto throw 15 million people off Medicaid to cover the cost of cutting the tax on investment income from 23.8 to 20 percent for people making $250,000 or more. Or trying to come up with any tax loopholes they'd be willing to close something thathas eluded them so far let alone a few trillion dollars' worth of them. Instead, they could get back to their Bush-era basics: passing a deficit-financed tax cut and then announcing how much they hate deficits whenever Democrats win back the White House. After all, why go through the unpleasant business of paying for things when you could skip all thatand still get tax cuts that would last until almost the middle of the century?

Or, as Republicans call it, fiscal responsibility.

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Republicans say they might not cut taxes for the rich. Don't believe them. - Washington Post

A red light for low-wage workers in St. Louis.

Rian Castillo via Flickr

On Aug. 28, St. Louis may become the first city in the United States to see its minimum wage fall, from $10 an hour to $7.70 an hour, as the Missouri statehouse enables a pay cut for some 35,000 workers.

Henry Grabar is a staff writer for Slates Moneybox.

Thats the date when a new state pre-emption law, drafted specifically to target St. Louis, is scheduled to take effect. The Missouri measure will override the citys own minimum wage increase, which was implemented in May after a two-year court battle, and end a three-month period during which fast food, retail, and other workers in the city were required to be paid hundreds of dollars in additional income.

Republican-run states forcing Democrat-run cities to not raise the minimum wage is a story weve seen before, of course. Alabama thwarted Birminghams efforts in February of last year; Ohio stopped Cleveland in December. More than a dozen other states have passed pre-emptive pre-emptions, abolishing municipal wage laws before any cities or counties consider them. GOP politicians usually say minimum wage ordinances wont actually help workers, but they also defend the pre-emptions in principle, because they preserve a uniform regulatory environment.

St. Louis is a unique case. Shortly after the city passed its minimum wage law in 2015, the Legislature passedover the veto of then-Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrata pre-emption law to abolish all municipal wage laws not in effect onAug. 28, 2015, the exact day the city passed the ordinance.* But it was immediately enjoined in a lawsuit filed by local business interests that went all the way to the state Supreme Court. In May, that body decided St. Louis did have the authority to enact a wage law.

So the Missouri Legislature went back and drafted a more specific law that would squash the local ordinance. The idea was to fast-track it in March, before the local wage hike took effect. Thanks to the quirky practices of Jefferson City, though, Democratic state senators managed to stall the measure, forcing Republicans to use a procedural measure to jam the bill through in the waning hours of the session last week.

The St. Louis policy was projected to give an immediate raise of about $2,400 a year to approximately 35,000 workers, before $10 went up to $11 on Jan. 1, 2018. Broadly speaking, theres a lot of debate over how local wage floors affect employment markets, worker income, hiring, and hours. (Read my colleague Jordan Weissmanns piece on the complex effects of Seattles $12 to $13 minimum wage.)

One thing is clear, though: Minimum wage hikes are popular. More than half of all registered voters supported a $15 wage floor in 2016, according to Pew, much higher than what St. Louis had targeted. And the idea of taking away a raise that has already been given seems particularly cruel; Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, a Republican who believes the local ordinance will kill jobs, will not attach his signature to the bill, allowing it instead to pass without it. (There is no pocket veto in Missouri.)

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Local control is most important, except when the locality is doing what you don't want. More...

A template for St. Louis progressives going forward? Deep-red Arizona, where Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, threatened in January of 2016 to withhold funding from cities like Tempe, Tucson, Flagstaff, and Phoenix that had considered or passed various types of worker protections. In November, Arizona voterswhile voting for a Republican senator and for Donald Trumpopted to enact a statewide minimum wage increase at the ballot, tying Duceys hands.Now thats a uniform regulatory environment.

*Correction, July 9, 2017: This post originally misspelled Jay Nixons last name.

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St. Louis Gave Workers a Wage Hike. Missouri Republicans Are Taking it Away. - Slate Magazine (blog)

And these numbers translate into dramatic positive impacts on real lives. A few days ago the Indiana G.O.P. asked residents to share their Obamacare horror stories; what it got instead were thousands of testimonials from people whom the A.C.A. has saved from financial ruin or even death.

How do Republicans argue against this success? You can get a good overview by looking at the Twitter feed of Tom Price, President Trumps secretary of health and human services a feed that is, in its own way, almost as horrifying as that of the tweeter in chief. Price points repeatedly to two misleading numbers.

First, he points to the fact that fewer people than expected have signed up on the exchanges Obamacares insurance marketplaces and portrays this as a sign of dire failure. But a lot of this shortfall is the result of good news: Fewer employers than predicted chose to drop coverage and shift their workers onto exchange plans. So exchange enrollment has come in below forecast, but it mostly consists of people who wouldnt otherwise have been insured and as I said, there have been large gains in overall coverage.

Second, he points to the 28 million U.S. residents who remain uninsured as if this were some huge, unanticipated failure. But nobody expected Obamacare to cover everyone; indeed, the Congressional Budget Office always projected that more than 20 million people would, for various reasons, be left out. And you have to wonder how Price can look himself in the mirror after condemning the A.C.A. for missing some people when his own partys plans would vastly increase the number of uninsured.

Which brings us to Republicans efforts to obscure the nature of their own plans.

The main story here is very simple: In order to free up money for tax cuts, G.O.P. plans would drastically cut Medicaid spending relative to current law, and they would also cut insurance subsidies, making private insurance unaffordable for many people not eligible for Medicaid.

Republicans could try to make a case for this policy shift; they could try to explain why tax cuts for a wealthy few are more important than health care for tens of millions. Instead, however, theyre engaging in shameless denial.

On one side, they claim that a cut is not a cut, because dollar spending on Medicaid would still rise over time. What about the need to spend more to keep up with the needs of an aging population? (Most Medicaid spending goes to the elderly or disabled.) La, la, la, we cant hear you.

On the other side even I was shocked by this one senior Republicans like Paul Ryan dismiss declines in the number of people with coverage as no big deal, because they would represent voluntary choices not to buy insurance.

How is this supposed to apply to the 15 million people the C.B.O. predicts would lose Medicaid? Wouldnt many people drop coverage, not as an exercise in personal freedom, but in response to what the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates would be an average 74 percent increase in after-tax premiums? Never mind.

O.K., so the selling of Trumpcare is deeply dishonest. But isnt that what politics is always like? No. Political spin used to have its limits: Politicians who wanted to be taken seriously wouldnt go around claiming that up is down and black is white.

Yet todays Republicans hardly ever do anything else. Its not just Donald Trump: The whole G.O.P. has become a post-truth party. And I see no sign that it will ever improve.

The rest is here:
Attack of the Republican Decepticons - New York Times