CHRISTMAS 2022 -- CHURCHILL RETURNS, TRUMP DISSOLVES, GOP IMPLODES

Four score and a year ago today, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrived in the United States.  

Over the previous fortnight, America had declared war on Japan and Germany and Churchill had come to visit his partner. For more than a year, he had led Great Britain in a solitary fight against Nazi Germany.  The European continent had been overrun and London bore the scars and almost daily trauma of German bombs.  Only his leadership, his countrymen's resolve, and the RAF had stood between them and defeat. 

Yesterday, Churchill returned.

This time in the person of Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine.

It is impossible to overstate the role Zelensky and Ukraine have played in stemming the tide of today's incipient fascism and preserving the rules-based  world order bequeathed to us by Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in the wake of World War II.  Since February, Ukraine -- a country of roughly 44 million -- has fended off invasion and destruction by Russia -- a nuclear power of 143 million now run by a paranoid authoritarian in love with war crimes.  Critically assisted by western money and arms, and a NATO rebuilt by Joe Biden, it has done what everyone thought impossible last winter.  It has . . .

Survived. 

Yesterday,  like Churchill before him, the president of that small nation spoke before a joint session of the US Congress. And like Churchill before him, he laid out what was at stake, not just for his country but for America and the world as well.  "The battle," he said, "is not only for life, freedom and security of Ukrainians."  Rather, "[i]t will" determine "whether [there] will be democracy . . . for all."  It "cannot be postponed or frozen."  On it depends "the restoration of [our] international legal order."

He thanked America for the military and financial assistance it has already provided.

Profusely.

He also asked for more.

Predictably.

He made it clear, however, that our "money is not charity."

Critically.

"It's an investment in . . . global security and democracy".

When Churchill addressed Congress in 1941, he measured reality alongside the potential inherent in his cemented partnership with the United States.  "It is not given to us to peer into the mysteries of the future," he admitted, "[Y]et in the day to come, the British and American people will, for their own safety and for the good of all, walk together in majesty, in justice and in peace."  When Volodymyr Zelensky addressed Congress yesterday, he did much the same.  "I know," he said, "that everything depends on us".  "Yet,"  he continued, "so much depends on the world." And "so much in the world depends on you." 

In the current war in Ukraine, America has already provided over $48 billion in military and financial assistance and is on track to provide another $45 billion in the omnibus spending bill the Senate passed today and sent to the House.  The EU as a whole has contributed $30 billion and others have contributed substantial albeit lesser sums. In the wake of the Cold War back in the '90s, when Madeleine Albright and others took to calling America the "indispensable nation", contributions like this are what they had in mind.  The fight in Ukraine is against this century's version of authoritarian fascism. For rights-based democracy and a rules-based world order to win that fight, nothing could be more indispensable.

Fascism, of course, is not just a foreign problem.

We have our own version here.

In the person of Donald Trump. 

And on that front, the January 6 Committee completed its own indispensable work earlier in the week.

On Monday, it held its last public hearing and announced that it was referring criminal charges against the  former president to the Department of Justice.  

The charges being referred  are for aiding and abetting the January 6 insurrection, obstruction of  the official electoral count taking place that day, conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy in making false statements. They were supported by seventeen specific findings.  These included findings that Trump "oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress", "unlawfully pressured State officials . . . to change the results of the elections in their States", "purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud" in connection with the presidential election,  "summoned tens of thousands" of his supporters to Washington based on those fraudulent claims, and then refused repeated requests to tell those supporters to disperse after knowing they had violently overrun the Capitol.

The vote to refer was unanimous but represented a compromise. According to Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the choices at the extremes were to do nothing on the theory that the committee's report as a whole lays out all the evidence (and constitutes more or less a de facto referral) or to make scores of referrals covering both the four sent and all the other process crimes (perjury, subornation of perjury, witness tampering) for which there is evidence.   Even though Raskin himself hopes and expects those process crimes to be prosecuted, he said that the committee as a whole decided to "focus on the central actors with the major offenses."

This capped off  what has been a bad two months for Trump.  

His candidates lost in the mid-terms last November; his company was found guilty of criminal tax evasion in New York earlier this month; he entertained two antisemites, one of whom is also a white supremacist, the week before that; his poll numbers are declining among GOP primary voters;  his presidential campaign had to lock people into the room in which he announced he was running; the DOJ is already investigating him in connection with both the January 6 insurrection and the illegal removal of presidential papers to Mar el Lago . . .

And now this.

The process of accountability in America can be slow.

But it also can be ineluctable.

For Trump,  disaster is a habit and attention a drug. This is a combination  that would destroy most people, never mind preclude them from becoming president, and though the Donald has been violating the law of averages for most of his  life, sooner or later the averages catch-up. And it now looks like . . .

Later has arrived.

Later, however, is not something House Republicans are negotiating particularly well these days.

Although they narrowly won control of  the House in the mid-terms, they remain frozen in their inability to make California's Rep. Kevin McCarthy the next Speaker.  

McCarthy as Speaker would be the expected outcome in any other year given his current position as Minority Leader. Standing in his way, however, is  a gaggle of far-right conservatives asserting their undying opposition to him and the GOP's underwhelming performance last November leaving him with no room to ignore them.  The GOP will have 222 seats in the next House.  McCarthy's opponents, however, have thus far made it impossible for him  to corral the 218 votes he needs to wield the Speaker's gavel.

The likely result here is that McCarthy will prevail.  

It is likely for two reasons.  

First, no other GOP member with any heft has emerged as a credible alternative, so much so that McCarthy's  supporters have created campaign-style buttons with the slogan "O.K." 

Meaning . . .

"Only Kevin". 

The "O.K."  buttons are a response to "Never Kevin" buttons sported by McCarthy's small but ardent opposition. The theory is that McCarthy is the only realistic choice.  The button, however, makes him sound like an all-that- is left consolation prize at the county fair.  Or, as pundit Molly Jong-Fast put it, his supporters chose O.K."because 'meh' was already taken."

Second, assuming ballots are taken in which McCarthy continues to fall short of a majority, the alternative would then be to look for a Speaker outside the House.  The problem here, however, is that most of those respectable enough to hold the job (e.g., Rob Portman, who by then will be a former Senator from Ohio) will never take it and those who would take it (e.g., Liz Cheney) will not be offered it.

So, O.K. may be it.

Which may not be all that ok at all.

To whittle his way to the top, McCarthy has had to make a series of unseemly compromises with extremists in his caucus.  He has already had to promise Marjorie Taylor Greene -- currently stripped of any committee assignments for basically advocating the assassination of Democrats -- that she will get assignments come January 3, and Greene herself is gunning for a spot on the powerful Oversight and Reform committee.  Though a steering committee of GOP members will pick who serves there, McCarthy is part of that committee and will probably agree to her request.  If so, Taylor-Greene will join other MAGA denialists and grenade-throwers (think Jim Jordan) and spend the next two years "investigating" the January 6 committee,  hyping spurious claims for impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, or assailing Hunter Biden for having traded on his last name.

McCarthy's other possible "give" is to agree to demands that he reinstate the rule that allowed the GOP caucus to force former Speaker John Boehner to retire in 2015.  Called a "motion to vacate", the rule permitted the caucus to vote on removal of the Speaker at any point in his two-year term.  In 2015, Boehner chose resignation suspecting he would lose that vote, and thus far McCarthy has refused to agree to reinstating the rule given the leverage it would provide his caucus opponents.  

Whether McCarthy will stand firm is unclear.  

In 2015, after Boehner quit, McCarthy wanted to be Speaker but stood down when it became clear he couldn't get the needed majority.  This allowed Paul Ryan to emerge as a consensus choice. Ryan, however, was pilloried by the same extremists who bedeviled Boehner and decided to leave once his term ended in 2018. McCarthy then became Minority Leader when the Democrats re-took Congress and has been salivating for the top job ever since.

Effective Speakers control their caucus.  They do this via some combination of hardball and honey.  They understand what each member in their caucus wants but also what cannot be given.  They know how to count.  And they are tough. Pelosi had to negotiate to get to 218 when she took the gavel for the second time in 2019 and she did so without compromising her ability to be effective.  

McCarthy, however, may be negotiating away his effectiveness.

And almost certainly will have done so if he resurrects the Boehner-era motion to vacate.

This is something none of us should encourage.

On Tuesday, McCarthy was forced to agree to a threat the Freedom Caucus advanced against Senate Republicans who planned to vote  for the omnibus spending bill that passed today.

The extremists want to use the need to raise the debt ceiling to force cuts in Democratic programs and are willing to shut down the government to do so. This tack has been tried and failed many times in the past, and most of the GOP has no desire to run a play that has blown up in their faces before.  

Not, however, the extremists.

They are now threatening any Republican Senator who accepted the omnibus with no cooperation on any of their future proposals.  One Republican Senator, North Dakota's Kevin Cramer, reacted to this latest act of petulance as follows: "Statements like that [are] the very reason that some Senate Republicans feel they should probably spare [House Republicans] from the burden of having to govern."

As if to hammer home the point that petulance is the House GOP's only policy, two from the Freedom Caucus, Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, sat on the hands throughout Zelensky's speech to Congress. And earlier in the day, Don, Jr. -- proving once again that Putin must have something on his father --  called Zelensky "an ungrateful international welfare queen".

A House controlled by the GOP's Freedom Caucus would clearly be good for the Democrats. 

But not for the country.  

Or the world. 

The saving grace is that there are more of us than them.

And that there are still people in the world willing to stand up to bullies no matter the cost.

They exist in large numbers in Ukraine. . . 

Where one of them is president.

Merry Christmas.

SEASONS GREETINGS

It will be a Merry Christmas for Brittney Griner.

But not for Paul Whelan.

Which has driven American politics into its usual false corners.

This past week President Biden struck a deal with the world's worst reigning fascist, Russia's Vladimir Putin.  The Russians freed Brittney Griner, the WNBA basketball star they grabbed ten months ago and then sent to a penal colony for nine years because some hashish oil was found in her vape cartridges when she was departing the country last March. Griner, like many underpaid WNBAers, was moonlighting in her off-season for a team in Russia and had a medical prescription for the oil.  Putin -- who runs a country whose only exports are oil, gas and cyber-crime -- was in the process of beginning to get his ass whipped in Ukraine and thought he'd acquired some leverage -- or at least would "own the liberals" -- when his cops arrested a black lesbian American basketball star.

Once she was arrested and show-tried, the American State Department went into overdrive in an effort to get her out.  For his part, Putin wanted Viktor Bout, the Russian arms dealer who was two-thirds through a 25-year sentence for arms trafficking in connection with attempts to murder Americans.  Over objections from the "we don't negotiate with terrorists" crowd, Biden was initially willing to trade Bout for Griner so long as Russia released Paul Whelan as well.  

Whelan is an American businessman who the Russians imprisoned for espionage following his arrest in 2018.  

The Whelan arrest was a classic set up.  In Moscow, which he entered on his US passport (he is a multi-national with US, British and Irish citizenship) in order to attend the wedding of a service buddy, Whelan met a Russian friend (who was also a Russian Federal Security Service or FSB agent) beforehand and was arrested after the "friend" passed him a classified list of FSB employees.  The notion, however, that Whelan is a spy was (and remains) laughable.  For one thing, he was given a bad conduct discharge from the Marines in 2008 after being court-martialed and convicted of larceny, and that alone would have made spy craft impossible.  For another, when the CIA sends in agents, it uses diplomatic cover, which Whelan never had.

At the time of Whelan's arrest, American jails were stocked with high-value Russian prisoners (a high-value Russian prisoner is a prisoner either obsequiously loyal to Putin himself, a former KGBer/spy, or  a hacker/cybersleuth).  These included Bout (spy), Maria Butina (spy and obsequious),  Roman Seleznev (cybersleuth) and Alex Vinnick (hacker). When the US proposed that Griner and Whelan be swapped for Gout, the Russians insisted that Vadim Krasikov also be included in the deal.  Krasikov, however, is a Russian spy imprisoned in Germany . . .

By the Germans . . .

For the Putin-sanctioned murder in Berlin of an ethnic-Chechen in 2019.

At the end of the day, a double-swap was not possible.  

The Russians would not include Whelan with Griner  in any deal for Bout nor would they trade Bout for Whelan alone.  And the Germans would not agree to  release Krasikov. Biden therefore had to choose between bringing Brittney home alone or leaving both her and Whelan there for the foreseeable future.

He chose to bring her home.

And continue to negotiate for Whelan's release.

Since then, the reaction from America's various quarters has been sad but typical. 

It has also been anomalous.  

First, the anomaly.

The people with the biggest stake in Whelan's release, namely, his family, were told beforehand that Putin would not exchange him along with Griner for Bout, or him for Bout alone, and they wholeheartedly approved of going forward with the exchange to free Griner alone.  As Whelan's brother, David, noted to CNN, "Any time an American comes home is wonderful news. I'm so glad for Brittney and Cherelle.  It's a wonderful day."  In a later statement, he continued "As the family member of a Russian hostage, I can literally only imagine the joy she will have, being reunited with her loved ones, and in time for the holidays."

Talk about class.

The Whelans have it in spades.

The same, however, cannot be said for so many others.

Donald Trump called the exchange "a stupid and unpatriotic embarrassment" and wondered "why . . . Paul Whelan wasn't included in this entirely one-sided transaction". Marjorie Taylor Greene said Biden should be impeached for "trad[ing] a Russian terrorist . . . for a basketball player" while leaving "a US marine in [a] Russian jail".  Kevin McCarthy said the deal "made Putin stronger . . . and . . .  America more vulnerable."  Donald Trump Jr. snarked that the Biden administration "was apparently worried that their DEI score would go down if they freed an American Marine."  DEI is the corporate acronym for "diversity, equity and inclusion" and Tucker Carlson removed any subtlety. Griner, he said,  was brought home, "because she is a lesbian woman of color".   Whelan, he claimed,  "is a Trump voter and he made the mistake of saying so on social media,  and he's paying the price for that now".

This is all performative nonsense.  

Biden never had the option of trading Whelan for Gout or Whelan and Griner for Gout.  If Gout, who with good time had served two-thirds of his sentence, had to be locked up for the duration lest his release imperil national security (Kevin McCarthy's claim; and John Bolton's as well), neither Griner nor Whelan were ever getting out.  The Russians are only willing to trade Whelan for a spy and want what Germany will not give them -- Krasikov.  

So the choice here was not whether to leave Whelan in a Russian jail.

It was whether to leave both Whelan and Griner in one when only Griner could have been freed.

Putin is in the business of hostage taking because he thinks he has to be.  Krasikov basically committed a (Russian) state-sanctioned murder and will stay in jail for life unless Putin gets him out.   Bout was an ex-KGBer serving a 25-year sentence. Seleznev and Vinnick are cyber-criminals and thus particularly valuable in today's Russia.  

Trump (or the Trumps) and Greene and McCarthy's beef is not really with exchange as a matter of principle. Indeed, while he was president, Trump routinely made them.  In 2019, he traded three senior Taliban leaders for two Americans held by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Earlier, he dealt an Iranian scientist for an American student held in Teheran. 

Truth be told, on the hostages issue, Trump more or less gutted the "no concessions" policy embraced by all previous administrations, Republican and Democrat.  He did that as only he could.  He made the issue personal in order to be able to claim credit. Once a president makes hostage release personal, however, the price for hostages (and their value to people like Putin) increases.

The reality is that Biden lives in this post-Trump world.  

In that world, no American family will accept anything less than full presidential commitment (and involvement) when it comes to trying to release Americans unjustly imprisoned abroad.

So the Trumps and Greene and Carlson are taking a different tack.

They are de-valuing Griner. 

A black, lesbian basketball player who avoids the national anthem as part of a BLM protest is not equal to an ex-Marine . . .

Especially one who was a Trump voter.  

She's just a DEI score. 

She doesn't get to leave. 

Even if the Marine wasn't being released in any case.

Wow!

These people make Scrooge look good.

The bottom line here is that Griner and Whelan are equal.  Griner's BLM protest no more disqualifies her than does Whelan's bad conduct discharge. Their respective and ostensibly different politics, sexual orientations and races are also irrelevant.  Neither one of them belonged in a Russian jail.  

Both of them should have been released.

One was. 

To their undying credit, the Whelans are celebrating that.

We should too.