We begin today with Keith Naughton writing for The Hill that there is only one Donald Trump and his name is not Jim Jordan.
Intimidation, backstabbing and flaunting the will of the majority are all tactics that Donald Trump has used expertly to dominate the Republican Party. Wannabe House Speaker Jim Jordan has tried the same gameplan, only to find out that he’s no Trump. It took three failed ballots for that reality to sink in for Jordan and his fuming, fumbling allies. […]
It’s the Trump playbook: do whatever it takes to undermine your opponent and then play a game of chicken, forcing the other guy to duck. But Jordan is not Trump. Jordan does not have the charisma and feel for the room Trump has. Worse, Jordan does not have Trump’s power — which means his game of chicken simply won’t work.
Enough Jordan opponents realized that caving to Jordan’s tactics would give a small minority a de facto veto over anything that happens in the Republican caucus. In short, letting Jordan win would neuter the majority and this small minority would only become more aggressive and demanding. The whole dynamic is less about ideology and more about game theory.
Dan Balz of The Washington Post takes a look at the split screen of Republican chaos and effective Democratic presidential leadership by President Joe Biden.
Rarely is the contrast between the leadership of the two political parties as clear as it has been in recent days. President Biden has been steadfast in responding to the vicious attacks against Israeli citizens by Hamas terrorists. Republicans in the House have been so consumed by internal differences that they have left Congress immobilized when action is demanded.[…]
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) raised his hand and then suffered through three losing ballots on the House floor, falling further behind the necessary votes with each ballot. House Republicans then told Jordan on Friday that his time was up and broke for the weekend, keeping Congress in paralysis. Chaos hardly describes the scene on Capitol Hill. They are damaging not only themselves as a party but also faith in the United States as a stable democracy. […]
As Republicans remained mired in their infighting, Biden tried to project something different. His week was one that few presidents have experienced. His days included a sudden trip to the war zone that is Israel today, progress and then setbacks in efforts to get humanitarian aid flowing to civilians in Gaza, and a full-throated embrace of Israel’s right to defend itself while in Tel Aviv, coupled with frank words, publicly and privately, about the difficult choices Israel must make militarily.
Ruth Michaelson of Guardian notes that a number of ex-ministers and former officials want Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resign now.
Former Israeli military, political and intelligence officials have expressed doubts over the leadership of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as debate rages inside the country about the response to the Hamas attacks on 7 October that killed 1,400 Israelis.
Former prime minister Ehud Barak described the terrorist attack as “the most severe blow Israel has suffered since its establishment to date”. “I don’t believe that the people trust Netanyahu to lead when he is under the burden of such a devastating event that just happened under his term,” he told the Observer. […]
Cabinet ministers including the controversial far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, defence chiefs including the Israeli military chief of staff Herzi Halevi, and Ronen Bar, who heads Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, have all apologised for the failure of the Israeli government to protect its citizens after the attack. A recent poll found that 80% of Israelis want Netanyahu to take responsibility for the failures that allowed Hamas’s incursion. In a separate poll earlier this month, 56% said Netanyahu should resign after the war ends.
Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic reveals one of the primary reasons that many Israelis now want an end to political polarization.
…Israelis created a mass movement capable of organizing long marches and enormous weekly protests, every Saturday night, in cities and towns across the country. Unlike similar protest movements in other countries, this one did not peter out. Thanks to the financial and logistical support of the Israeli tech industry, the most dynamic economic sector in the country, as well as to organized teams of people coming from academia and the army reserves, the protests kept going for many months and successfully blocked some of the proposed legal changes. I was trying to understand why these Israeli protests had succeeded, and so I met tech-industry executives, army reservists, students, and one famous particle physicist, all of whom had participated in organizing and sustaining the demonstrations.
After the surprise Hamas attack on southern Israel earlier this month, I listened again to the tapes of those conversations. In almost every one of them, there was a warning note that I didn’t pay enough attention to at the time. When I asked people why they had sacrificed their time to join a protest movement, they told me it was because they feared Israel could become not just undemocratic but unrecognizable, unwelcoming to them and their families. But they also talked about a deeper fear: that Israel could cease to exist at all. The deep, angry divides in Israeli politics—divides that are religious and cultural, but that were also deliberately created by Netanyahu and his extremist allies for their political and personal benefit—weren’t just a problem for some liberal or secular Israelis. The people I met believed the polarization of Israel was an existential risk for everybody.
Clea Caulcutt and Sarah Paillou of POLITICO Europe report that in light of the French far left’s refusal to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization amid an uptick in antisemitic attacks in French, it has created an opportunity for National Rally leader Marine Le Pen to appeal to French Jewish voters.
The moral vacillations of France’s hard left, which is refusing to describe Hamas as a terrorist organization, have horrified French Jews, just as they face a surge in antisemitic offenses, ranging from death threats to graffiti on Jewish shops.
And that spells an opportunity for Le Pen. She can seize on a clear anti-Islamist agenda, while the extreme left relies heavily on a support base in immigrant and Muslim communities, where a robust defense of Israel would play badly. Supporting France’s Jews against antisemitism is probably less a play for votes from the world’s third biggest Jewish community than another major step by Le Pen to try to normalize the party and break from its toxic past. […]
This is quite a realignment. The National Rally has for many years been synonymous with antisemitism. The party founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was notorious for making antisemitic jokes and said the Holocaust was a detail of history. But his daughter Marine has strenuously been trying to change that, excluding her father from the party in 2015 and rebranding the National Rally.
Marine Le Pen isn’t new with regard to appealing to constituencies in this manner.
Finally today, The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer confirming that and, but, and or can, indeed, get you pretty far— at least as far as the U.S. Supreme Court.
The trouble dates back to 2018, in what we thought at the time was a shining example of bipartisanship. Remember that bizarre moment when most congressional Republicans, every congressional Democrat, and the neofascist Trump administration came together to pass the First Step Act, the most sweeping criminal justice reform in years? After more than 30 years of Reagan-era mandatory minimum sentences that had seen U.S. prison populations triple, the First Step Act gave judges discretion to apply lighter sentences if defendants met certain criteria, among other reforms. Kim Kardashian was there, lobbying Trump in the Oval Office, while Jared Kushner was wooing Mike Pence, whom the president — Kushner’s father-in-law — hadn’t yet tried to have killed.
It was a weird time.
Turns out it was also too good to be true. Quoting the bill’s language directly (because it’s so convoluted): A judge could lighten a sentence if “the defendant does not have (A) more than 4 criminal history points, excluding any criminal history points resulting from a 1-point offense, as determined under the sentencing guidelines; (B) a prior 3-point offense, as determined under the sentencing guidelines; and (C) a prior 2-point violent offense, as determined under the sentencing guidelines.”
Confused yet? So are the courts. At issue is whether, in writing the law, Congress meant “A, B, and C” or “A, B, or C.” Hanging in the balance are thousands of people — nearly 6,000 a year, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission — who might be eligible to spend less time in prison. For many of them, their freedom hinges on the Supreme Court’s decision about the meaning of and and or.
Everyone try to have the best possible day!
Chitown Kev
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