Trump swore to uphold the Constitution in January 2017. He violated that oath in January 2021. Now, in January 2025, he will swear it again. [theatlantic]

 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/jack-smith-donald-trump-january-6/681309/

Jack Smith Gives Up

David Frum

5 - 6 minutes

The January 6 crime paid off for Trump.



Yuri Gripas / Abaca / Sipa USA / AP

January 14, 2025, 1 PM ET

Early this morning, the Department of Justice released the report of Special Counsel Jack Smith on his investigation of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. The saga of the U.S. criminal-justice system’s effort to hold the coup instigator accountable is thus closed. No prosecution will take place. Compared with the present outcome, it would have been better if President Joe Biden had pardoned Trump for the January 6 coup attempt.

A pardon would at least have upheld the theory that violent election overthrows are wrong and illegal. A pardon would have said: The U.S. government can hold violent actors to account. It just chooses not to do so in this case.

Instead, the special counsel’s report delivers a confession of the helplessness of the U.S. government. Smith asserts that there was sufficient evidence to convict Trump of serious crimes—and then declares the constitutional system powerless to act: The criminal is now the president-elect; therefore, his crime cannot be punished.

The report suggests that if the law had moved faster, Trump would be a convict today, not the president-elect. But the law did not move fast. Why not? Whose fault was that? Fingers will point, but finger-pointing does not matter. What matters is the outcome and the message.

Trump swore to uphold the Constitution in January 2017. He violated that oath in January 2021. Now, in January 2025, he will swear it again. The ritual survives. Its meaning has been lost.

In 2022, a prominent conservative intellectual proclaimed that the United States had entered a “post-Constitutional moment”:

Our constitutional institutions, understandings, and practices have all been transformed, over decades, away from the words on the paper into a new arrangement—a new regime if you will—that pays only lip service to the old Constitution.

That conservative was Russell Vought, one of the co-authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy plan, and now President-Elect Trump’s choice to be director of the Office of Management and Budget, which controls and coordinates all actions by the executive branch. The post-constitutional moment that Trump supporters once condemned has now become their opportunity. They have transgressed the most fundamental rule of a constitutional regime, the prohibition against political violence—and instead of suffering consequences, they have survived, profited, and returned to power.

If anything, the transgression has made them more powerful than they otherwise would have been. Bob Woodward gives an account in his 2018 book, Fear, that Gary Cohn, Trump’s chief White House economic adviser, thwarted Trump’s intent to withdraw from NAFTA and the U.S.–South Korea trade agreement by snatching the notification letters off the president’s desk. The story suggests something important about the difficulty Trump had imposing his will during his first term. But for his upcoming second term, Trump has made defending his actions in 2021 a test of loyalty. Last month, The New York Times interviewed people involved in recruiting for senior roles in the Trump Defense Department or intelligence agencies; several of them had been quizzed about whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election and whether Trump did anything wrong in his challenge to the election on January 6. The clear implication was that to answer anything but No and No would have been disqualifying. There will be no more Gary Cohns, only J. D. Vances who will deny the previous election and defend Trump’s actions to overturn it.

That is what a post-constitutional moment looks like.

Before Trump, American law was quite hazy on the legal immunity of the president. In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a president could not be sued for his official acts. In 1997, the Court ruled that a president could be sued for personal acts unrelated to his office. Both of these rulings applied only to civil cases, not to criminal ones.

For nearly 250 years after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the question of the president’s rights under criminal law did not arise. Trump’s proclivity for wrongdoing forced the question on the country: Was a president of the United States subject to criminal law or not? Last year, the Supreme Court delivered a mess of an answer, the main holding of which seemed to be: Here’s a complex, multipart, and highly subjective set of questions to answer first. Please re-litigate each and every one of them while we wait to see whether Trump wins or loses the 2024 election.

Now comes the Smith report with its simpler answer: If a former president wins reelection, he has immunity for even the worst possible crimes committed during his first term in office.

The incentives contained in this outcome are clear, if perverse. And they are deeply sinister to the future of democracy in the United States.

The meh-ification of Jan. 6 [washingtonpost]

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/06/jan-6-american-attitudes-polling-trump/

The meh-ification of Jan. 6

Trump has rewritten the narrative of that day with his base, but the bigger story is that people — including independents — stopped caring as much.

January 6, 2025

Tear gas is fired at supporters of President Donald Trump while they storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Evelyn Hockstein for The Washington Post)

Analysis by Aaron Blake

Four years ago, thousands of Donald Trump’s supporters, spurred by his false and ridiculous claims of voter fraud, stormed the U.S. Capitol seeking to overturn his 2020 election loss. Today, on a snowy Monday, Congress convened to take the penultimate step in returning Trump to the presidency.

That once-unthinkable-to-many scenario — including to high-profile Republicans — has launched all manner of retrospectives

Politically, the conventional wisdom is that Trump has successfully rewritten the narrative; he’s “retconned” it, to use a popular term. And it’s not just an academic question; as Trump prepares to pardon many participants in the Capitol insurrection, perceptions of that day will matter when it comes to how practical that decision will be and how it will reflect on Trump.

But the more accurate description might be that, with a nudge from Trump, people just stopped caring as much.

Polling has regularly shown that, despite Trump’s efforts, Americans have hardly adopted his views on Jan. 6.

On the third anniversary of that date, they said by a 5-to-1 margin that the events that day “threatened democracy” rather than defended it (seemingly by trying to right a purported injustice). A majority said Trump was probably guilty of a crime for his actions. Just one-quarter of Americans said the penalties for Jan. 6 defendants were “too harsh,” as Trump does.

And while polling since then is sparser, things didn’t appear to shift too much during the 2024 election as Trump pressed his case.

AP-NORC polling from just before the election showed a majority said Trump bore at least “quite a bit” of responsibility for that day. An Ipsos poll this past summer showed a majority were inclined to believe that Trump had “tried to incite a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol.” Only about one-third doubted that.

And an Economist/YouGov poll released last week showed just 15 percent of Americans approved of those who stormed the Capitol — people whom Trump has more or less lionized and even spoken of as if they are kindred spirits.

But that same poll gets at perhaps the biggest story here. And that’s that people — probably through a combination of fading memories and Trump muddying the waters — have adopted a more “meh” attitude toward such a seminal political moment.

After the dust settled on the insurrection four years ago, YouGov showed Americans overwhelmingly agreed on the very basic threshold question of whether the rioters were bad. More than 8 in 10 Americans and even three-quarters of Republicans disapproved of them. More than 7 in 10 Americans “strongly” disapproved.

Today, though, those numbers have fallen substantially. The most recent Economist/YouGov poll shows the percentage of Republicans who disapprove of the rioters has dropped to 50 percent. And the percentage who strongly disapprove has dropped even more, from 55 percent to 24 percent.

That many of Trump’s most devoted supporters ultimately go along with his version of events, regardless of the evidence, shouldn’t be too surprising. We’ve seen this over and over again.

But what’s perhaps most notable when it comes to how Trump won and how strongly people might object to the looming pardons, is how things have shifted beyond his base. The political middle, too, has stopped caring as much. Two-thirds of independents still disapprove of the rioters, but the percentage who strongly disapprove has dropped from 67 percent to 50 percent.

That suggests that only about half of the political middle is truly animated by this topic.

The biggest movement hasn’t been from “Jan. 6 bad” to “Jan. 6 good,” but rather from “Jan. 6 bad” to people saying they’re “not sure” just how bad it is — which for some might just be “I don’t care enough to say.” Just 9 percent of Americans declined to offer a verdict in January 2021; today, 19 percent do.

We see this in the pardon numbers, too.

Polling has regularly shown Americans lean significantly against the idea of pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, generally by about 2 to 1. Very few Americans — only about one-quarter in a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll a year ago — regard their sentences as “too harsh.”

But the new YouGov poll shows just 39 percent of Americans and of independents “strongly” disapprove of such pardons.

In other words, as with so many things Trump-related, the opposition has lost much of its fight and decided other things are more important. And the passage of time has again proved one of Trump’s greatest allies.

 

Who will rebuild Los Angeles? Immigrants. [washingtonpost]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/09/los-angeles-reconstruction-immigrants-deportation/

León Krauze

Who will rebuild Los Angeles? Immigrants.

And many of them will be doing it under threat of family separation.

January 9, 2025

People return to their home after it was burned down by wildfires in Altadena, California, on Thursday. (Ringo Chiu/Reuters)

Watching the fires raze Los Angeles, a city I called home for years, has been devastating. Santa Ana winds, blowing through the mountains at speeds exceeding 80 mph, have caused catastrophic damage. The west side of the city is barely recognizable. The Pacific Coast Highway, one of the most iconic stretches of the American landscape, lies in ruins. The surrounding area, home to the equally renowned Sunset Boulevard — celebrated in countless dreams and a witness to innumerable Californian sunsets — has been reduced to ashes.

The full scale of the devastation will be hard to tally for some time. What is clear, however, is the immense challenge that reconstruction will pose. This wildfire is already among the most destructive in the region’s history. Rebuilding will be a monumental task fraught with uncertainty. Building in Los Angeles is notoriously difficult because of complicated permitting and regulations. The city will have to untangle a bunch of its bureaucratic knots — and quickly.

One thing, however, is certain: the rebuilding of Los Angeles will rely heavily on immigrants.

A significant proportion of the region’s construction workforce consists of immigrants. According to a 2020 report by the American Immigration Council, 43 percent of construction workers in California are immigrants. Among these, a majority are of Mexican origin, reflecting a long history of Mexican labor contributing to the city’s development.

“Immigrants are the engine of construction in Los Angeles,” Santiago Ortiz, a local designer and building consultant told me. “Without immigrants working the most critical trades in the industry, we won’t be able to rebuild what we have lost over the last three days.”

mmigrant labor has already been vital in the recovery of other U.S. cities devastated by natural disasters. For example, after Hurricane Harvey struck Houston in 2017, more than half of the construction workers involved in rebuilding efforts were immigrants. Thousands of undocumented immigrants worked long hours under grueling conditions, often without proper safety protections, and some were even exploited through wage theft. Despite the challenges, immigrants alleviated a labor shortage in Houston, allowing it to recover more rapidly than anticipated.

Similarly, immigrant workers were instrumental in rebuilding Florida after Hurricane Ian hit in 2022. In Southwest Florida, which suffered extensive damage, immigrants made up a large part of the cleanup and construction workforce. Their efforts were particularly significant in areas such as Fort Myers Beach, where entire neighborhoods were leveled. Without immigrant labor, the rebuilding timeline would have been significantly delayed, leaving more residents displaced for longer periods.

Immigrant construction workers are not just vital in emergencies. In California alone, immigrants make up 40 percent of the state’s overall construction workforce. The entire U.S. construction industry depends on their labor year-round. According to the National Association of Home Builders, 31 percent of workers in construction trades nationwide are foreign born. Most plasterers, ceiling tile professionals and most roofers are immigrants. About 23 percent of those workers are undocumented. Almost 40 percent of drywall installers, for example, lacks a permanent legal status in the country.

Immigrants will be the ones bringing Los Angeles back from the ashes. Without them, the city will struggle to recover.

As Trump takes power, vowing to implement punitive immigration policies to vigorously go after the undocumented, it is crucial to acknowledge who truly builds America. It will be a moral failure that as immigrants work to get Southern California back on its feet — cleaning up mountains of debris, erecting wooden beams, installing drywall and wiring electrical systems — they will be doing so under threat of family separation. Their children will be going to school terrified that their parents could disappear at any moment.

As during the covid-19 pandemic, the United States is asking its immigrant workforce to perform essential tasks. The least it can do in return is to grant them peace and security instead of subjecting them to persecution and discrimination.

How the Democrats Lost the Working Class The theory seemed sound: Stabilize financial markets, support the poor and promote a more secure, integrated world. But blue-collar workers were left behind. [nyt]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/04/us/politics/democrats-working-class.html

How the Democrats Lost the Working Class

The theory seemed sound: Stabilize financial markets, support the poor and promote a more secure, integrated world. But blue-collar workers were left behind.

By Jonathan Weisman

A political correspondent based in Chicago, Jonathan Weisman has covered the White House, the Treasury, economic policy and presidential campaigns since 1996.

• Jan. 4, 2025

Democrats had just absorbed a crushing defeat in the 1994 midterm elections when President Bill Clinton’s very liberal labor secretary, Robert Reich, ventured into hostile territory to issue a prophetic warning.

Struggling workers were becoming “an anxious class,” he told the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, two weeks after Republicans led by Newt Gingrich had gained 54 seats in the House and eight in the Senate. Society was separating into two tiers, Mr. Reich said, with “a few winners and a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and whose disillusionment is easily manipulated.”

“Today, the targets of that rage are immigrants and welfare mothers and government officials and gays and an ill-defined counterculture,” Mr. Reich cautioned. “But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow?”

His message went largely unheeded for 30 years, as one president after another, Republican and Democratic, led administrations into a post-Cold War global future that enriched the nation as a whole and some on the coasts to staggering levels, but left many pockets of the American heartland deindustrialized, dislocated and even depopulated.

As a half-century-old world order organized around American-Soviet contention gave way to a more freely competitive landscape of shifting alliances, presidents from both parties sought to secure U.S. leadership under new rules for economic competition, global stability and strong financial markets. Democratic presidents tried, with limited success, to expand safety nets at home, especially health care and income support for the poor. In the end, however, their bets on foreign policy — opening China to capitalism, halting Iran’s nuclear program, tightening economic bonds with allies — took precedence, and a new fealty to megadonors shaped fiscal policies that bolstered financial markets but shuttered many factories.

The unintended consequences often came at the expense of American workers. And Mr. Reich’s “anxious class” — neither the impoverished nor the highfliers riding the rising global stock market — felt unheard until the rise of an unlikely new kind of Republican: Donald J. Trump.

The Democratic Party’s estrangement from working-class voters first became clear with Mr. Trump’s upset of Hillary Clinton in 2016, powered by broad shifts in the preferences of white voters without college degrees, and it became even more unmistakable with his emphatic defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris in November. That result was a reckoning for a party that thought it had fixed its problems with blue-collar voters by heavily reinvesting in domestic manufacturing but instead discovered even more erosion, this time among Black and Latino workers.

Many Democrats have blamed recent social issues like transgender rights or the “woke” language embraced by many on the left. But the economic seeds of Mr. Trump’s victories were sown long ago.

“One of the things that has been frustrating about the narrative ‘The Democrats are losing the working class’ is that people are noticing it half a century after it happened,” said Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “The resentment and movement away from the Democrats began long before they were for nongendered bathrooms. It was because their lives were becoming more precarious, their kids were leaving town, the pensions they expected were evaporating, and that took a toll.”

A big bet on China, without a safety net

To be sure, blue-collar voters have long been fickle. Richard M. Nixon’s “silent majority” delivered him a landslide in 1972, propelled not by a Republican economic platform but by a backlash to civil rights legislation and anti-Vietnam War protests. The so-called Reagan Democrats, stung by inflation and economic malaise, helped give the White House back to the G.O.P. eight years later, and it remained in Republican hands for 12 long years.

William A. Galston, a domestic policy adviser to Mr. Clinton and an architect of the Democrats’ shift to the center, said that after the election debacles of 1980, 1984 and 1988, the party’s repositioning on social and economic issues was not a choice but an imperative.

But once Mr. Clinton took office in 1993, choices were made.

“The Clinton vision was to be a pro-growth progressive by combining major expansions in public investment and the safety net with more private investment through fiscal discipline and vibrant markets,” said Gene Sperling, an economic adviser to the last three Democratic presidents. “As the first post-Cold War president,” he continued, Mr. Clinton also tried to have “a focus on strengthening global relations through trade agreements.”

The North American Free Trade Agreement had been negotiated under President George H.W. Bush. It fell to Mr. Clinton to get it through Congress. His rationale was that the trade agreement would enhance Mexico’s stability and economic growth, reduce illegal immigration and foster cooperation in fighting drug trafficking. A wider social safety net — including universal health care, expanded education and job training and economic investment — would cushion the blow of employment losses, while cheaper consumer goods would make everyone happy.

Then the health-care push collapsed in the late summer of 1994. The Republicans took control of Congress after their decisive victories that November, and the domestic agenda was moribund, replaced by a zeal for budget cutting. The Clinton administration faced a choice: Pull the plug on free trade and internationalism or push ahead without the safety-net side.

Over the objections of more liberal voices in the administration, Mr. Clinton chose the latter, pressing on with legislation to normalize trade relations with China and allow Beijing to join the World Trade Organization.

Even then, there was concern that China’s accession into the family of trading nations could flood the United States with cheap imports and bankrupt American manufacturers. But the economy was roaring, deregulation was the order of the day as the administration worked to free Wall Street from Depression-era banking and investment rules and, most important, a reformer, Jiang Zemin, had taken control in China. The foreign policy chiefs in the White House believed firmly that cooperation was vital to securing a prosperous, peaceful and eventually democratic China.

“You might think I was nuts,” Mr. Clinton allowed last month as he discussed international trade at The New York Times DealBook Summit, “but Jiang Zemin was president of China, and he was a darn good one.”

A disregard for ‘the dignity of work’

That tendency to roll the dice on grand international bets, with working-class voters as the chips, would become a theme. Too often, the bets did not pay off.

China became more autocratic, not less. And the feared tsunami of Chinese exports indeed arrived, along with the damage. In 1998, 17.6 million Americans were employed in manufacturing. By January 2008, the “China shock” had cost U.S. manufacturers nearly four million jobs. By January 2010, as the financial crisis waned, manufacturing employment had bottomed out below 11.5 million.

“I would be the first to say the leadership of both political parties were in the grip of a theory or story that turned out to be wrong,” Mr. Galston said, “and damagingly so.”

Still, Democratic economists defend their choices. Jason Furman, an economic adviser in the Clinton and Obama White Houses, said the biggest expansions of income inequality came in the 1980s and 1990s, before the China shock. Overall, China’s integration into world markets did increase the number of jobs in the United States — selling services like insurance and Hollywood movies to the Chinese, and peddling Chinese-made goods at stores like Walmart — while sharply lowering the cost of living for American consumers.

What was less appreciated beforehand was the psychological damage that would be done by factory closures, large and small, in communities where prestige, stability and identity centered on those plants — as well as the political impacts of those closures on key industrial states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Democratic policies focused on people as consumers instead of as workers, counting on those people whose jobs were eliminated to find their way to jobs newly created — an assumption that was often flawed, given that the new service jobs frequently required out-of-reach skills or were located on the coasts, not in the upper Midwest.

Too often, said Jared Bernstein, the chairman of President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, there was a “disregard for the importance of work, the dignity of work.”

“Forty people might have lost their job in a factory, but 100,000 people in the community had lower prices,” Mr. Bernstein said. “The calculus seemed obvious. But the calculus was wrong.”

Still, for years, the Democratic Party’s drift away from the working class could be papered over. George W. Bush eked out the narrowest of victories in 2000 in part because the economy was doing so well that voters could focus on his appeal to “restore honor and integrity to the White House.” Four years later, Mr. Bush was re-elected as a wartime president, his domestic agenda topped by hot-button social issues like opposing gay marriage.

But blue-collar voters, who had soured on the “trickle-down economics” of the Reagan years, turned away from the party of Mr. Bush, who had entangled the nation in two wars, and watched helplessly but angrily as Wall Street tycoons dragged down the banking and housing markets in 2008 with their opaque financial gambles.

And they spurned the G.O.P. again in 2012 when it turned to Mitt Romney, a wealthy businessman seemingly plucked from plutocratic central casting.

Pulled punches after the financial crisis

David Axelrod, one of the architects of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, said the last years of the George W. Bush administration were a moment when Democrats could pivot back to policies to address the hollowing out of the industrial base, and with it, the middle class. The 2009 bailout of the auto industry was driven by those concerns, as were the re-regulation of Wall Street and the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

But under Mr. Obama, no one on Wall Street or in the banking sector faced prosecution for the global financial crisis. After Mr. Obama called bankers “fat cats” on “60 Minutes,” Democratic donors on Wall Street howled.

“The masters of the universe,” Mr. Axelrod said, “turned out to be more sensitive than we thought.”

Mr. Obama tempered his language.

The 2012 campaign was marked by an early effort by Democrats to tar Mr. Romney as an insensitive, rapacious businessman willing to send jobs overseas. It worked. The working class stuck with Mr. Obama.

But the later years of his presidency veered away from kitchen-table issues as Mr. Obama tried to secure his legacy on the global stage.

That meant striking a deal with Iran to curb its nuclear program, at least temporarily; completing groundbreaking regulations on trucks, cars and power plants to curtail climate change; and finalizing one more ambitious trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to unite a dozen nations on both sides of the world’s largest ocean under trade rules and in an alliance that would isolate China.

As Mr. Obama basked in those achievements, Mr. Trump campaigned against every one of them, framing them not as steps toward a more peaceful planet but as job killers again threatening the forgotten working class. Once elected, he would undo all of them within months.

A glaring math error

The Democrats’ alienation from blue-collar voters was scarcely a unique phenomenon. Across the developed world, as Western democracies have grown more affluent and less industrially centered, so have the parties that once represented the working classes, said Thomas Piketty, the French economist who has become one of the foremost experts on wealth inequality.

It seemed to make sense politically: With the largest cities and the growing suburbs backing those center-left parties — which Mr. Piketty called “the Brahmin left,” or “parties of the educated” — shrinking towns and rural areas would matter less and less.

But there was always a problem with the theory, said Mr. Bernstein, the Biden adviser: “About 60 percent of the work force is still not college-educated.”

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a veteran Republican economic adviser in the Bush White House and for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, observed that huge shocks to the nation’s economic system — terrorism and war, the financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic — had upended many Americans’ lives, but least of all those of the wealthy. The rich did not send their children to war, their banks were bailed out, and they rode out the pandemic working from home.

“In all of it, the elites got away unscathed,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said, “while the ordinary man took it on the chin.”

Exploiting such resentments, Mr. Trump, with his relentless economic appeals and his open disregard for America’s global leadership, broke the Democratic formula by winning over not only a large majority of the white working class but also a strong percentage of workers of color.

Of course, there is plenty of blame to go around.

Labor leaders often point to the Democratic Party’s movement away from unions as an intermediary between the party and working-class voters. During the 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama was instructed to not even use the words “labor union,” Mr. Furman recalled: Most workers were not members, and it was believed that unions were unpopular.

Mr. Podhorzer said he understood why Democrats had moved away from unions as their conduits to the working class.

“When you talk to the unions, you’re talking to an institution that can hold you accountable to the promises you are making and can ask you for specific things,” he said. “When you’re talking around them, you’re basically doing commercial marketing.”

But, he added, “that sets you up for the moment when a Donald Trump comes along, and you have a candidate who just has better marketing than you.”

Still, Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard professor who was the chief economist in the Clinton Labor Department, said unions had played their own negative role. As the chief negotiator on the labor agreements that would accompany NAFTA’s passage, Mr. Katz recalled, he worked out an $8 billion package to bolster unemployment insurance, expand job training and relocation assistance and increase other transition programs for every worker affected by trade, whether in a union or not.

Union leaders balked, he said. They simply wanted to kill NAFTA. Short of that, they wanted any trade adjustment assistance to go through the unions to union workers. The $8 billion package became a $50 million-a-year program administered through the unions, available only to workers who could show that they lost their jobs because of international trade and the movement of factories to Mexico and Canada.

Workers dismissed trade adjustment assistance as burial assistance.

There were also missed opportunities: Mr. Furman said the Obama administration’s timid response to the financial crisis prolonged the slow, frustrating recovery, intensifying the anger that Mr. Trump tapped into in 2016. And Mr. Clinton’s balanced budgets and record surpluses in the late 1990s had quickly been squandered by Mr. Bush.

But there, too, political reality played a part. Republicans controlled Congress.

“Do I wish Clinton had spent the surplus on great things instead of handing it to George W. Bush? Yes,” Mr. Furman said. “Do I think he could have spent it on all those great things in a divided government? No.”

A Biden recalibration, undone by inflation

If any Democrat intuitively understood the voters who were abandoning his party, it was Mr. Biden, who campaigned in 2020 as “Scranton Joe,” the product of a small, deindustrialized city that epitomized the ground lost by the working class.

His victory may have been fueled by the pandemic, but his focus was on economics. He tried to undo or reverse some of the damage that had been done by his predecessors. He brought in left-leaning economists like Mr. Bernstein and Heather Boushey, who had often been voices of dissent in the Clinton and Obama years.

His chief at the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, zealously tried to break up monopoly industries. The United States Trade Representative, led by Katherine Tai, steadfastly avoided pursuing new trade deals that might rankle labor leaders, instead focusing on issues like strengthening labor rights in Mexico.

The new administration ushered out the belief that healthy financial markets, low unemployment and adequate support for people with the lowest income were enough to sustain an economic growth whose benefits would be shared broadly.

None other than Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary most associated with the Democratic shift toward promoting economic growth and market stability, called the Biden recalibration “constructive.” The president largely confined his “industrial policy” to promoting domestic manufacturing in arenas like semiconductors, which are vital to economic and national security, and to combating climate change, which unfettered free markets have failed to address, Mr. Rubin said in an interview.

The Biden administration also moved to bolster the clout of unions, drive down unemployment so workers would gain bargaining power and strengthen the Internal Revenue Service to go after affluent tax cheats, Mr. Bernstein said.

Mr. Biden did not have the surplus of federal dollars to invest that Mr. Clinton had bequeathed to his successor, so he guided private investment through regulations and huge tax credits secured through Congress.

“A trillion dollars of private investments have already been announced and are underway,” said Lael Brainard, the director of the Biden National Economic Council. “That’s a pretty remarkable number. Factory construction has doubled relative to the Trump administration — doubled.”

A “worker-centered trade policy” strengthened so-called Buy America commitments, maintained most of Mr. Trump’s tariffs on foreign products and pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into new American infrastructure and factories.

“Our new approach to trade recognizes people as more than just consumers, but also producers,” Ms. Tai said in a 2023 speech, “the workers, wage-earners, providers, and community members that comprise a vibrant middle class.”

Mr. Biden even joined a United Automobile Workers picket line in 2023, a first for an American president. (On Friday, in one of his last moves as president, he sided with union leaders and blocked the acquisition of U.S. Steel by a Japanese rival.)

If all of that was a corrective for policies past, the working class proved to be in an unforgiving mood in November. Ms. Harris saw some electoral gains among union workers. But she lost far more ground in the much larger, nonunion work force.

In November, 56 percent of voters without college degrees voted for Mr. Trump. In 1992, just 36 percent of voters with only a high school diploma voted Republican — about the same percentage that Barry Goldwater got in his overwhelming defeat against Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Republican and Democratic economists point to a single reason: inflation. Mr. Reich’s “anxious class” was as anxious as ever, unwilling to see policy shifts that might take years to bear fruit as a salve for the immediate pain of rising prices.

Democrats said the president was the political victim of a global trend emerging from the pandemic. Republicans pointed to his policies, and one piece of legislation in particular, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, saying it poured gasoline on the smoldering embers of post-pandemic inflation.

“The American Rescue Plan killed the Biden administration in its infancy,” Mr. Holtz-Eakin said, almost ruefully. “It was the worst thing they could have done, and they did it. They were warned, and they did it anyway.”

Ana Swanson contributed reporting from Washington.

Jonathan Weisman is a politics writer, covering campaigns with an emphasis on economic and labor policy. He is based in Chicago. More about Jonathan Weisman

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 6, 2025, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: How the Democrats Lost The Working-Class Vote. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: U.S. Politics, President Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Democratic Party, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton

The Constitutional Sheriffs Movement and Election Denial [americanoversight.org]

 https://americanoversight.org/investigation/the-constitutional-sheriffs-movement-and-election-denial/

investigation

Updated February 10, 2023

The Constitutional Sheriffs Movement and Election Denial

Election-denial activists have encouraged “constitutional sheriffs” to bolster partisan election investigations and further undermine faith in U.S. democracy. American Oversight is investigating the movement and its adherents’ ties to election denial and voter-fraud alarmism. 

The “constitutional sheriffs” movement — a fringe theory that holds that sheriffs have more law enforcement power in their home counties than any other government body or individual — has risen in influence over the past decade. Adherents believe that county sheriffs are the ultimate authority in determining the constitutionality of the laws they must enforce — including on matters of election administration.

In recent years, the movement has brought its work to the election denial space, with many constitutional sheriffs running for office and on promises not to enforce certain laws and others working as self-appointed election police in 2020 and 2022. Election deniers have encouraged constitutional sheriffs to monitor elections and launch investigations in efforts to further undermine faith in the security of voting.

The movement’s most prominent group is the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA), which was founded in 2011 by former Sheriff Richard Mack of Graham County, Ariz. The organization claims on its website that “the Constitution makes it clear that the power of the sheriff even supersedes the powers of the President” — a theory that legal scholars say has no grounding in law.

Background
Before founding CSPOA, Mack was a longtime board member of the Oath Keepers, alongside founder Steward Rhodes, who in late 2022 was convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. In 2022, Mack stepped down as CEO of CSPOA, and Sam Bushman, a far-right podcaster, assumed the role.

One member of CSPOA who was involved in efforts to undermine the 2020 election was Sheriff Christopher Schmaling of Racine County, Wis. In 2021, Schmaling recommended charging five members of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission with misconduct and fraud for measures they took to facilitate coronavirus safety protocols for voters living in nursing homes. A year later, Schmaling did not investigate or recommend charges against a resident who illegally requested multiple absentee ballots to prove election fraud is possible, instead blaming the state’s top election officials.

In May 2022, CSPOA said it was encouraging its members to launch investigations into the 2020 election in their own states. Sheriff Dar Leaf of Barry County, Mich., began investigating alleged voter fraud after the 2020 election, with other inquiries opened by sheriffs in Arizona, Kansas, and Wisconsin. At CSPOA’s annual meeting that summer, it announced that it had teamed up with voter-fraud alarmist group True the Vote — whose founder, Catherine Engelbrecht, was jailed later that fall for refusing to comply with a court order in a case challenging True the Vote’s claims about an election software company — to investigate claims of 2020 voter fraud and to police future elections.

American Oversight’s Investigations
American Oversight has submitted public records requests in more than a dozen states to the offices of sheriffs — including Schmaling and Leaf — seeking communications with specific election conspiracy theorists and activists such as Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Arizona Rep. Mark Finchem, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, the constitutional sheriffs group Protect America Now, and Engelbrecht. We also requested any communications Schmaling may have had in connection with the Wisconsin Assembly’s partisan review of the 2020 election.

In September 2022, Leaf responded to our request for communications, confirming that such records of communication with True the Vote existed, but withheld them under an exemption in the state’s public records law for records related to law enforcement proceedings. American Oversight sued for the release of the records, arguing that those communications did not constitute legitimate law enforcement work, given the lack of any credible evidence of widespread voter fraud and the misinformation propagated by True the Vote. Leaf’s attempts to shield his communications, American Oversight said, was “an abuse of his position” that “subverts the public’s right to know how the government is spending taxpayer resources.”

In January 2023 and in response to our litigation, Leaf’s office released a partial response to our records request. The released records include communications with Engelbrecht and additional constitutional sheriffs, as well as with Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence officer who has claimed that the 2020 election was illegitimate at dozens of election denial events across the country. 

American Oversight has also requested records related to the participation of certain sheriffs at the Claremont Institute’s 2022 “Sheriffs Fellowship,” a week-long meeting of constitutional sheriffs in Huntington Beach, Calif., that focused on conservatism, the Constitution, and the “roots of radical leftist ideology.” We will update this page as more findings become available.

Biden job gains top Trump and Obama [axios]

 https://www.axios.com/2025/01/10/iden-job-gains-obama-trump

Jan 10, 2025 - Business

Biden job gains top Trump and Obama

Dan Primack

 

Data: BLS; Chart: Axios Visuals

The U.S. economy added 2.23 million jobs in 2024, including 256,000 in the final full month of Joe Biden's presidency.

The big picture: There have been more jobs gained under Biden's term than under the full terms of former Presidents Trump, Obama, or George W. Bush.

By the numbers: Biden is now at +16.1 million, aided by the post-pandemic economic recovery.

• Trump oversaw 2.1 million job losses, although there were 6.6 million jobs added during his first three years in office (i.e., pre-pandemic years).
• Obama oversaw 7.1 million job gains, with losses at the beginning of his first term due to the Great Financial Crisis.
• Bush oversaw 5.2 million job gains.
• Bill Clinton has a stronger record than any of his successors, with a total of 23 million jobs added, although his annual average trails that of Biden.