Author: Kevin Drum

Rep. Jamie Raskin kicked off the Donald Trump impeachment trial by railing against the "January exception" implied by the Republican argument that Trump can't be tried after he's left office. As Raskin says, this would implicitly mean that presidents can do anything they want during their last month in office and face no risk of punishment.

Rep. Joe Neguse is now following up on this, arguing that a "January exception" would allow any official to resign in order to avoid facing impeachment.

I believe that "January exception" will be the Democratic meme for the day. It's a smart move. I don't know what kind of technical legal force it has, but it's definitely the argument most easily understood by ordinary people.

Longtime readers know that I'm dedicated to bringing you every negative news report on California's bullet train. This is fairly easy since every news report about the bullet train is negative. Here's the latest:

The California bullet train authority will seek a $4.1-billion appropriation to complete construction in the Central Valley, as costs and schedules continue to grow.

....The disclosures by the rail authority include an update on the cost of the Central Valley system. Newsom originally said the estimated cost would not exceed $20.4 billion and that it would be operating by 2028. The new cost includes an upper limit of $22.8 billion, a 10% increase, and an operational date of 2030, a two-year slip.

....The $4.1-billion appropriation would substantially deplete the bond fund. At the time it was approved, the full 500-mile bullet train system from Los Angeles to San Francisco was supposed to cost $33 billion and the bonds would cover a third of it.

The idea here is to use up all the bond money on the "starter" segment between Bakersfield and Merced, and then pretend that more money will be found for the final links to San Francisco and Los Angeles. This will never happen, which means that a decade from now California will have a bullet train that takes people from Bakersfield to Merced.

You may be wondering how many people want to take a train from Bakersfield (pop. 400,000) to Merced (pop. 100,000) by way of Fresno (pop. 500,000), shaving maybe an hour or so off the 2½-hour drive by car. The answer is not very many, and it's hardly worth the time to quantify this any further.

Remember how much we all mocked the "bridge to nowhere"? Hell, that was only $400 million and it never got built anyway. It's nothing compared to our $20-30 billion bullet train to nowhere.¹

¹I don't mean to imply that Bakersfield, Fresno, and Merced are "nowhere." But I guess that's what I'm doing. However, I say this in a spirit of cameraderie with my friends in the Central Valley, not as some snotty liberal elite who's lived his entire life in Southern California.

I see that Ezra Klein is reading my mind today:

Should We Dim the Sun? Will We Even Have a Choice?

That’s the central theme of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.”...In my conversation with her on my podcast, “The Ezra Klein Show,” I wanted to focus on one [subject] that obsesses me: solar geoengineering. To even contemplate it feels like the height of hubris. Are we really going to dim the sun? And yet, any reasonable analysis of the mismatch between our glacial politics and our rapidly warming planet demands that we deny ourselves the luxury of only contemplating the solutions we would prefer.

Fifteen years ago my view on climate change was conventionally liberal: we needed bold policies to fight global warming. This included things like carbon taxes; federal initiatives to spur investment in solar and wind; regulations to reduce power consumption, and so forth. One of my earliest magazine pieces for Mother Jones represents this kind of thinking. You can read it here.

For fifteen years I waited for evidence that the world would make even the mildest efforts to enter this fight. But this is a global problem that demands a global response, and on that score we've gotten almost nothing. We all signed the Paris Accord, but compliance is voluntary and few countries have any real hope of meeting their goals. Extraction of fossil fuels continues apace in virtually every country where it's possible: Canada has oil sands, Norway has offshore oil, the United States has fracking, Germany has coal, China has coal, and even Britain, which gave up mining coal years ago, is now set to open a new coal mine. No matter how green a country claims to be, it will extract all the fossil fuels it can if it means generating a few more jobs or making a small dent in its balance of trade figures. In the meantime, carbon levels in the atmosphere continue to rise like a metronome:
A couple of years ago I finally gave up on this: It was obvious there was no hope for an adequate global response in anywhere close to the necessary time frame. I now believe that our only option is to invest massive amounts of money in technology solutions, hoping against hope that enough of them succeed to reverse warming before it destroys the planet. You can read all about that here.

But there's one more thing. Technological progress may be our best hope right now, but how likely is it to work? Since it requires no big personal sacrifice other than trainloads of cash—which can be put on national credit cards if push comes to shove—it could gain enough public support. And since it will produce technology that everyone can use, other countries might well pitch in. And finally, since it does nothing one way or the other about the Uighurs, even China might get on board. It has a legitimate chance.

By "legitimate," however, I mean that my personal guess is that it has maybe a 10% chance of panning out. If you're an optimist, you might give it 20%.

Which brings us to this: what do I predict will happen? The answer is that I think around 2040 or so we will collectively conclude that we're screwed. Global temps will already be 2ºC above the historical average and we'll be on an irreversible path to 3ºC. The future will look so horrific that we simply have no choices left. And so we will shoot gigatons of aerosols into the atmosphere. This will dim the sun's heat just enough to halt, and then reverse, global warming.

This is not the only possible form of geoengineering. There are lots of others, many of them fascinating and some of them far better, in theory, than aerosols. But all of them are pipe dreams right now, and even in the future will probably be prohibitively expensive and intrusive. Aerosols, by contrast, are surprisingly well understood and surprisingly cheap.

They're well understood partly because every few years a volcano dumps a huge load of ash and aerosols into the atmosphere, which has given us a chance to study their impact. And they're cheap because, well, because they are. Roughly speaking, all it takes is a fleet of about a hundred aircraft spraying loads of sulfate aerosols 24/7. The cost would be in the range of $5-10 billion a year, which is peanuts, and it would lower the temperature of the earth by about a twentieth of a degree per year. We would slowly get back to a manageable level, and then continue spraying to keep temps steady.

Do I think this is a good idea? Absolutely not. For one thing, it doesn't solve all the problems of climate change. Ocean acidification, for example. For another, different areas of the planet have different ideal temperatures. Who's going to decide what our global goal should be? And what's to stop any country from spraying its own aerosols if it thinks temperatures should be even lower?

So of course it's not a good idea. It's a terrible idea. But is it a worse idea than warming of 3ºC? Nope. And it's not even close.

The things we're doing now will probably have an impact by 2040. That's good, since the less spraying we have to do the better. But they most likely won't be anywhere close to what we need, and the pressure to adopt a cheap, fast, and decently understood second-best solution will eventually become irresistible. And so we'll spray.

Molly Ball wrote a deeply reported piece in Time last week about the campaign to prevent Donald Trump from trying to steal the election. Her main character is Mike Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the AFL-CIO, who figured out a year ahead of time that Trump was likely to yell fraud if the 2020 election was even remotely close. A few months later he was ready to put a counter-offensive in place:

On March 3, Podhorzer drafted a three-page confidential memo titled “Threats to the 2020 Election.” “Trump has made it clear that this will not be a fair election, and that he will reject anything but his own re-election as ‘fake’ and rigged,” he wrote. “On Nov. 3, should the media report otherwise, he will use the right-wing information system to establish his narrative and incite his supporters to protest.”

....In April, Podhorzer began hosting a weekly 2½-hour Zoom....The meetings became the galactic center for a constellation of operatives across the left who shared overlapping goals but didn’t usually work in concert.... “Pod played a critical behind-the-scenes role in keeping different pieces of the movement infrastructure in communication and aligned,” says Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. “You have the litigation space, the organizing space, the political people just focused on the W, and their strategies aren’t always aligned. He allowed this ecosystem to work together.”

This is a good read all by itself, but the really important stuff comes later. Apologies for the length of the following excerpt, but I promise I have a point to make:

Laura Quinn, a veteran progressive operative who co-founded Catalist, began studying [online disinformation] a few years ago.... The solution, she concluded, was to pressure platforms to enforce their rules, both by removing content or accounts that spread disinformation and by more aggressively policing it in the first place.... In November 2019, Mark Zuckerberg invited nine civil rights leaders to dinner at his home.... “It took pushing, urging, conversations, brainstorming, all of that to get to a place where we ended up with more rigorous rules and enforcement,” says Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who attended the dinner and also met with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and others.

....Beyond battling bad information, there was a need to explain a rapidly changing election process.... Dick Gephardt, the Democratic former House leader turned high-powered lobbyist...worked his contacts in the private sector to put $20 million behind the effort.

....About a week before Election Day, Podhorzer received an unexpected message: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to talk.... “With tensions running high, there was a lot of concern about unrest around the election, or a breakdown in our normal way we handle contentious elections,” says Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s executive vice president and chief policy officer. These worries had led the Chamber to release a pre-election statement with the Business Roundtable, a Washington-based CEOs’ group, as well as associations of manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, calling for patience and confidence as votes were counted.

But Bradley wanted to send a broader, more bipartisan message.... Agreeing that their unlikely alliance would be powerful, they began to discuss a joint statement....As it was being finalized, Christian leaders signaled their interest in joining, further broadening its reach. The statement was released on Election Day, under the names of Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, and the heads of the National Association of Evangelicals and the National African American Clergy Network.

There's more, and Ball could have added that once the Trump disinformation campaign went into full swing after the election, every single person in charge of counting votes—county clerks, attorneys general, secretaries of state—opposed Trump's effort. The same goes for judges in the several dozen lawsuits Trump launched. He lost them all, regardless of whether the judge had been appointed by a Democratic or Republican president.

Now, the normal takeaway from Ball's piece is shock and dismay that it took a fight of this magnitude to overcome Trump's anti-democracy jihad. But I take something different away: If you put everything together, it turns out that literally no one except for the most cultish of Trump's followers supported his democracy-bashing efforts. Everyone opposed them

This is why I continue to think that democracy in the United States is way stronger than people are giving it credit for. It took a devastating punch from a uniquely demagogic president supported by hundreds of Republican politicians and the massed media efforts of Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media machine. Despite this, everyone outside of Trump's cult opposed him and the effort failed miserably. That's not bad.

There is, of course, a different takeaway: what if the business community had decided to throw in with Trump? How big a difference would that have made? And what are the odds that some future demagogue might be self-disciplined and corrupt enough to bring the business class on board?

That's hardly an impossible scenario, though I think it's only likely if the business community is brought along slowly. For now, they seem to remain pretty firmly in the conventional class of Americans who believe strongly in democracy and don't think that a Democrat in the White House is going to bring the country to its downfall. As it turns out, most Americans not in thrall to Fox News believe that too.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 8. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Paul Krugman writes tonight about using deficits to pull ourselves out of a recession:

A dozen years ago, just before Barack Obama was sworn in as president amid the Great Recession, I wrote a disconsolate column titled “The Obama Gap.” At a time when many viewed the president-elect as a transformational figure, I lamented the caution of his economic policy. His proposed stimulus, I argued, would fall well short of what was needed.

....The good news — and it’s really, really good news — is that Democrats seem to have learned their lesson. Joe Biden may not look like the second coming of F.D.R.; Chuck Schumer, presiding over a razor-thin majority in the Senate, looks even less like a transformational figure; yet all indications are that together they’re about to push through an economic rescue plan that, unlike the Obama stimulus, truly rises to the occasion.

If you click the link in Krugman's column, he appears to have suggested in 2009 that we needed a stimulus of about $2 trillion in actual public spending. The stimulus we got had only a third of that, plus some tax cuts.

Our current recession is totally different. If Biden's plan passes, we will have approved more than $5 trillion in spending divvied up among consumers, businesses, schools, local governments, hospitals, and more. In other words, even though the 2009 recession was the worst in nearly a century, we're spending close to ten times more on today's recession than we did back then.

This ought to be something of a destruction test of a perfect Keynesian stimulus. Stimulus money (or "rescue money" if you prefer, though it doesn't matter since money is money no matter what you call it) started being pumped into the economy almost immediately after the recession started; it's continued throughout; and Biden's plan will keep it going until after the pandemic is over. It's based almost entirely on public spending, not on tax cuts; the Fed is not trying to sabotage it with interest rate hikes; and it's enormous. There is really nothing more that anyone could ask for on a purely macroeconomic basis.

As long as the pandemic is active, none of that matters. The economy is going to stay in a rut for reasons having nothing to do with fiscal or monetary policy. But when it's over, the economy should be in terrific shape. Really terrific shape. And I suspect it will be. But if it's not, conventional stimulus theory will have something to answer for.

Former MoJo colleague Ben Dreyfuss writes about Twitter:

The proliferation of super large accounts is quietly the biggest problem on this site. Everyone is one retweet away from being seen out of context by millions of people with a completely different timeline.

— Ben Dreyfuss (@bendreyfuss) February 8, 2021

Are super large accounts the biggest problem with Twitter? I don't know that I'd go that far. But Ben is right that it's a big problem.

Here's why. All of us on Twitter follow a different set of accounts. That means each of us is responding to a different version of reality when we tweet something. I read my timeline and may feel that it represents "what Twitter is thinking," but all it really represents is what the people I follow are thinking. Anything I tweet has to be understood in that context.

But if my post is retweeted by a big account to a couple million people with an entirely different view of reality, then I can be in big trouble. The real issue might be that Mr. Big and I just have a slightly different view of what's really happening out in the world, which is fairly trivial. But this won't even occur to Big's followers. They'll just immediately pile on, with consequences that are hard to predict.

In a sense, this is nothing more than another example of the fact that we're all increasingly trapped in little news bubbles of our own making. We have such different views of the world that it's all but impossible to agree on even a basic set of facts to start from. And often we don't even really know it.

This is from a story in the Washington Post a few weeks ago about the rise in homicides in 2020:

The grim body count isn’t quite over yet, but the data collected so far is stark — a 20.9 percent increase in killings nationwide, in the first nine months of the year, according to the FBI.

....Experts agree the pandemic has played a huge role in the rise in killings, but it has also probably contributed to a significant decrease in nonviolent crimes, which the FBI data shows fell by more than 8 percent in the first nine months of the year, possibly because there were fewer people on the street, fewer stores open for business and fewer crimes of opportunity available.

A huge rise in the murder rate is obviously bad news, but it's paradoxically good news too. The trendline for national crime rates never changes by more than a few percentage points a year, which means that a 20.9% increase is plainly a huge outlier. Maybe it was prompted by the George Floyd protests. Maybe it was prompted by the pandemic. But whatever it was, there's no chance that it represents a genuine change in long-term crime trends. This is confirmed by the fact that nonviolent crime was down and—if I remember this correctly—that violent crime other than murder was also down (or at most very slightly up.)

Crime rates have been unusually spiky over the past few years, and it's hard to extract much of a signal from all the noise. We need to figure out why the murder rate is up, but we should also expect that in 2021 it will probably go right back down.

In honor of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers winning the Super Bowl, here's a picture of the Pirate Tower in Laguna Beach. It's a 1-second exposure near sunset, which gives the ocean surf a misty look.

Needless to say, this is not actually a pirate tower. It's a stairway. There's a house at the top, and the eccentric dude who built it decided he wanted more than just the usual set of wooden steps when he went down to the beach. He decided on a French chateau look, and back in 1926 I guess there was no one around to tell him he couldn't do it.

One of my favorite political parables comes from the 1980 election. What happened is that Ronald Reagan loudly and persistently promised that a big supply-side tax cut would get us out of the recession and supercharge the economy. A few years later the economy recovered—as it was bound to do eventually—and Reagan was able to loudly and persistently take credit for it. The result was morning in America and a landslide victory over Walter Mondale in 1984.

The lesson here is not that tax cuts supercharged the economy. They were probably #4 or #5 on a list that includes Paul Volcker lowering interest rates; oil prices coming down; big deficit spending; and devaluation of the dollar. The lesson is to loudly claim that you're doing something to save the economy and then wait around for the economy to recover. Then you can credibly claim that it was your policies that rescued the country.

Democrats don't do this much, and it's nice to see that change this year. Joe Biden and the liberal commentariat are pretty united in their insistence that the economy is in dire shape and the Democrats' $1.9 trillion coronavirus bill will rescue us. Well, maybe it will and maybe it won't. But if the economy is doing well in 2022, Democrats are well set up to take credit for it. Ditto for 2024.

And if the economy isn't in great shape in 2022? Then it probably doesn't matter. In other words, talking up the coronavirus bill has a big upside and no downside. So talk away.