Kevin Drum

LA Times columnist Mark Barabak recently tooled up to Bakersfield, the deep-red heart of Kevin McCarthy's congressional district, to find out what his constituents thought about impeaching Joe Biden. Here's a sampling:

“We as conservatives need to fight back. You have to keep the enemy off balance at all times.”

Biden has “made a mockery of our country.” Impeachment “should have happened a long time ago.”

“He’s just a mouthpiece. And not a very good one.”

Democrats went after Trump “from the get-go. It’s only fair [Biden] should be impeached.”

“I don’t think the Republicans would be doing this if [Democrats] didn’t go after Trump.”

The first thing you should notice is that no one mentioned Hunter Biden. These folks might marinate daily in Fox News, but they either don't know or don't care about the "Biden crime family." They just don't like Biden and think he deserves impeachment because Democrats have been mean to Donald Trump. Not one of these five people mentioned any actual thing Biden has done. They just loathe Democrats and that's enough.

Of course, it's worth noting that Republicans in California successfully recalled Gov. Gray Davis for no particular reason, and have tried ever since to recall other Democratic governors just because they're Democrats. So maybe this is hardly surprising.

The wingnut caucus in the House has proposed a short-term spending bill that would cut outlays by "1%." But it's not really that:

The 1 percent cut is an average for the federal budget. The Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs would not receive any cuts, while other government agencies would have their budgets slashed by 8 percent until the end of October.

This is ridiculous. What's the government supposed to do? Tell 8% of their workforce to take October off and then maybe come back in November? That's no way to run a railroad.

This proposal isn't going to get any traction in the Senate, nor should it. Conservatives agreed to spending levels during negotiations over the debt ceiling, and if they have any integrity left they should honor that even if they regret it in hindsight. A deal's a deal.

Oh come on:

As if neanderthals didn't already get enough abuse from homo bigbrainius.

Pretty soon, everybody in the world is going to be suing oil companies:

The state of California has sued five of the largest oil and gas companies in the world, alleging that they engaged in a “decades-long campaign of deception” about climate change and the risks posed by fossil fuels that has forced the state to spend tens of billions of dollars to address environmental-related damages.

There's not much question that oil companies have been aware of climate change for a very long time. Here's a set of findings from Exxon Mobil going back nearly 50 years:

The Exxon scientists did good work! The red lines show actual levels through 2015 (temperature and CO₂ concentrations), and they match the Exxon projections very closely. Exxon has known for a long time what the burning of fossil fuels was doing to the planet—and other industry groups have known even longer.

But I'm still uneasy about these lawsuits. Oil companies are obviously no heroes, but the real defenders of climate change denialism are much easier to find: us. All of us. Even now, when the evidence of climate change is unquestionable, we keep burning oil and gas and coal in prodigious quantities. And we aren't doing it because of oil company propaganda. We're doing it because we don't want to give up our cars and air conditioners and plastic bottles:

It's true that solar power has finally started to inch onto this chart, though it's still so small you can barely see it. And keep in mind that solar didn't start to take off until 2015. We were flatly not willing to use it if it meant any increase whatsoever in electricity prices. We only started to use it when the price of solar fell to a point that absolutely no sacrifice was necessary.

So sure, sue the oil companies. Why not. But don't think of them as the big villains in the climate change story. We're the villains. All the oil companies did was make a lot of money giving us what we desperately demanded from them.

It's all over, and only two Republicans in the Texas Senate voted to convict Ken Paxton on any of the charges against him. The other 17 Republicans all voted to acquit on every charge.

The evidence against Paxton was open-and-shut, and the charges were clearly serious enough to be impeachable. But tribal loyalty and intense pressure from conservatives carried the day. What an embarrassment.

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, is almost comically corrupt. He's so corrupt that even though the legislature is controlled by his fellow Republicans, he's being impeached.

The Texas Senate is voting on impeachment as I type this, and so far Paxton has survived on eight out of 16 counts. Only a couple of Republicans have joined Democrats to convict him.

But there are still eight counts to go! Maybe Texas Republicans will do the right thing in the end.

Maybe someone can finally get Donald Trump to shut up:

Special counsel Jack Smith is asking a judge to issue a gag order against former President Donald Trump, prohibiting him from attacking prosecutors, the judge or potential witnesses who may testify in his federal criminal trial stemming from his effort to subvert the 2020 election.

I'm basically in favor of anything that pisses off Trump, so I'm rooting for the gag order. Nobody deserves one more.

Here is the average hourly wage for auto workers over the past 30 years:

The view of the auto workers is that back when the industry was in trouble they made a lot of concessions on pay to keep the companies in business. Adjusted for inflation, auto workers today make about $12 per hour less than they did in 2005.¹

Now that auto companies are doing well, the unions want them to make concessions on pay that will get workers back on the rising trendline they were on before. This is where the initial demand for a 40% raise over four years came from. That still wouldn't get them back to the old trend, but it would at least get them back to about where they were in 2005.

¹I'm using PCE inflation here instead of CPI because this is a long-term series where it makes a difference. Using CPI, auto workers make $15 per hour less than they did in 2005.

Last week we got a closeup of Hilbert, so this week it's Charlie's turn. He was walking back and forth on the fence when I took this.

The UAW—my former union!—isn't happy with Joe "Mr. Union" Biden:

Shawn Fain, the head of the United Auto Workers, has privately expressed his frustration with Joe Biden, wanting the president and other Democratic lawmakers to come out more aggressively in support of his union, which launched a strike Friday against the so-called Big Three automakers.

Fain’s frustration was conveyed by five people familiar with his thinking, who were granted anonymity to describe his position. One of those five described him as “not happy” with the situation. And Fain’s not the only person in Michigan who isn’t thrilled with the way Biden and his team have handled the labor dispute.

Fain is famously aggressive, so it's no surprise to hear this even though Biden has offered stronger support for the union than any other president in memory. But I have a question: Is there any evidence from recent history that presidential support has any impact on union negotiations? I hear this same kind of thing at all levels—the mayor should get involved, the governor should get involved, the president should get involved—but none of those people have any actual authority to do anything, and thus no real leverage. President Biden could offer mediation assistance in the auto strike, but only if both sides want it. As far as I know, neither side wants it.

In any case, my understanding is that wages aren't the only sticking point here. There's also the UAW's desire to make sure that new plants making electric vehicles are unionized. But for some reason this never gets mentioned.