President Biden has already turned over to Congress the transcript of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur. But he's claimed executive privilege to hold on to the tape recordings. The Wall Street Journal is outraged:
The privilege claim is bogus on two grounds....
Oh for chrissake. There's no need to read any further. Of course his claim is bogus. But so is the claim from Republicans in Congress that the recordings play some legitimate role in their oversight function. They've already got a 400 page report from Hur himself; congressional testimony from Hur; and a transcript of the interview—all of which make it clear that Biden did nothing wrong.
Everyone knows perfectly well why Republicans want the audio: so they can find some excerpt where Biden stutters or slips a bit. Then they can gleefully release it amidst earnest claims that it shows Biden was hesitant or untruthful or confused or no longer remembers his own name.
Republicans have honed the art of the congressional investigation into a fine art, and I admit I'm a little puzzled that Democrats haven't done the same. They ran the January 6 investigation a couple of years ago, but that's about it—and Republican Liz Cheney was the driving force behind it anyway. Beyond that, they can't quite seem to bring themselves to bash away at Republicans in the same scorched-earth style that Republicans do to Democrats.
In a way, I'm thankful for that. The Republican style is obscene. Still, unilateral disarmament hardly seems right either.
I would like to see the Democrats practice this particular form of art with respect to the political partiality/impartiality of a certain Supreme Court justice. Hearings all summer long on Mr. Alito...
It's a tough problem, because I think the phrase "unilateral disarmament" is incorrect. Republicans have deliberately and systematically destroyed norms, and even formal rules and laws, that enabled government to function relatively smoothly for decades, including -- importantly! -- working through policy differences and even philosophical ones without collapsing into paralysis. Gingrich and his successors, McConnell in the Senate, and Reagan and his successors in the WH, along with an increasingly large cadre of willing arsonists, have energetically sabotaged both Congress and the Executive, and everyone -- except maybe corporations and the 0.1% wealthiest individuals -- is worse off for it. That Democrats have NOT done this, or have not responded in kind, is not so much "disarmament" as a continuing commitment to try to make government work.
Alas, the current generation of Republican voters is just too damn dumb to get it. THEY deserve a working government of course, for their subsidies and to lock up the people they want locked up, but the rest of it is "waste, fraud and abuse," and they are perfectly happy to watch it burn.
Ironically, when the flames reach the parts they care about, they blame Democrats. But as Davis X Machina noted long ago, they'll put up with it, as long as they think the people they hate are doing even worse than they are.
It's nihilism. And declining to join in nihilism is not disarmament.
This is wrong- Democrats destroyed the most important norm first, which was that you could disagree on almost anything as long as the race and gender hierarchies were maintained. When Democrats started acting like black people were human and women were equal to men, Republicans had to respond.
Old people like to talk about era when the parties got along as a golden age, but it was an age when they were basically coalitions of white guys who went to certain colleges. You were more likely to run as a Democrat if you were Southern or from a working-class background (altho not within the last couple generations), or a Republican if you were Northern or from the old patrician class, but fundamentally those guys were the same- they went to the Ivies, they summered in Newport, and they kept their lessers down while distributing the federal budget amongst their own class.
The era of “norms” was bad for most people, and we should celebrate its end. We’re not to actual democracy yet, but we’re getting closer, and the Republicans are doing the work.
lol oh right I forgot that Republicans are the party of racial and gender equality, and also that norms of good government are the same as racism and sexism.
You may wish to look up “category error.”
“Actual democracy” indeed. Sounds like Libertarian nonsense to me. “Government is best that governs least,” so burn it all down and something something the people something. Just like in, say, Somalia or Haiti.
I disagree, because there is actually a There there for the other side. Republicans are fabricating bullshit from carefully edited or curated drips and drops - taking things and making it appear as if there's a There there.
It would be the polar opposite if Democrats investigated and released stuff - it would just be the tip of a There iceberg, as has already been shown by ProPublica reporting on a plethora of topics.
Them's just facts.
Bashing the bad guys any way you can is really the only thing that works anymore, and Democrats need to internalize that truth now before it's too late for the country.
"Going high when they go low" just doesn't cut through.
Liz Cheney was not the driving force behind the Jan 6 hearings. She was given a prominent role because she had an (R) after her name, and Dems took a back seat to her to preserve a sheen of bipartisanship.
Also recall that those hearings were not supposed to be Democratic hearings. The Dems offered the GOP a bi-cameral, bi-partisan committee with equal representation and equal subpoena power but a Dem as the chair. The GOP declined, and so the House created ANOTHER bi-partisan committee that the GOP tried to sabotage with its nominees. Pelosi declined only two of the nominees, and then the GOP leadership pulled out AGAIN.
So I think your description of this as the Dems trying to have a partisan attack committee like the GOP does is not accurate, nor is your positioning of Liz Cheney as the prime mover of the Committee.
Are Biden/the Democrats doing the politically prudent and wise thing? - of course
Are the Republicans out to create a hit piece on Biden, versus having a sincere legislative purpose, well of course!
Welcome to politics in 2024
The Republicans want to do this because they want to accuse Biden of the thing they believe is true about Trump. For a long time I have argued that Trump’s mental slip ups could be due to jet lag or sleep deprivation. But lately he has been doing this thing where he will be speaking forcefully on a subject and suddenly lose his train of thought and say some garbled words, then sort of pathetically say “ohhhh” and then pick up on a related or unrelated thought and return to his forceful language speech.
I very much recognize this from my father’s Alzheimer’s. We don’t know how Trump behaves privately when talking to congressional leaders but I suspect if he does it while talking to him the less sycophantic ones might be worried.
Actually, no, the claim of executive privilege is not bogus.
Congress' right is tied to investigative powers; with transcripts in hand, the recordings are unnecessary to hand over.
If the recordings would potentially show that Biden apparently lied or is senile, as Kevin suggests, then they are certainly relevant to Congress's oversight powers.
Don’t feed this fuck.
"If", "would", "potentially", and "apparently" sounds like a fishing expedition for something that the Special Counsel did not or could not find. Congress' oversight cannot compel Justice to prosecute Biden just because it thought he lied to SC.
The Constitution lays out specific tests to being POTUS; senility is not one of them. As such, there is nothing here for Congress to have oversight of.
why is it of course bogus? i have no idea and haven't read into their reasoning underlying the claim (presuming they provided any such justification), but as a non-lawyer it seems strange to present it as obviously bogus without addressing why at all.
ETA: IANAL, but having read Garland's letter justifying executive privilege, the arguments seem at the very least not absurd, and to me pretty persuasive. if republican disagree, then they can take it to the courts. https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000018f-813a-d017-a39f-d1bf35110000
> In a way, I'm thankful for that. The Republican style is obscene. Still, unilateral disarmament hardly seems right either.
It's called taking the moral high ground. And the Israeli's should learn how to do that.
It's amazing how often people complain that some group of people is disgusting because they do X and therefore we should do X back to them.
This isn't an obscure thing any more.
Time was, while there were strong disagreements between the two parties (and sometimes, within them) about what the role of government should be, what it should do, and how it should spend taxpayer dollars, the two parties at least agreed, broadly speaking, that government should serve people. (Southern Democrats in the early 1900s were perfectly happy to sacrifice the needs of poor white Southerners in order to keep black Southerners "in their places," but they still wanted to use the power of government to accomplish specific things.)
But by the late 70s, faced with a potential crisis in President Carter's obvious commitment to the values he publicly claimed to hold, the Republican party generally and Ronald Reagan specifically turned against government entirely. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" isn't just a line to mock the idea that "government assistance" is desirable, it's an attack on the very idea that government has a function beyond collecting taxpayer dollars to maintain a military to project American power into other countries, and protecting the rights of those Americans who can call up prominent politicians and get put through to them from all the people who vote but have no connections or influence beyond that.
Reagan gutted regulatory structures, slashed taxes on corporations and the very wealthy, ballooned the debt, and began the dismantling of the civil service that continues to this day. Time was, government service was something to be proud of: during the Depression, government jobs were highly desirable and some of the smartest people in the country took them and ended up designing and administrating social programs like Social Security. Now, according to Reagan and the Republicans, you're a sap to want to be a bureaucrat, unless you're corrupt, and the best government agency is one that keeps the government from "harming" the powerful. Government is to protect the powerful and the wealthy from everybody else, not to protect everybody else from the excesses and abuses of the powerful and the wealthy.
Obviously, operating from such a starting assumption, the vast majority of Democrats who claim to actually value government and its capacities are either posturing to appear virtuous while being as venal and corrupt as everyone else, or covering for something specific; a handful might actually believe in what they say, but they're clearly fools if they do (as they still think Carter was).
Some of the older guard Republicans resisted, at least somewhat: George W. Bush grew up around people in government, worked in his father's White House, and respected institutions in a way now foreign to the party (see how they turn even on the FBI and CIA!). Dick Chaney might think the government has to "be evil" sometimes, but he's still in favor of it taking action.
I spent the four years of the Trump presidency wondering why the real power players in the Republican party weren't intervening to check his worst excesses. The answer is that they didn't care. Because like Trump himself, they can easily and genuinely believe obvious untruths when they are involving things they're ignorant about, and they project their own world-view and motives on everyone else. Those most involved with influence peddling doubtless understood government in the most cynical way imaginable, but they wanted government that cannot function effectively. 9/11 demonstrated the country can still carry out multiple extended wars while the government is otherwise ineffective, so they can still get what they want. Trump was "bread & circuses" for the masses, feeding red meat to the base while whenever something genuinely important came up (whether deregulation or a Supreme Court appointment), he would do what the wealthy and powerful wanted.
The really scary thing isn't just that these people are so cynical about government: they genuinely believe that's just what government is. When the other side talks about regulation or civic responsibility or "the rule of law," it's the same BS, because no successful politician can believe in any of that. And it isn't just that they don't care if government functions: they are actively disinterested in it functioning.
Kevin, did you actually read Garland's letter detailing their legal analysis and justification and still think the exec privilege claim is totally bogus? https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000018f-813a-d017-a39f-d1bf35110000
Il Duce and his band of guilty sycophants yell Executive Privilege almost on a daily basis, so I have no problem with Biden doing it here.
As far as Democrats running decent investigations, it certainly helps if you have evidence instead of lies and bull shit. The House did a good job impeaching that Orange Turd, but then again, its sort of like shooting fish in a barrel since he was fucking guilty.
If the only reason the Republicans want the tapes is "so they can find some excerpt where Biden stutters or slips a bit", it seems pointless. Biden does enough public speaking that there are already plenty of examples of Biden stuttering or slipping a bit, and as the campaign ramps up there will certainly be many more.
More likely they want to cherry pick some answers they can claim were lies, so they can start braying about impeaching him for perjury. That's how they eventually got Clinton, you'll remember.
Recently, Kevin has come perilously close to being a tiresome contrarian. Instead of airily dismissing the White House's claims as "bogus", would it be too much trouble for him to explain what legitimate interest a House committee has in the recording of testimony of which it already has the transcript, when the testimony in question was given voluntarily to an investigation which is now closed, in which nobody was charged, and in which the person giving the testimony was neither a subject nor a target of the investigation? Garland cites case law to support his argument that executive privilege may apply, and anyone dismissing his argument needs to explain why if they want to be treated as serious commentators.