1. David Bernstein: Senator Zilch: Why Mitch McConnell Does So Little

Barring something unexpected, this Tuesday will mark two months since the U.S. Senate held a roll call vote on passage of any type of legislation. That was a joint resolution to nullify President Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the Mexican border (which Trump later vetoed).

It’s been three months, as of Sunday, since the Senate last took yeas and nays on a genuine, full-fledged bill: the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act. It passed, 92 to 8, and was later signed into law.

So there was some eye-rolling last week when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell harshly criticized House Democrats, telling them to “move on” from investigating the Trump administration, and get back to the business of legislating for the country. When, some Democrats mused, will McConnell allow the Senate to move on to that business?

The United States Senate, that great deliberative body, has effectively ceased legislating this year. It has shut down. Closed for business until 2021.

McConnell has his eyes, presumably, on the 2020 election; he wants to preserve the Republican majority in the Senate — and his own re-election in Kentucky — and apparently thinks the path lies in criticizing Democrats’ proposals, not in promoting Republican or even bipartisan ones. https://www.wgbh.org/news/commentary/2019/05/13/senator-zilch-why-mitch-mcconnell-does-so-little

2. Max Boot: Republicans are hall-of-fame hypocrites

“In scandals such as this, it is always members of the president’s party who have particular leverage, and therefore who have a particular responsibility, to hold the president accountable for his actions.

In a 2012 video unearthed by Republicans for the Rule of Law, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) excoriated then-Attorney General Eric Holder for not providing more documents to a House probe of a gun-running sting: “I think that it is outrageous that any attorney general — Republican or Democrat — refuses to comply with Congress’s constitutional right to hold them accountable and the Justice Department accountable. I would say that if that if this was a Republican just like I do now because it’s a Democrat. Not only that, I think this has gone on so long and the stonewalling by the attorney general has been so egregious, that I think he has to resign.” Needless to say, Rubio is not calling for Barr to resign. Indeed, he doesn’t have a censorious word to say about the Trump administration’s current stonewalling.

Rubio is joined in the hypocrisy hall of fame by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) who, as a House member in 1998, demanded that President Bill Clinton be impeached for, inter alia, refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas: “The day Richard Nixon failed to answer that subpoena was the day he was subject to impeachment, because he took the power from Congress over the impeachment process away from Congress and he became the judge and jury.” Today, by contrast, Graham shows no interest in eliciting any information from the Trump administration. “I’m not going to do any more. Enough already. It’s over,” Graham told reporters in explaining why he would not call Mueller to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Likewise, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) proclaims “case closed” even though new evidence continues to emerge of Trump’s misconduct (including possible financial fraud).

The Republicans’ reluctance to investigate Trump is sometimes explained by pointing to their devotion to unlimited executive power — a GOP obsession ever since Watergate. But their past statements make clear that this is not the case. Republicans believe in presidential power only when the president is a Republican. When it’s a Democrat, they suddenly discover the importance of congressional oversight. There is no disinterested principle that could possibly explain or excuse Republican conduct. Their only principle is blind partisanship. We are in a “constitutional crisis,” as Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) says, and Republicans are siding with their party over the Constitution.

This is, as noted Republican moralist Bill Bennett would say, shameful — except of course Bennett is one of the Republican hypocrites who refuse to call out a Republican president. After the Mueller report was released, Bennett appeared on Fox News to say that even if Trump’s aides had followed his orders to stop the Mueller investigation, “that wouldn’t be obstruction of justice, either. … The executive power rests with the president. He can do what he wants.”

Back in 1998, Bennett expressed his deep “deep disappointment” in the “silence of thoughtful Democrats.” Today he does not even have the decency to remain silent. By talking, he is removing all doubts about his insincerity, unseriousness and opportunism — and that of his fellow party members. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/09/republicans-believe-presidential-power-only-when-president-is-republican/

3.  Tina Nguyen: Rudy Giuliani Asks Ukraine To Interfere In U.S. Election To Help Re-Elect Trump

Fox News is all over the Biden-Clinton-Manafort-Ukraine conspiracy. (Yes, there are also connections to Hillary Clinton and Paul Manafort, which my colleague Abigail Tracy details here.) At the center of the effort to make Bidengate the next Benghazi is Rudy Giuliani, who sees nothing wrong with pressuring the Ukrainian government to reopen the investigation into Burisma. “We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” he told The New York Times in a story published Thursday, on the eve of a trip to Kiev to launch his charm offensive.

The irony is so rich it could give you a heart attack. Giuliani’s efforts in Ukraine are, of course, precisely what Republicans accuse Clinton’s campaign of doing in 2016, when Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele went fishing for Ukrainian dirt on Donald Trump. On Thursday night, Giuliani told Laura Ingraham on Fox News that there had been “massive collusion” between “the Democratic National Committee, officials of the Obama administration, Clinton people, and the Ukrainian officials” to “create false information about Trump, about Manafort.” Naturally, then, Giuliani wants to counter that with some collusion of his own.

“There’s nothing illegal” about asking the Ukrainian government to open investigations into Trump’s political enemies, Giuliani told the Times. “Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy—I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already, and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”

Apparently Giuliani’s client and the United States government are one and the same. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/05/rudy-giuliani-joe-biden-ukraine

4. Elizabeth Kolbert: Climate Change and the New Age of Extinction

Last week, an international group of scientists issued what the Times called “the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity.” The findings were grim. On the order of a million species are now facing extinction, “many within decades.” “What’s at stake here is a liveable world,” Robert Watson, the chairman of the group, Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, told Science.

To keep nearly eight billion people fed, not to mention housed, clothed, and hooked on YouTube, humans have transformed most of the earth’s surface. Seventy-five per cent of the land is “significantly altered,” the I.P.B.E.S. noted in a summary of its report, which was released last week in Paris. In addition, “66 per cent of the ocean area is experiencing increasing cumulative impacts, and over 85 per cent of wetlands (area) has been lost.” Approximately half the world’s coral cover is gone. In the past ten years alone, at least seventy-five million acres of “primary or recovering forest” have been destroyed.

Habitat destruction and overfishing are, for now, the main causes of biodiversity declines, according to the I.P.B.E.S., but climate change is emerging as a “direct driver” and is “increasingly exacerbating the impact of other drivers.” Its effects, the report notes, “are accelerating.” Watson wrote last week, in the Guardian, that “we cannot solve the threats of human-induced climate change and loss of biodiversity in isolation. We either solve both or we solve neither.”

So far, it could be argued, the casualties haven’t slowed us down. The I.P.B.E.S. report cautions, however, against assuming that this pattern will continue. Nature, it succinctly observes, “is essential for human existence.” The report points to pollinators as one group of organisms that humans can’t readily do without. Ninety per cent of flowering plants and seventy-five per cent of all types of food crops rely on pollination by animals—birds, bats, and (mostly) insects. Cash crops including coffee, cocoa, and almonds are pollinator-dependent. In many regions, important pollinators, like native bees, are in decline. It’s not clear exactly why, but probably one of the major factors is an increasing reliance on synthetic pesticides, which don’t distinguish between insects that are useful and those that are unwanted. These chemicals are supposed to prevent crop failures; the danger is that they may end up causing them.

As much as six hundred billion dollars’ worth of annual agricultural production “is at risk as a result of pollinator loss,” the I.P.B.E.S. warned. In an earlier report, on pollinators and the food supply, the group predicted that “total pollinator loss” would decrease production of the most important dependent crops “by more than 90 per cent.”

We would, it seems, be well advised to shift course, if only for our own, species-centric reasons. And, according to the I.P.B.E.S., there is still time for “transformative changes” in the “production and consumption of energy, food, feed, fibre and water.” Regrettably, though, all signs point to more of the same. In 2018, carbon-dioxide emissions from the energy sector rose to a new high of thirty-six billion tons. Also in 2018, nearly thirty million acres of tropical forest were lost—an area the size of Pennsylvania. As the Web site InsideClimate News noted, this destruction occurred “even as more corporations and countries made commitments to preserve tropical forests.” As long as we continue to tear through the biosphere, expect the losses to continue to mount. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/climate-change-and-the-new-age-of-extinction

5. Paul Waldman: Trump’s tax return scam has taken yet another turn

While the best con is one in which the victim never even realizes they got scammed, that can seldom be guaranteed. So the con artist needs a final argument to make to their mark if they get confronted, and the one they often use goes as follows: Sure, I conned you. But this is your fault. You were dumb enough to believe me. Now get lost, sucker.

That is what President Trump is now saying to the American public on the subject of his tax returns. He spent years saying that he would be releasing his returns as soon as a routine IRS audit of them was complete, so the American public could understand exactly where he gets his money and where he might have conflicts of interest as president.

This was and remains a pressing question, because Trump’s greed is so encompassing that we can never be sure that if faced with a choice between doing what is in the best interests of the country and making money for himself, he won’t choose the latter. After all, this is a man who while running for president was pursuing a hotel deal in Moscow, sucking up to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and claiming falsely that he had no business interests in Russia. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/08/trumps-tax-return-scam-has-taken-yet-another-turn/

6. Jeffrey Toobin:“The Constitutional System Is Not Built to Resist Trump’s Defiance of Congress

Our constitutional system never contemplated a President like Donald Trump. The Framers anticipated friction among the three branches of government, which has been a constant throughout our history, but the Trump White House has now established a complete blockade against the legislative branch, thwarting any meaningful oversight. The system, it appears, may simply be incapable of responding to this kind of challenge.” The Constitutional System Is Not Built To Resist Trump’s Defiance Of Congress. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-constitutional-system-is-not-built-to-resist-trumps-defiance-of-congress

7. Eric Lutz: Trump’s New Border Plan: Make The Military Pay For The Wall

In the halcyon days of 2015, back when his “build the wall” mantra was more of a mnemonic device, Donald Trump claimed that constructing his “beautiful” barrier along the southern border would be “easy.” “It’s not even a difficult project if you know what you’re doing,” he insisted. Fast forward to 2019, and his quest for a wall has been anything but simple. Mexico isn’t paying, and Trump’s emergency declaration, a last-ditch effort to fund the thing, is facing multiple legal challenges. In desperation, the president has reportedly turned to the Pentagon for help. And according to The Washington Post, his newly-installed acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, is happy to comply.

Per the Post, the Pentagon is planning to shift another $1.5 billion to Trump’s project from its own programs—including its ballistic missile program, its Airborne Warning and Control System, and a program that funds war efforts abroad. Shanahan maintains the diversion won’t adversely effect military operations: “The Department carefully selected sources for the reprogramming that are excess or early to need and will not adversely affect military preparedness,” read a document reviewed by the Post. Still, the fact that the D.O.D. is funneling money from bona fide defense systems to fund a wall that will be largely ineffective is deeply ironic.

Also ironic: that Trump, who has claimed the D.O.D. was “depleted” by Barack Obama’s administration, would siphon funds from D.O.D. programs to fund his pet project. Democrats, too, are incensed at the move, noting that raiding the Pentagon’s coffers is yet another way Trump has subverted Congressional authority, and that the funds could be better spent on, say, disaster relief for military personnel. “Once again, the Department of Defense has ignored decades of precedent and cooperation with the Congress in carrying out a transfer of funds without regard to any consultation with the Appropriations Committee,” a team of Democratic senators including Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy, and Jack Reed wrote in a letter to Shanahan on Friday. “We are dismayed that the Department has chosen to prioritize a political campaign promise over the disaster relief needs of our service members, given the finite reprogramming authority available. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/05/trumps-new-border-plan-make-the-pentagon-pay-for-border-wall

8. Greg Sargent: The big unanswered question at the core of Trump’s corruption

Why?

In recent days, the unanimous message that has blared forth from President Trump, his media propagandists and his Republican allies in Congress on the Mueller report is that it is now “case closed” on this whole story, as Mitch McConnell put it.

Countless Republicans have uttered the same talking point in every conceivable forum: No collusion, no obstruction. This is an entirely settled matter — total exoneration.

Yet at the same time, the full force of the administration’s legal resources — backed up by the Senate majority leader and virtually all congressional Republicans — has been marshaled against further fact-finding of any and all kinds, on just about every single remaining front where outstanding unknowns remain.

Why? Why is this massive effort to close down every last remaining line of inquiry necessary, if Trump has been totally exonerated? https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/10/big-unanswered-question-core-trumps-corruption/

9. Karen Tumulty: A real story of fake news: Trump’s wealth

In 1985, Trump reported losses of $46.1 million from his casinos, hotels and apartment buildings, which hemorrhaged $1.17 billion over the next decade. “Year after year, Mr. Trump appears to have lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer,” the Times wrote.

Even now, Trump would rather be thought of as a tax cheat than a loser. “You always wanted to show losses for tax purposes . . . almost all real estate developers did — and often re-negotiate with banks, it was sport,” he tweeted in response to the recent Times report.

His backup singers at “Fox & Friends” chimed in, noting that piling up 10 digits’ worth of losses was a testament to Trump’s financial genius. “If anything, you read this and you’re like ‘Wow, it’s pretty impressive, all the things that he’s done in his life,’ ” co-host Ainsley Earhardt said in wonder. “It’s beyond what most of us could ever achieve.”

During the final debate of the 2016 campaign, Trump vowed to “run our country the way I’ve run my company.” As we are learning, that is one campaign promise he’s on track to keep. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/it-turns-out-trumps-business-success-was-a-media-made-myth/2019/05/09/eb22825e-71dc-11e9-8be0-ca575670e91c_story.html

10.  Bess Levin: Report: No One Wants Live In Trump’s Decrepit, Tainted Tower

When Donald Trump first opened Trump Tower, the centerpiece of his property empire, he was able to convince everyone from Steven Spielberg to Johnny Carson to Sophia Loren to pay top dollar to live in the place, with units selling for as much as $15 million. Now, thanks to a name that’s synonymous with “racist blowhard of debatable mental stability and questionable moral conduct,” not to mention a lack of updates in recent years, people can’t get away from the building fast enough. Nobody wants to go there. If you’ve got a Marriott and a Hyatt and a Trump, you’re not going to Trump.” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/05/no-one-wants-live-in-trumps-decrepit-tainted-tower-new-york

11. Jonathan Chait: The Banal Complicity of Rod Rosenstein

Trump’s progress in corrupting the Department of Justice — and, to some extent, the entire federal government — into a weapon of his autocratic aspirations relies on the acquiescence of figures like Rod Rosenstein. It is the Rosensteins who translate the president’s lizard-brain impulses into practical directives and create a patina of normalcy around them. (Or, in some increasingly rare cases, refuse to do so.) And so Rosenstein’s spate of valedictory remarks attempting to cleanse and justify his service to Trump give us real insight into the worldview of the compliant bureaucratic functionary.

Rosenstein’s idea of nonpartisan neutrality does not require abstaining from political commentary. It merely requires abstaining from criticism of his boss. In another recent speech, Rosenstein attacked the Obama administration for failing “to publicize the full story about Russian computer hackers and social media trolls, and how they relate to a broader strategy to undermine America.” (Blaming Obama for doing too little to stop the Russian operation, when Trump was abetting it and Republican leader Mitch McConnell threatened to publicly attack any administration statement against it, is one of Trump’s Orwellian talking points.) http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/rod-rosenstein-comey-barr-mueller-trump-russia-department-justice.html

12.  Bess Levin: White House Admits Trump Is Blatantly Lying About His Trade War

Last Friday, after escalating his now-year-long trade war with Beijing, Trump insisted, “Tariffs are NOW being paid to the United States by China of 25% on 250 Billion Dollars worth of goods & products. These massive payments go directly to the Treasury of the U.S.” And on Monday morning, he doubled down on his insistence that American consumers should be thanking him on bended knee: “There is no reason for the U.S. Consumer to pay the Tariffs, which take effect on China today,” he tweeted. “Very bad for China, very good for USA!”

Of course, in reality, tariffs are not paid for by China, but by U.S. companies. If the companies manage to stay in business at all, those costs are then passed on to American consumers. It’s a (massive) point of clarification that’s been noted by economists, analysts, and the media alike. But what really seems to have set Trump off is that, over the weekend, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow acknowledged this point, too!

It can’t be underscored enough that Kudlow isn’t some ex-Goldman globalist admitting that the president is lying through his caps about who’s paying for his “good and easy to win” trade war, but a longtime lackey who has had no issue making patently absurd statements in service to Trump in the past. And in a move everyone outside the Oval Office saw coming. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/05/donald-trump-larry-kudlow-china-tariffs

13. Betsy Woodruff: NRA Legal Bills Raise ‘All Sorts of Red Flags’

“One hundred thousand dollars a day? That’s just off the charts.”

That’s how Deborah Rhode, a legal ethics expert from Stanford Law School, put it after reviewing a memo from ex-NRA president Oliver North. In the document, North laid out allegations against the embattled gun rights group’s outside law firm, claiming the firm has billed the association about $24 million since last March and $8.8 million in the first three months of 2019—averaging to more than $97,000 per day. Meanwhile, the NRA’s latest financial disclosures forms show its revenue has slumped under the gun-friendly Trump administration.

North’s memo—which NRA top brass dispute—raises new questions about the association’s finances at an extraordinarily fraught moment for the grassroots gun-rights powerhouse. On the one hand, it finds its most powerful ally ever in President Trump. But at the same time, it faces acute challenges from inside and out: an increasingly organized, media-savvy movement calling for tighter gun laws, a belligerent foe in the New York governor’s mansion, and internal turmoil that has left its members’ heads spinning. Plus, there’s the whole money problem.

Now North claims the group’s legal bills are a new, huge strain on its finances—which have contracted.

“The Brewer invoices are draining NRA cash at mindboggling speed,” reads the memo, referring to the legal bills, and adding that they “pose an existential threat to the financial stability of the NRA.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/nra-legal-bills-raise-all-sorts-of-red-flags