Linkin' and Thinkin'

Twenty things to read, and quick thoughts related to them

Dear Friends,

Here are some things I found worth reading and pondering this week, with quick comments by me on each.

1. Jonathan Bernstein on the shutdown stalemate. One big-picture take-away is that public opinion has hardened beyond the partisan event horizon of shutdown politics (as predicted by Jennifer Victor). This, in turn, makes shutdowns potentially less dangerous for the parties and more profitable as party-unifying exercises. And, of course, it also might make shutdowns more difficult to dislodge, as both sides credibly see themselves as not on the losing side of the short-term opinion battle. Thus, stalemate.

   

   None of this is without cost. There are many externalities. The most obvious one is the related inability of public opinion to move much on objectively outrageous unilateral executive actions. The underlying formula here is simple: at least since Iran-Contra, we’ve seen an ever-increasing unwillingness of partisans to levy any sanction on co-partisan presidents. The Watergate model looms large in peoples’ minds, but it’s badly outdated and came at an unusual time of low partisanship, which allowed for both the efforts to sanction the Nixon White House and the post-Watergate bipartisan clean-up of the deficiencies that led to the imperial presidency.

   

   Those days are long gone, and what we’re left with now is a combination we’ve never had in American history: highly polarized parties and the massive and powerful administrative state of the modern executive branch. We had the former for much of American history, but the latter arose and functioned in the odd mid-20th century period of low partisanship. The 21st century presidencies are the natural results of both trends finally coming together. To wit, try to imagine the 1974 reaction to item #2, #3, #11, and #13.

   

2. The Lobby Shop podcast on the shutdown stalemate. Liam Donovan should be your go-to source for tactical party analysis of the shutdown (and most things Hill politics). This episode is an especially good analysis of the various pressure points that could shift the political calculation of the parties and leaders in the coming weeks. Or not. One counterintuitive feature of the current shutdown is that Trump has largely gone out of his way to ease the pain of the shutdown and that has served as a release valve for a lot of the moments that might otherwise have forced a resolution; instead of just blaming the Dems for the shutdown and using his executive discretion to marginally increase the pain, he’s done almost the opposite: finding money for troops, looking to extend WIC payments, leaving national parks and monuments open.

   

   One explanation for this is that Trump, like the Democrats, is looking to leverage the shutdown for his own ideological and power ends, so he prefers it not draw the ire of the public. Another explanation, of course, is that Trump the populist is genuinely moderate on a fair number of issues in the nexus of government benefits, and doesn’t like the idea of turning them off. As with his other moderate positions, this puts him out of step with much of the congressional GOP. But his unquestioned position as party leader and during his second term has made that much less of a potential liability than it was during his first term.

   

   I’ve seen a lot of nonsense OLC memos in my day

3. Related: the White House’s Talking Points on Troop Pay. I don’t know how else to put this except to say this document is basically just histrionic bullshit. It argues a series of plainly wrong things: (1) that the commander-in-chief clause gives the president special power over military appropriations; (2) these powers include the authority to generally spend money on things not appropriated for by Congress; and (3) the president may use money expressly appropriated for purpose A to pay for some purpose B that Congress did not appropriate money toward.

   

   None of this comports with either 18th century English practice, the 1787 Founders’ vision, or typical past practice. That the White House cites a pile of emergency instances where the executive illegally spent money (often when Congress was out of session for months) is not particularly compelling. It is also true that most people—including me—support getting the troops paid and it would be politically insane to challenge this. And that means it is going to become a precedent whenever a future president does this. This is a classic executive pattern—controversially violate basic laws and norms, and then retrospectively use those violations as bullet-proof precedent years or decades down the line.

   

4. Related: the White House also wants to use donations to pay troops. Last week an anonymous $130 million donation came in (it turned out to be from billionaire Timothy Mellon) that the administration intends to use toward troop pay. It is of course fine and good if people want to donate money to the federal government. But using donations to offset a lapse in appropriations is explicitly prohibited by the Antideficiency Act. With good reason. We don’t want the executive shaking down wealthy donors and corporations to fund activities against the wishes of the legislature. I hope that’s obvious.

   

   This also continues a more general problem of the Trump administration blurring the lines of revenue and appropriations. No matter how much revenue comes into the federal government—from taxes, fees, permits, land sales, donations, or otherwise, none of it can be spent except by appropriation made by law. You can’t use tariff revenue to pay for troops, nor can you use donations from wealthy friends. Even if the treasury’s coffers are overflowing. Again, this is a longstanding Anglo-American principle settled almost 400 years ago: it was once true that the power to tax was the power to spend. But since the aftermath of the English Civil War, they have been completely separated, and neither belongs to the executive.

   

   The other issue here is that $130 million is only enough money to fund the Military Personnel accounts for six hours. Literally. Which means any administration use of that money for troop pay is either going to give everyone like $100, or is going to be the White House picking and choosing favorites to receive checks. The latter is a terrible idea.

   

5. Related: the administration knocked down the East Wing. As a substantive matter, I fully support adding a legitimate ballroom to the White House. We need a permanent space at the Executive Residence for big gatherings; the temporary stuff they would set up in the yard always struck me as a little embarrassing. I’m highly annoyed the administration didn’t consult Congress on this one—the president has no constitutional right to the mansion, it is a benefit provided and paid for by Congress—but I don’t really see this as part of the deeper political crisis over executive power.

   

   Nor do I have any patience for the related political cattle-call among Democrats to vow to tear this thing down. It’s obviously performative nonsense. Symbolically, all of this does reinforce the legitimate concerns about Trump as a wanna-be authoritarian, but no one is bulldozing this thing in 2029. Once Trump is gone, everyone is going to agree it’s great. I’m sure the original interior design will be gaudy, but the exterior is going to look architecturally grand, all administrations will benefit from using it going forward, and future presidents will fix Trump’s awful authoritarian nouveaux riches interior decorating taste. No one will care about its providence in 20 years.

   

   This is a good idea

6. Nate Silver on the NBA gambling scandals. Cheating has always been—and probably always will be—a problem in poker. A lot of this is baked into the cake, structurally. Unlike Bridge or Bid Whist or Gin, poker doesn’t really make sense unless you are playing for money. As my dad was fond of saying, “poker isn’t a card game, it’s a gambling game played with cards.” And that inherently makes it a hustle. Which in turn attracts a lot of hustlers and their slippery ethics. The second issue is that poker is a nearly perfect gambling game for sustaining interest among losing players; it rewards skill long-term, but has very high short-term variance. That makes it much harder—compared to golf or pool or bridge—to assess whether you are getting outclassed or just unlucky. Weaker players will often win on any given night. But it also makes it more difficult to tell if you are being cheated, based on results. It could always just be bad luck.

   

7. Related: David French, on increasing concerns about sports betting. The entire industry of sports betting has exploded in the wake of the Supreme Court tossing the former federal ban. And while physical sportsbooks have opened in many states, the real growth has been mobile betting on phones, including continuous in-game betting. The problems are real. Addicted college kids. Increases in suicide and bankruptcy. Not to mention the less-worrisome but still problematic issues of incessant DraftKings ads during sporting events. I’m perfectly fine with sports betting being legal—I’d surely ban slot machines before sports betting. But the friction-less nature of mobile betting, combined with the continuous in-game betting, sure makes contemporary sports-betting look a lot more like a slot machine than it used to.

   

8. Related: Shreyas Hariharan on lottery-like financial products. A good reminder that it’s not just sports betting that has exploded. We really are in the age of casual betting across many domains. Trading Magnificent Seven stocks on Robin Hood. Political prediction markets about the shutdown on Kalshi and Polymarket. Trading crypto on everything from Coinbase to Paypal to, well, Robin Hood and Kalshi! As someone who grew up in the shadow of the mecca of horse racing, one thing that doesn’t surprise me at all is that long-odds bets are slowly dominating the market. The persistence of favorite-longshot bias (bettors just prefer wagers on 20-1 horses over 2-1 horses, even when the latter are well-known to have higher expected value) is a well-known gambling phenomenon that has been repeatedly found across wagering domains. But it’s not just that players love it; in many instances the house can charge a higher rake on bet categories that are inherently longshots, because (1) players don’t feel the rake on losing bets; and (2) when they do win, it’s a relative windfall so the rake is less noticeable as an absolute figure. When bettors love something and the house can get a higher cut from it, that’s a recipe for an explosion in a gambling category.

   

   We didn’t know how good we had it with the wall-to-wall beer ads

9. Isaac Saul on the Trump administration. I’ve been screaming about this for decades now, but I think a lot of people still haven’t internalized that a heck of a lot of the executive power accumulation is going to stick after Trump. Just like with Biden in 2021, once they get their (wo)man in office, the Dems aren’t going to be particularly interested in restraining the presidency. The Court will likely lay down some guardrails on the next Dem POTUS, so we aren’t actually spiraling toward an elected monarchy built on partisan tit-for-tat, but those restraining decisions will be derided by liberals, not cheered. Saul lays down a hypothetical that will terrify some conservatives but should terrify everyone:

   Imagine [a Dem president wins] election on a fundamental promise to end gun violence in America. So, in turn, he claims he has a “mandate” to send the National Guard into the three states with the highest rates of gun violence: Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. The troops converge on small rural towns to round up gun owners suspected of violating a range of firearm laws. Gun shops are raided and trashed by federal agents; tables are flipped over, desks are emptied, customers inside are zip-tied and dragged onto the street in front of onlookers without any reasonable suspicion of having committed a crime. Helicopters buzz overhead as back-up. The agents don’t flash warrants or ID themselves; in fact, they’re all masked and it’s not always clear what agency they are with. They demand identification and proof of firearm licenses from everyone present. All the customers are detained without due process until the agents are sure they haven’t committed a crime. Local police and politicians try to intervene, but they are ignored and forced out of the way. Federal courts stacked with Democratic-appointed judges greenlight the troops’ actions. Then imagine a handful of the customers inside one of these shops ends up being guilty of something, and those people are pointed to as justification for the entire raid.

   

10. Related: Don Moynihan on ICE and the construction of a presidential police force. I’ve long had quite libertarian views on policing and the 4th amendment, so I’m pre-disposed to be concerned about these developments. But the underlying problem continues to be, in my view, not the existence of ICE or even the policy of mass deportation. It is the utterly immoral and inhumane execution of the policy. And even if you don’t care for or consider the actual illegal immigrants (and yes, I think that’s a term we should use) worthy of humane or moral treatment, you should probably care about the U.S. citizens routinely being subjected to it. Too many people are saying “well, it’s not illegal,” as if that itself is a defense of wise policy. To hold any administration to the standard of what is not explicitly impermissible is to ask for inhumane behavior. It is often legal for the state to purposefully terrify children; there is essentially no moral justification for it.

    

    I have no doubt that many of the citizens who end up zip-tied or physically assaulted or arrested and held without charges were protesting, heckling, or impeding ICE agents. But a police force of masked, plain-clothed, unidentified, armed agents should be giving the benefit of the doubt to citizens concerned about their behavior, and any cops regularly arresting people and never charging them should be disciplined and removed from the field. Best I can tell right now, the exact opposite is happening: from the top-down, the policy is explicitly designed to be inhumane. With the specific goal to terrify immigrants and sympathetic citizens, and the broader goal of creating a national police force willing to execute policy in inhumane ways.

    

11. Annie Karni in the NYT on Speaker Johnson keeping the House adjourned. At the micro-strategic level for the GOP, there’s a strong logic to the House not being here. The CR action right now is in the Senate, and there’s not much for the House Republicans to do on that narrow issue, except say dumb things to the press. So leave them home. On the other hand, there’s plenty the House could be doing, starting with working on the nine appropriations bills that will still need to be passed at some point. Zooming out, it also plain feels wrong for the House to be gone for seven weeks in the midst of a shutdown and a series of dubious executive-branch assertions of spending power. And it doesn’t help that Johnson is keeping them out on unilateral authority and possibly against the wishes of the House majority. Double so given that it all might be in service of delaying the swearing in Member-elect Grijalva, who would happen to be the 218 vote to move the Epstein oversight discharge petition.

    

12. Trump and the new 10% Canadian tariffs. The presidency has historically been more supportive of free-trade than individual members of Congress, so once upon a time, it perhaps made sense to hand off flexible tariff power to the executive, where you knew it would reliably be used only when actually necessary. But now we’re seeing the worst possible reverse of that: a president slapping tariffs on one of our biggest trading partners because of a political ad that bruised his ego. I’m torn about whether Congress can constitutionally delegate tariff power to the executive, but it’s obvious that Trump completely lacks the wisdom to effectively employ the discretion currently allowed under law. Maybe the courts will solve this, but a functional Congress would take care of it long before that.

Not the place you want to be setting tax policy

13. More talk about nuking the filibuster to end the shutdown. I still don’t see it happening. In particular, whatever problem it solves for getting the CR through the Senate, it creates a new headache for congressional Republicans. Once you switch the appropriations process from inherently-bipartisan to a party-line legislative exercise, you are going to run into at least two problems. First, it blows up your cover for blaming the minority when you moderate; Senate Republicans would have to own up to their less-than-ideologically-pure preferences on these bills. Right now they can just point toward the need to compromise with Dems.

    

    The second problem is related: the House hasn’t been able to muster a partisan GOP majority for much of any appropriations bills in the last 15 years beyond going-nowhere partisan messaging exercises. Nuking the filibuster trades the practice of forcing the House into a bipartisan coalition that eats Senate compromises into one where House and Senate Republicans engage in a partisan holy war. As far as democratic theory goes, that’s probably better. But it sure doesn’t sound appetizing as a strategic plan for the GOP right now.

    

14. Trump keeps talking about a third term. I’m pretty sure he does this because (1) he loves owning the libs and this is great catnip for this; and (2) he would certainly love to see it come to pass, if the constitution were amended (there are nascent weak efforts at this) or if the system completely collapsed. But neither of those things are going to happen, and I can say with high confidence that he’s not going to run again, nor is he going to try to use the alleged vice-presidency loophole (he himself ruled it out).

    

    The reason for this is simple: politicians who want to circumvent term-limits have a much more straightforward option: have a figurehead run for office while you remain the actual power in a lesser, or even non-elected, role. That’s what Putin did with Medvedev. It’s what George Wallace did via his wife. It’s what Trump might conceivably try to orchestrate. I doubt it would succeed. But it’s so much cleaner (and more legal) than any other option.

    

15. Related: Noah Smith on what comes after Trump. The post-Trump discussions are indeed starting in earnest. Even Trump is (perhaps surprisingly) talking about them, floating Vance and Rubio as strong 2028 candidates. The biggest question on the table—regardless of who wins or what party they are from—is whether the U.S. can pull back from the global drift toward personalist regimes, which seem inferior in all the ways you might expect, including economic growth. In truth, it seems unlikely. The general rise of populist ideologies on both the right and left, the increasing role of billionaires in US public politics, and the success of personalist-populist strategies of Newsom and others all point toward the prospect of a low-key party insider institutionalist winning the presidency on a politics of low-key party insider-ism being very hard to picture. Whatever the appeal of Biden was post-Trump I, his model of politics seems fully outdated in the current environment. See also this Julia Azari piece on Trump vs. Trumpism.

    

16. Gabe Fleisher on ways to end shutdowns forever. I’m mostly against all of these, because most of them wouldn’t actually end shutdowns. Automatic CRs with ever-increasing across-the-board cuts would give leverage and incentive to folks who want those outcomes, and as a former appropriator I am required by law to tell you that across-the-board cuts are the single dumbest way to reduce spending. I’m also against withholding Member pay during shutdowns, precisely for the reason people find it attractive; I don’t think putting legislators’ personal skin in the game improves the quality of public policy. I wouldn’t want them making war decisions on a rule that forced their kids to be drafted to the front lines—it would make them too selfishly risk-averse—and I fear personal financial penalties would create similar perverse outcomes.

    

17. A McKinsey report on federal permitting. Just a ton of infrastructure projects are tied up in the federal permitting process. Something like 1.5 trillion in total capital expenditures. There are a lot of aspects to the so-called Abundance agenda that is all the rage among neoliberals right now, but getting out from under this sort of bureaucratic weight almost certainly has to be some of the easiest return on investment within the genre.

    

18. Daniel Kolitz in Harper’s on “Gooning.” The single most disturbing article I’ve ever read on the internet, about the single most disturbing widespread internet subculture I’ve ever read about. A true glimpse into a techno-dystopian world that apparently involves tens of thousands of Gen Z Americans. I’m not sure you should even read it; you might be better off with the blissful ignorance of the GoonVerse. On the other hand, there are just a ton of public policy questions and problems on display here, and I have little doubt that the emergence of AI may exacerbate both the cultural trends and the problems that appear in the article.

    

19. The NHL official website, French-language version. I’ve been back working on my French in earnest for the past year or so (I grew up not-too-far from Quebec and took years of French in school, never actually achieving fluency). I’ve tried all of the modern methods, and many of them are indeed excellent. Podcasts in the car are great for listening practice. And talking out loud to Chat-GPT is awesome for speaking. But my favorite new tactic is taking a website I visit regularly, and just committing to never looking at the English version. I did this at the start of the hockey season with NHL…err, LNH.com, and it has been a remarkably effective strategy. My background knowledge of hockey and the narrow context of every article/video makes it easier to decode vocabulary and meaning, and my interest in hockey news means I am forced to practice every day. Highly recommended.

    

20. Lakshya Jain on immigration as a crime issue, not an economic one. This finding also likely ties into conservative Manhattan Institute scholar Charles Lehman’s findings about disorder; the post-COVID rise in crime has generally reversed, but the post-COVID rise in non-criminal disorder (subway fare hopping, graffiti, littering, etc.) is separate and largely remained in place. And is a much more acute problem because while crime (especially violent crime) affects few people even when relatively high, visible disorder is apparent to everyone. To the degree support for immigration restrictionism coincides with crime or the perception of crime, I suspect that bringing the crime rate down alone won’t reverse that. It will take reducing the perception of disorder as well.

Cheers,

Matt