James Fallows

One U.S. Senate, in its currently polarized and paralyzed configuration, is bad enough. The choice and confirmation of Kavanaugh is a step toward replicating the flaws of one branch of government in another. The Court becomes a version of the Senate, across the street from the original model but with lifetime seats.

A rhetorical success of the pro-Kavanaugh side was to convert the debate about his suitability for this role into a “proof beyond reasonable doubt” criminal-trial standard concerning allegations of sexual misconduct.

Proof beyond reasonable doubt is the right standard for depriving someone of liberty. Bill Cosby’s jury was satisfied on those grounds, and O. J. Simpson’s was not. But that has never been the standard for choosing a university president, or a CEO, or a four-star general, or a future marriage partner, or a Nobel Prize winner, or a lifetime federal judge. With all their differences, the standard for these decisions is supposed to be: Is this the best person for the role?

I previously argued that, entirely apart from the allegations of sexual  misbehavior, Kavanaugh had proved himself the wrong person, in three ways:

• His explosive, angry, non-judicious temperament;
• His openly embraced partisan outlook;
• His record of demonstrable equivocations, evasions, and outright lies under oath. (Again, beyond discussions of Deborah Ramirez or Christine Blasey Ford.)

That I, personally, think this doesn’t matter. But it is significant that:

• 2,400 law professors do;
• As does a former dean of Kavanaugh’s oft-mentioned alma mater, the Yale Law School (“For as long as Kavanaugh sits on the court, he will remain a symbol of partisan anger, a haunting reminder that behind the smiling face of judicial benevolence lies the force of an urgent will to power”);
• As does a former Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice, John Paul Stevens;
• As does The Washington Post’s editorial page, which had supported every Supreme Court nominee since Robert Bork, including Clarence Thomas;
• As does Ben Wittes, a close friend of Kavanaugh’s, who had supported him before the hearings;
• As, implicitly, does Kavanaugh’s champion, current White House counsel Don McGahn, who according to The New York Times said that an extended investigation of Kavanaugh could be “potentially disastrous” for Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
• And as do many people who have known him through his life.

A sample from the Post’s editorial:

Finally, Mr. Kavanaugh raised questions about his candor that, while each on its own is not disqualifying, are worrying in the context of his demand that Ms. Ford and his other accusers be dismissed and disbelieved. These include his role in the nomination of controversial judge Charles Pickering while working for Mr. Bush, his knowledge of the origin of materials stolen from Democratic Senate staff between 2001 and 2003, and his lawyerly obfuscations about his high school and college years….

And what of Mr. Kavanaugh’s political philosophy?… We would not have opposed Mr. Kavanaugh on that basis, just as we did not think GOP senators should have voted against Sonia Sotomayor because they did not like her views. Rather, the reason not to vote for Mr. Kavanaugh is that senators have not been given sufficient information to consider him — and that he has given them ample evidence to believe he is unsuited for the job. The country deserves better.

And from the Politico essay by Robert Post, former dean of Yale Law School:

Each and every Republican who votes for Kavanaugh, therefore, effectively announces that they care more about controlling the Supreme Court than they do about the legitimacy of the court itself. There will be hell to pay ...

Judge Kavanaugh cannot have it both ways. He cannot gain confirmation by unleashing partisan fury while simultaneously claiming that he possesses a judicial and impartial temperament.

But now he will take his seat, much as Trump assumed his powers. Matthew Yglesias has argued that this change will be good in hastening a demythicized view of the Court as just another version of the Senate, a thoroughly partisan and politicized body. And Clarence Thomas, at least, may have the comfort of no longer being the person who reached the court by the narrowest confirmation-vote margin (52 to 48 for Thomas), and no longer having the greatest personal cloud hanging over him. Who knows how the other pluses and minuses will net out.

But Trump has changed our view of who could end up in his office, and what the restrictions are. So will Kavanaugh, about the Supreme Court.

Thirty-one days to go.

Even two exceptions illustrate the rule. One was Clarence Thomas’s angry outburst at his 1991 hearing about a “high-tech lynching for uppity blacks,” in addressing allegations of sexist misbehavior. That was memorable because in the annals of judicial nominees it was so rare. And the circumstances of his nomination were strikingly different from Kavanaugh’s, given Thomas’s background as the child of a poor black family in the segregated South. (Thomas was finally confirmed on a 52-48 vote—which seems narrow until you remember that Democrats then had a 10-seat margin in the Senate. If bloc voting had been the norm, he presumably would have gone down, 45-55.)

The other exception came during Barack Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address. Obama criticized the recent Citizens United ruling—and Samuel Alito, one of the five Justices who made a majority in that case, frowned and seemed to mouth No, no from the audience. Alito’s “outburst” was notable enough that it was discussed for days.

Kavanaugh’s demeanor was as difficult to place on this scale of past judicial demeanor as Donald Trump’s rally-speech mode would be, when compared to the bearing of Dwight Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan or either of the Bushes. In addressing the senators on the Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh was angry, disrespectful, self-pitying, boastful, and thin-skinned.

It would not have been in Amy Klobuchar’s nature to respond to Kavanaugh’s “have you had a blackout?” challenge with something like the following, but she would have been wholly within her rights had she done so:

Let me remind you, Judge Kavanaugh, that you are addressing members of the United States Senate, who have been elected by our constituents to assess your fitness for the lifetime position of trust that you aspire to hold.

Did he have reason to be angry? Probably so. But we choose combat leaders, surgeons, airline pilots, teachers, and others precisely for their grace under pressure, their ability to master their emotions. Judges, too.

(2) Partisanship. Modern nominees are of course faking it when they say that they would bring no preconceptions, and a perfectly open mind, to the cases that would come before them. Of course they have leanings. Why else would the lists of likely choices for a Democratic president be different from those for a Republican president?

But the very act of faking it—John Roberts’s claim that he would “just call balls and strikes”—demonstrates respect for the idea that justice should be above politics. Compare that with Brett Kavanaugh’s statement this week:

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.

This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades…

And as we all know, in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around.

For an elaboration of why “what goes around, comes around” is the last thing you want to hear from a prospective justice, of any party, see this Twitter thread from David Franklin, a law professor and experienced Supreme Court litigator.

Again an exception proving the rule: By her own admission, Ruth Bader Ginsburg erred badly in criticizing then-candidate Trump during the summer of 2016. Within a few days she apologized, saying “My recent remarks in response to press inquiries were ill-advised and I regret making them. Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office.” She acknowledged the norms by saying she was sorry to have violated them.

(3) Unnecessary lies. All politicians lie. All human beings do, too. But most politicians, like most people, stick with useful lies. Lies when the truth would be embarrassing or costly. Lies to get out of a jam. And lies when you think you won’t be caught. Richard Nixon usually told the truth when he didn’t have a reason not to. So did Bill Clinton, and LBJ. So do most of the rest of us—because, to emphasize the point, for most people it’s embarrassing to be caught in a lie.

For Donald Trump, the dynamic is different. He doesn’t care if everyone knows he’s not telling the truth. I laid out some of the evidence soon after the election, here. Daniel Dale, of the Toronto Star, has indefatigably chronicled Trump’s thousands of immediately obvious lies in his “Trump Checks” feature. Tiny example: during the campaign, Trump complained about the dates for debates with Hillary Clinton. In giving his reasons, Trump said that the NFL had sent him a letter asking to change the dates, because they conflicted with scheduled games on TV. Almost instantly, the NFL denied it had sent any such letter. Trump moved on, unfazed. He didn’t—doesn’t—care.

The surprise of Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony is that he, too, appears not to care. Tiny example: Kavanaugh said, again and again and again, that his high-school beer drinking had been legal, because he was 18, and the drinking age in Maryland was 18 at the time. Except neither of those things is true. He was 17 during the summer in question—he was born in February, 1965, and Christine Blasey Ford is talking about the summer of 1982—and in any case the drinking age in Maryland at the time was 21. These are not complicated or gray-zone facts.

(Mild complication: While Kavanaugh was still 16, Maryland’s drinking age was 18. Then, soon after he turned 17, the Maryland legislature raised the legal age to 21, as you can read here. But at no point in Kavanaugh’s high school career was he of legal drinking age in Maryland.)

Any high school student who likes beer knows exactly what the drinking age is. Kavanaugh knew then, and now. He just plain lies about it. And he seems not to care.

This lie stands out because his claim is so easy to disprove. So too with boof and ralph (“I’m known to have a weak stomach”). But Kavanaugh showed the same Trump-like lack of concern in a number of other, more policy-related assertions.

Nathan J. Robinson has an extremely detailed analysis of Kavanaugh’s response to Christine Blasey Ford’s account, here. (Its headline is, “How We Know Kavanaugh Is Lying.”) Soon after Kavanaugh’s nomination was announced, and long before the sexual-assault claims, Democratic senators Dick Durbin and Patrick Leahy said that Kavanaugh had misled them (“perilously close to being lied to”) about his role in the Bush administration’s torture policies, back during his D.C. Circuit confirmation hearings back in 2006.

Lisa Graves, who had been a Judiciary Committee staffer for Leahy, wrote in Slate that newly released emails and documents established that Kavanaugh had lied about his Bush White House role back at the 2006 hearings. The details are complicated, but she concludes:

Newly released emails show that while he was working to move through President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees in the early 2000s, Kavanaugh received confidential memos, letters, and talking points of Democratic staffers stolen by GOP Senate aide Manuel Miranda. That includes research and talking points Miranda stole from the Senate server after I had written them for the Senate Judiciary Committee as the chief counsel for nominations for the minority.

Receiving those memos and letters alone is not an impeachable offense.

No, Kavanaugh should be removed because he was repeatedly asked under oath as part of his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings for his position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit about whether he had received such information from Miranda, and each time he falsely denied it….

[H]e lied.

Under oath.

And he did so repeatedly.

I have my own hypothesis, based on life experience and observation, about the reasons for the temperamental display we saw from Kavanaugh. (It’s related to Megan Garber’s.)  But that’s just hypothesis for now; I don’t know if it’s true. I also don’t know, nor does anyone, how the vote on Kavanaugh will ultimately go.

But from behind the veil of ignorance separating us from the future, one thing about the Kavanaugh nomination is clear. Donald Trump changed all previous understandings of what would be acceptable, or disqualifying, in a presidential candidate. And with his displays involving temperament, partisanship, and disdain for veracity, Brett Kavanaugh is doing the same about candidates for the most powerful court in the land.

*To connect this UN theme with the subject of a dispatch yesterday: I happen to know about the occasional springtime schedule because I was working on a UN speech for the then-recently sworn in Jimmy Carter in March, 1977, on the night before Deb’s and my first son, Tom, was born.

This is the same son Tom whose own family news, the arrival of a third daughter, is noted here. More on Tom’s UN-speech background here.

For every celebrity who endures a damaging, false, perhaps fantasized or perhaps malicious sex-related accusation, there appear to be a whole lot more who got away, for years, with long-term patterns of abuse, despite complaints and warning signs. They succeeded in bottling up, tamping down, and generally escaping accountability, mainly because their positions of power meant that their victims didn’t speak up, or were not listened to.

The modern history of pedophile priests is again an extreme case, but it illustrates the pattern I’m describing: that it’s costly, damaging, embarrassing or shameful, and in other ways arduous for someone who has suffered from sexual abuse to speak up against a public figure. Therefore, I realize looking back, I have learned more and more to give the benefit of the doubt to women and men willing to go through the pain of reporting their claims. (I have been thinking frequently of the movie Spotlight, which of course doesn’t directly apply in this case but is about a related power dynamic.)

I am careful to say “benefit of the doubt,” and not “beyond a reasonable doubt,” as would apply in a criminal proceeding. No one should be assumed guilty without a full process like the one Bill Cosby has just gone through, which starts with the presumption of legal innocence.

But of course Brett Kavanaugh is not on criminal trial; he’s being vetted to see whether he deserves one of the most powerful, least accountable, and most temperament-and-fairness-dependent positions in the U.S. government. I have no idea of the underlying truth of any of the complaints about Kavanaugh. But based on what I’ve seen play out over the decades, I feel that at a minimum they should be fully explored and checked out. How can there be any reasonable objection to having the FBI question the witnesses, and take statements from all involved, under oath?

(2) The maximalist defense. Based on transcripts of the interview Fox News did of Kavanaugh and his wife Ashley, I was going to lay out a big explanation of why it is so striking that Kavanaugh is answering his critics with absolute denials.

George W. Bush used to say, “When I was young and stupid, I was young and stupid.” Kavanaugh is not giving himself any such out. He is not referring to embarrassing misunderstandings, or mistakes of immature judgment, or possible vagaries of memory, or decisions he badly rues in retrospect. He is saying that he was literally virginal in high school and college. He has never done anything like this. He is absolutely not this kind of person. He would not ever treat women in this way. The charges are All. Absolutely. False. Every. One. Of. Them.

As an argumentative stance, this is obviously risky, since an absolute claim can be undone by even a single proven counter-example. It’s odd because it’s a mismatch with the ample evidence of serious drinking as part of the young Brett Kavanaugh’s reputation — self-described in his speeches until recently, and by his high-school and college associations. (“He was a notably heavy drinker, even  by the standards of that time, and he became aggressive and belligerent when he was very drunk,” James Roche, his freshman roommate at Yale, said this weekend in a statement.)

Also, the stance of complete purity is either inconsistent with, or a creepy complement to, the very aggressively sex-related line of questioning that the 30-something young lawyer Kavanaugh proposed that prosecutor Kenneth Starr ask the incumbent president, Bill Clinton. (Eg: “If Monica Lewinsky says that you ejaculated into her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?” That was one of a series of  questions Kavanaugh proposed, and Starr had the judgment not to pursue.)

But it turns out that I don’t even need to get that whole explanation started. This morning Caitlin Flanagan published a very powerful and insightful long essay on exactly these themes. It is here, and rather than quoting any of it, I’ll suggest that you read it forthwith, and carefully.

To the best of my knowledge (will gladly update if there are corrections), here are the Republican senators who have clearly called for an FBI investigation of the allegations and the evidence:

Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, is not yet on that list, because she has given only oblique indications of support. According to NBC, she said on Tuesday morning of an FBI investigation: “It would sure clear up all the questions, wouldn’t it?” She could answer her own question by saying that she won’t vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination until there has been an investigation. As a member of the Republicans’ wafer-thin 51-49 majority in the Senate, she has enormous power to change the outcome here, if she chooses to exercise it. The same is true of every other Republican.)

Forty-two days to go.

Update:  Big sisters Tide, age four, and Navy, age two, welcome West Fallows, age three days, to her new home. For how this scene looked two years ago, when Tide welcomed newborn Navy, see here.

Of the many questions the episode raises, let me quickly mention just two.

1) Who else was in on this? Anyone following the Kavanaugh-confirmation controversy over the past week would have noticed previews, rumbles,  speculation, and excitement among conservative voices about upcoming news that would remove the sexual-assault cloud from Kavanaugh.

For instance, on Tuesday of this week Kathleen Parker ran a column in the Washington Post with the headline “Is there a Kavanaugh doppelganger?”, which was the hypothesis that Ed Whelan laid out.  A number of Republican senators and TV pundits said that Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser, might be “mixed up” about the event itself or which young men were involved. And, as Brian Beutler noted, about an hour before Whelan began his dispatches, Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review posted:

Nearly all of the conservative establishment, to its credit, reacted in horror once they saw what Whelan was actually posting. (An exception was Fox and Friends, which on Friday morning, about an hour before Whelan retracted his tweets, was enthusiastically promoting his theory to Fox viewers.) But beforehand many of its members seemed hopeful about a big, new scoop that was about to appear.  (Update: in Vox, Zack Beauchamp asks similar questions about whether anyone other than Whelan was involved in hatching the “doppelganger” theory.)

A Democratic figure who has been involved in confirmation battles has suggested, via email, the kinds of questions that senators (and journalists) should be asking of Whelan and others, including some for Kavanaugh when he next testifies:

• Did anyone help Whelan compile the extremely detailed personal information he used, in his attempt to identify and blame a specific Georgetown Prep student? Did he really do this all himself?
• How did Whelan get the idea that there could have been a similar-looking classmate? How did the whole narrative of “mistaken identity” originate in the first place?
• Who Googled the floor plan of the house from a real-estate website, so that it could be used as evidence of the classmate’s alleged guilt? Or determined the home addresses of other students from 35 years ago, in order to place them on a map (as part of an argument about who lived close enough, or too far away, to be involved)?
• How did Whelan get the picture, from Kavanaugh's Georgetown Prep yearbook, that he used to ID his other suspect?
• What did Kavanaugh know, and when did he know it?

Here is a sample of the “forensic” postings that have now disappeared:

2) Who else might be tweeting on this subject?  In particular, Donald Trump, who weighed in on Friday morning:

It is painful to need to point this out, in response to the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States, but: the FBI could not have been involved in this case 35 years ago. The crime, if there was one, would have been under Maryland state law. The call would have gone to the Montgomery County Police. (The FBI, a federal agency—that’s what the F stands for!— is being invoked now because a nominee is being vetted for a lifetime-tenure federal job, and being considered by members of the U.S. Senate.)

And this is, of course, apart from the countless barriers of shame, privacy, despair, pain, lack of evidence, skepticism of police reaction, and fear of family reaction, that leave so many assaults unreported.

A prominent conservative figure backtracks. The most prominent GOP figure plows ahead. 46 days to go.

• Why this was deranged-seeming. I don’t know how long this Twitter stream will survive, before cooler heads delete it. (Six hours after its publication, it’s still visible, starting here. I’m sure I’m not the only person to have made screen-captures of the successive messages, for when the original disappears.) But it resembles the most fevered scenes of A Beautiful Mind in arraying “evidence” to show that Brett Kavanaugh could not have been at the notorious high school party—and that another person, whom Whelan specifically names, would have been the real attempted-rapist.
    
  Maps to show where the various high-schoolers involved in the case lived; architectural drawings of what Whelan believes must have been the scene of the attempted crime; Zillow-based photos of the interior of this house; high school yearbook photos and current shots likening the appearance of Kavanaugh and the “real” malefactor; a range of other crackpot forensic evidence—this and more  is what the messages painstakingly laid out. The sequence ended with a Pontius Pilate-style disclaimer that maybe the non-Kavanaugh person was not really guilty, but the preceding messages said: Stop blaming the future Supreme Court justice! Focus on this other guy. (Christine Ford herself quickly replied, according to the Washington Post: “I knew them both … There is zero chance that I would confuse them.”)
    

• Why this mattered for the Republican establishment. The author, Edward Whelan, is very far from a fringe figure. As Josh Marshall explains here, in a post written in a tone of shock, and with the headline “This Is Nuts”:
  
  “I’m really not sure quite how to capture what just happened. But a major, major player in the conservative/Federalist Society legal establishment in DC just posted a lengthy Twitter thread in which he accuses another alum of Kavanaugh’s high school of assaulting Professor Blasey Ford.”
  
  To similar effect, Brian Beutler, of Crooked Media, wrote:
  “To be clear, Ed Whelan is the conservative movement's go-to guy for judicial fights—to run down Democratic nominees and defend Republican ones. The claim that Republican officialdom had no advanced knowledge of his stunt tonight, which he'd previewed for days, is a joke.”
  
  Whelan is the director of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; a one-time Supreme Court clerk for Antonin Scalia;  reportedly a friend of Kavanaugh’s; and overall a significant figure within the conservative establishment. None of the members of that establishment, by the way, stepped up this evening to defend Whelan’s version of events. Which leads to…
     
• Why this might matter for Brett Kavanaugh. As many commentators pointed out this evening, a natural question for (Democratic) senators to ask, when Kavanaugh comes back before them, is: Did you know about any of this?  The Naval War College professor Tom Nichols put it this way:

One more note for the day: Donald Trump gave one of his patented rally speeches this evening in Las Vegas. As best I can tell from press reports (including the brilliant real-time lie-reporting from Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star), Trump did not mention that less than one year ago the deadliest gun massacre in American history took place in that city.

47 days to go.

An increasing source of atmospheric methane is simple leakage, from the natural-gas (mainly methane) wells that have become an increasing source of North America’s energy supply. From both a business and an environmental perspective, these leaks are sheer waste and inefficiency, in addition to being destructive.

To reduce the volume of escaping methane, the Obama administration proposed a series of anti-leak standards and rules. On taking office, Trump and his team — Scott Pruitt at EPA, Ryan Zinke at Interior, Rick Perry at Energy — said they would delay implementation of the anti-leak rules, or ignore or suspend them. Again they lost a series of court cases.  (A federal judge in California said the new policy was “untethered to evidence.”)

This week, in a parallel to the Flores changes, the administration announced that it would just undo the methane policy with its own set of new rules. You can see the details, from the estimable science writer Marianne Lavelle, here.  Another clarifying piece is here.  

After this revelation, Al Gore replied via Tweet:

This one too will be challenged in the courts.

(3) Cancer. Any president is head of the executive branch, and thus structurally the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States.

In an Oval Office interview with John Solomon and Buck Sexton of The Hill, which went online on Tuesday, the chief law-enforcement officer of the land referred to the FBI as “truly a cancer” and said this about how he should have treated its staffers even before he took office:

“If I did one mistake with Comey, I should have fired him before I got here. I should have fired him the day I won the primaries,” Trump said. [Note: Trump held no public office at that time.] “I should have fired him right after the convention, say I don’t want that guy. Or at least fired him the first day on the job. ...

Trump said he had not read the documents he ordered declassified [emphasis added: back story here] but said he expected to show they would prove the FBI case started as a political “hoax.”...

Asked what he thought the outcome of his long-running fight with the FBI, the president said: “I hope to be able put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to ... expose something that is truly a cancer in our country.

***

A freer hand to detain children. Removing controls on environmentally hyper-destructive sheer waste. Working around court rulings toward both those ends — while denouncing the law enforcement structure he is supposed to “take care” to defend.

These things happened while the Kavanaugh case was commanding the news. To the best of my knowledge, the list of Republican senators who have noticed or objected to any of it is this familiar group:

48 days to go.

“We write to express profound alarm at President Donald Trump’s decision on September 17, 2018 to intervene in an ongoing law enforcement investigation that may implicate the President himself or those around him,” the four Democrats said in their letter. (They are: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer; House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Ranking Senate member of the intelligence committee Mark Warner; and Ranking House member of the intelligence committee Adam Schiff. The four Republicans, who did not sign on, are: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell; House Speaker Paul Ryan; Senate intelligence chairman Richard Burr; and House intelligence chairman (sigh) Devin Nunes.) The letter added:

“The action he has taken… is a brazen abuse of power. Any decision by your offices to share this material with the President or his lawyers will violate longstanding Department of Justice policies, as well as assurances you have provided to us.”

So let’s note for the long-term record: no previous president has done this; no minority-party “Gang of Four” has previously had to complain in such impassioned tones; and no majority-party “Gang of the Missing Four” has as distinctly averted its eyes.

Possible leaks of classified material were a huge theme in the past presidential campaign. The winning candidate has now ordained a leak dwarfing anything contemplated back then. (Update: see more from Natasha Bertrand here.)

***

(2) Refugees. One of the glories of the United States, idealistically and in practical terms, is that it has opened its doors to those persecuted or endangered in their homelands. As my wife, Deb, and I discussed at length in our book, once they arrive, refugees are on average more entrepreneurial, more education-minded, and more law-abiding than the populace as a whole.

One of the stains on America’s record is when it has turned its back and closed its doors to those persecuted or endangered. Of course the MS St. Louis is the most notorious example, but every day there are similar cases.

There are limits to even America’s absorptive capacity, but every president in the modern era has set them higher than Donald Trump has now done. (You can see the historical patterns here. Two recent Atlantic posts go into the trends too, here and here.)

• After the warfare in Vietnam and Cambodia, Jimmy Carter substantially raised refugee admissions, to well above 100,000 per year, and large numbers arrived as well early in Ronald Reagan’s term.
• Through the first Bush era and the Clinton years, refugees from the former Soviet Union and the Balkans increased, and average annual levels were between 75,000 and 100,000.
• Refugee ceilings fell immediately after the 9/11 attacks, but then rose through the George W. Bush and Obama eras, averaging around 75,000 annually. To put it in perspective: this is roughly 1/4500^th of the existing U.S. population — a significant absolute number in international terms, but not among the leaders proportional to either population or GDP.
• Donald Trump has now set the coming year’s ceiling at 30,000—a one-third cut from last year’s 45,000, and the lowest level since before Ronald Reagan’s time.

I won’t make any more of the moral or practical argument in favor of refugee admission at the moment. Instead I’ll point you to this report by Deb about how refugees have helped invigorate the town of Erie, Pennsylvania. (Plus this.) And I’ll point you to an interactive Esri map, which you can find here, which dramatizes how the flow of refugees into the United States has changed in recent years; where they have arrived; and how many of them (and from where) have settled in any given town, including yours.

Noted for the record, as Jews in America and worldwide are beginning the Yom Kippur fast, and with 49 days to go until the midterm elections.

Twenty-four hours ago, it was news that, at last, one Republican senator had the daring to say: Hold on, what’s the rush with this vote, let’s hear the evidence against Kavanaugh and his response. That was Jeff Flake, of Arizona. Then another, Bob Corker of Tennessee, joined him—and by Monday evening, it had become the conventional view.

That is not good news for Kavanaugh, whose best prospect for success was that 51 Republicans would hold together as a bloc to get him through, fast. This would also make it tough for red-state Democrats facing hard reelection races—like Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri—to cast what they know would be a meaningless vote against him.

Every day that passes between now and a Senate vote is a step backward for Kavanaugh.

• It’s one more day for audiences to see reruns of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s brutalizing treatment of Anita Hill back in 1991—all men on the committee at that time, all white, all mercilessly hectoring Hill. Arlen Specter was the worst of them, followed by Orrin Hatch (who is still in the Senate, at age 84) and the committee’s then-chairman, Joe Biden, and its current chairman, Chuck Grassley (at 85). If you were too young to see these in real time, or even if you think you remember them, I strongly recommend paying attention when they’re shown on cable. Anita Hill’s composure is unbelievable, and the senators’ smug callousness is … hard to describe.
• It’s one more day for witnesses, stories, documents, emails, and complications of every sort to arise. What about, once again, the nominee’s big credit-card debts, and their sudden disappearance? What about his speech with constant (joking) allusions to binge and black-out drinking?
• It’s one more day for the most gimlet-eyed political calculators to think: Do we need the stress? Is this fight going to be worth it? If time is no longer on our side, does it make sense just to watch things go wrong, rather than trying a different approach? With a less controversial, more conservative, ideally younger judge—and maybe a woman!

The most gimlet-eyed of all is, of course, Mitch McConnell, who let it be known back in July that he thought that Kavanaugh carried needless personal and political baggage. “Mr. McConnell made clear in multiple phone calls with Mr. Trump … that the lengthy paper trail of another top contender, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, would pose difficulties for his confirmation,” the New York Times said in its story 10 weeks ago. “Mr. McConnell is concerned about the volume of the documents that Judge Kavanaugh has created … as well as in his roles as White House staff secretary under President George W. Bush and assistant to Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton.”

By cutting its losses with Harriet Miers 13 years ago, the Bush White House ended up with an apparently much more conservative replacement: Samuel Alito. Why—the Republican gimlet tribe will ask—should we keep beating ourselves up with these Kavanaugh hearings, when there are so many other choices we could make?

Those are the calculations that would apply—in usual times.

Under usual circumstances, this evening’s time capsule would say: Things look bad for Brett Kavanaugh.

But in these circumstances? Who knows. We’ll see.

Fifty days to go.

***

Here’s the full-frame version of the KAL cartoon:

The only argument for a rush, then, is brute-force political power. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to get this vote done now, because he thinks he can. This is of course the same McConnell who refused to have the Senate even consider a nomination that Barack Obama made 10 months before he left office. But 52 days before the next election, McConnell is applying the pressure to get the vote done now:

Now, while the Republicans have a 51-49 Senate majority. (Which, whatever happens in the midterms, they should in any case have through the end of the year.) Now, before any more documents or complications might come out. Now, before accusations of lying-under-oath from senior senators can be explored or adjudicated. Now.

As I’ve mentioned many times in this space, McConnell—and, beyond him, Donald Trump—can get away with what they are doing because not even one member of their razor-thin Republican majority has been willing to stand up to them.

This evening, at least for this moment, one of them has. Respect to Senator Flake.

And I have to amend my list of Republicans willing to stand up for principles and procedure. It would now read:

1. Jeff Flake

***

UPDATE. Via Politico I see that Senator Bob Corker, of Tennessee, who like Flake is not running for re-election, has now said that the vote should be postponed.

Good for Senator Corker.

The list could read:

1. Jeff Flake
2. Bob Corker

***

September 17 update, 12:00 noon:  Senator Susan Collins, of Maine, has just called for both Kavanaugh and Ford to testify under oath before the Judiciary committee.

And for a trip down memory lane, here is the preceding item, #70 in the series:

This one was about a warning from a career CIA official that Donald Trump was acting as, at best, an “unwitting agent” of Russian state interests.

That was ten weeks before the 2016 election. These things were knowable, and known, at the time. They’re even clearer now.

For more assessments of what Clarence Thomas has meant as a jurist, I refer you to my Atlantic colleague (and real-world law professor) Garrett Epps, here, here, and here, among other sources. Let’s focus for the moment on what his case means about the confirmation fight immediately in prospect, that of Brett Kavanaugh.

The Thomas and Kavanaugh cases differ in some obvious ways. Thomas was poor, black, and underprivileged by almost every measure. Kavanaugh, whose father was a long-time D.C. lobbyist who was paid $13 million in 2005, grew up on the opposite side of most calculations of racial and economic advantage. In terms of experience, Kavanaugh has been a federal judge for more than a dozen years, and has been rated “well qualified” for the Supreme Court by the American Bar Association, which the novice Thomas was not.

The similarity of the cases is the “now or never” nature of the criticisms of these candidates as people, and the consequent time pressure on their hearings. This is entirely apart from questions of substantive jurisprudence, for instance how Kavanaugh might rule in Roe v. Wade or on presidential powers. Instead these are questions of honesty, at several levels.

In Clarence Thomas’s case, the strongest argument against him as a person, and the one that provoked his angriest response, involved alleged sexual harassment—and whether he was being truthful in denying it. At his hearings, his former colleague Anita Hill was the only alleged victim of his behavior allowed to testify. The senator who then chaired the Judiciary Committee, Joe Biden (the Democrats held both the Senate and the House), notoriously prevented several other women from testifying, and treated Hill in a dismissive manner that many years later he apologized for.

In the decades since that hearing, accumulating evidence has piled up on Anita Hill’s side of this story (and the other women’s), and against Thomas’s. If you’d like to review the details, start with this recent piece by former New York Times editor Jill Abramson, who with Jane Mayer wrote a well-known book about the case; or a post by Jay Kaganoff, who has written for Commentary and National Review. In that article, called “Fellow Conservatives, It’s Time to Call on Clarence Thomas to Resign,” Kaganoff said that the mounting evidence had changed his mind. He concluded:

I believe Anita Hill. I believe that Clarence Thomas abused his authority to sexually harass a woman who worked for him. And lied about it. And smeared his accuser.

And got away with it.

“Got away with it” is the crucial point here. The “get away” / “don’t get away” decision point comes before a Senate vote, not ever afterward. Once a person is confirmed to the Supreme Court, he or she is, in practical terms, beyond all future accountability.

In principle, justices “should” recuse themselves from cases in which they have a potential conflict of interest. But no one can make them do so. Clarence Thomas’s wife, Ginni, is a long-time and highly paid lobbyist for right-wing political causes. To the best of my knowledge (I welcome new info), this has not ever led her husband to recuse himself from a case. As many news reports have noted, Brett Kavanaugh has been notably coy about whether he would recuse himself in cases involving the legally embattled president who is now appointing him. Obviously he “should” step aside in such instances—as Elena Kagan has recused herself in some cases involving the Obama administration, for which she was solicitor general. But absolutely no one could force him to do so, if he decided otherwise.

Also in principle, justices, like presidents, can be impeached. But this is even rarer for the Supreme Court than for the White House. It’s happened to only two presidents (Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton), and been threatened for a third (Nixon, just before he resigned). For the Supreme Court, it happened only once, in the early 1800s. Again, for practical purposes, whatever vote the Senate is about to hold on Brett Kavanaugh is the vote on whether he’ll be on hand through his 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, or however long he is able to serve. And the 51 Republicans under Mitch McConnell’s guidance in the Senate are rushing to lock this in while they can. (These are mostly the same people who followed McConnell’s lead in denying a hearing to the Obama nominee Merrick Garland through nine full months.)

They want to get the vote done now—while they still have a 51-49 vote majority in the Senate, before the mid-term elections and whatever they might indicate about Donald Trump’s standing, before further legal ramifications from the Mueller probe. If they can get him in, he’s in.

***

How is this connected to Clarence Thomas? I explicitly do not imply a connection in the most obvious way: that the recent allegation about sexual misbehavior by Kavanaugh, back during his high school days at Georgetown Prep, is in any way comparable to the squelched multi-witness case against Clarence Thomas. I have no idea what to make of this claim about Kavanaugh—except that it seems worth listening to Anita Hill, who has just said that the charge should be considered in “fair and neutral” conditions, rather than in a partisan-driven rush.

The circumstances that to me resemble Clarence Thomas’s involve two other aspects of Kavanaugh the person, which the Senate can consider during a confirmation vote—but never again.

One involves his truthfulness under oath. As I have written before, anyone active in D.C. journalism in the 1990s (as I was, for the Atlantic and as editor of U.S. News) is familiar with Kavanaugh’s name. Back then, while in his early 30s, Kavanaugh was an active partisan member of Kenneth Starr’s investigative staff, working on president Bill Clinton. David Brock, at the time a fierce right-winger (and critic of Anita Hill), has written about how Kavanaugh was a fellow warrior in these political crusades. Washington journalists knew Kavanaugh as one of the more press-available members of Starr’s staff. Then, in the George W. Bush administration, Kavanaugh was White House staff secretary and, like anyone in this job, involved in both politics and policy.

During his confirmation hearings for the D.C. Circuit Court 12 years ago, Kavanaugh denied under oath that he had participated in certain specified partisan fights. Two senior, hyper-cautious Democratic senators—Patrick Leahy, and Dianne Feinstein—have, along with others, now come out with statements saying that they believe Kavanaugh was lying under oath in 2006, and is doing so again now.

Was he? This matters.

Every modern-era judicial nominee has mastered the art of dissembling, and pretending to have a completely open mind and a “I just call the balls and strikes” objectivity about every controversial issue.

But actual lying is something different. Clarence Thomas’s interlocutors believed that he was lying about Anita Hill, and the intervening years make it more likely they were right. This is the first time I’m aware of, since the Thomas hearings, in which senators opposing the nomination have come out and said: This nominee is lying under oath. It is worth knowing the truth before the now-or-never vote is cast.

The second question involves finances. There’s been only one genuine impeachment of a Supreme Court justice, back in 1804. But the threat of impeachment convinced another justice, Abe Fortas, to resign, in the Lyndon Johnson era.

The cause of Fortas’s problems was what now seem like penny-ante financial complications. A $15,000 fee for some seminars, news of a $20,000 annual retainer from a Wall Street figure.

Sure, that was 50 years ago, so you have to allow for inflation. But by comparison, Brett Kavanaugh has some major financial gray-areas in his recent past. The very large credit-card debts, suddenly paid off? As David Graham put it in the Atlantic:

The fact remains that Kavanaugh suddenly cleared at least $60,000 and as much as $200,000 in mysterious debt over one year—sums large enough that senators might well want to know who the sources of the payments were.

Maybe this all is nothing. But the Senate is ramming through a vote before anyone knows what’s there. And—the crucial point—if information comes out about his finances, or his truthfulness, or anything even one day after he is sworn in, it will be too late. As with Clarence Thomas, he’ll be there, to stay.

And as for the number of Republican senators who are saying: Wait a minute, let’s take our time, it matters to know the truth before giving someone a job for life? What is the rush?

Here’s the list of their names:

52 days to go.

Update: This morning, September 16, the Washington Post published an editorial (i.e., editorial-board statement, not an individual op-ed) with the title “The Senate Should Delay Voting on Brett Kavanaugh.”  It says:

Republican efforts to rush through Mr. Kavanaugh have prevented a fair weighing of his nomination. The circumstances demand that Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation be delayed.

Suppose Brett Kavanaugh ended up with exactly 51 bloc-GOP votes on his side. Have you perhaps wondered how many votes the eight current justices received? Wonder no more. The tally also heightens the similarity in the Thomas and Kavanaugh cases:

Clarence Thomas, 52 votes

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 96 votes

Stephen Breyer, 87 votes

John Roberts 78 votes

Samuel Alito, 58 votes

Sonia Sotomayor, 68 votes

Elena Kagan, 61 votes

Neil Gorsuch, 54 votes

What this shows about Trump is familiar. He is unbounded by fact. He is incapable of understanding any event except through the prism of how it makes him look. He cannot even feign the sober selflessness expected of leaders of any organization. He …. well, he is himself.

But this is worth noting for the record as it underscores two points. One involves Trump’s further departure from the norms of all previous presidents. The other involves the response of the supposedly co-equal legislative branch.

The office: Like it or not, consciously or by instinct, all previous presidents have tried to do two things after taking office. The first is to expand the base. Or at least to try.

Through all of America’s presidential elections, only once has the winning candidate received as much as 61 percent of the popular vote. That was Lyndon Johnson, who got that 61 percent against Barry Goldwater, in 1964. FDR against Alf Landon in 1936, Richard Nixon against George McGovern in 1972, and Warren Harding against James Cox in 1920—these were landslide elections that still fell short of LBJ’s record, at just around 60 percent of the vote.

All the other winning candidates got less. This seems obvious, but focus on what it means: Every new president takes office knowing that 40+ percent of the public wishes he hadn’t won. In response, every one of them has at least tried to court some people from the other side.

The long litany of inaugural addresses, which you can peruse at the invaluable UC Santa Barbara American Presidency Project site, contains one example after another of new presidents trying to expand their support. For instance: Jimmy Carter’s inaugural address, which I helped work on, devoted its very first line to thanking Carter’s vanquished opponent, Gerald Ford, “for all he has done to heal our land.” This was controversial at the time, because the “healing” included Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon for Watergate offenses, rather than expose a former president to possible trial. The extra edge was Carter’s awareness that the pardon had hurt Ford politically, and increased the chances it would be Carter rather than Ford taking the oath that day.

There are countless other examples, but the main point is: out of decency, out of political calculation, out of the primal political-psychology impulse to be liked, and perhaps too because they have been sobered by the responsibilities of office, nearly all presidents start out trying to be unifiers. On the campaign trail, they spoke about the opponents as them. Once in office, they try to talk about us.

The language of us is foreign to Trump. When applied to the U.S. citizens who live in Puerto Rico. When applied to traditional U.S. allies who are part of NATO. When applied to the elected officials of another party who share governing responsibility. When applied to anything. In all these cases, it’s simpler: me, and them. The theme of the reprises of his campaign rallies, 20 months into his time in office, is: I won! Those losers lost!

Does this seem unusual? That’s because it is.

The other duty that previous presidents recognize as falling to them involves the emotional, ceremonial, inspirational, and even parental responsibilities of being the symbolic head of the national family. At moments of national stress or tragedy, most previous presidents have risen to this responsibility without even being told that they should do so.

After the space shuttle Challenger blew up, Ronald Reagan gave a brief, moving speech what this meant for the country as a whole. (“Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.”) Bill Clinton did something similar after the terrorist bombing of a government building in Oklahoma City. George W. Bush did so in his address to Congress nine days after the 9/11 attacks. Barack Obama, after the Charleston church shooting. You name a president, and a historian can locate some example of that person trying to act as head of state (not party), and as leader of the national family.

Every president, except this one.

The absence of that instinct—to unify, to heal, to reassure, to embolden—is the most notable aspect of Trump’s response to anyone else’s suffering.

Checks and balances: One of Congress’s supposed powers and obligations involves “oversight” of this executive branch. That is: hearings, investigations, and other ways of determining how members of the Executive Branch are carrying out their jobs.

At their highest level, these have involved public sessions like those that Senator J. William Fulbright, of Arkansas, held about the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Or that Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, held about excesses of U.S. intelligence agencies in the 1970s. Or that Senator William Proxmire, of Wisconsin, held about defense contractors in the same period. Or that Senators Sam Ervin, of North Carolina, and Howard Baker, of Tennessee, held about the Watergate scandal.

At their most tendentious, they have included spectacles like those of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the early Cold War era, under Representative Martin Dies of Texas. Or the two-year-long proceedings of the Select Committee on Benghazi, under Representative Trey Gowdy of South Carolina. Or the multi-year probe of the Obama administration’s “Fast and Furious” program, under Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah.

In short: Congress likes to hold hearings. Right at this moment it has a situation in which many thousands of U.S. citizens died after a natural disaster; in which a similar disaster is in prospect; in which news reports have highlighted possible fraud or mismanagement in relief efforts. After the Hurricane Katrina disaster under George W. Bush, a then-Republican-controlled Congress authorized a set of bipartisan hearings into what had gone wrong.

This time?

Here is a list of House or Senate committee chairs who have announced this year that their committees will launch investigations of what happened in Puerto Rico (to spell it out, with GOP majorities, all committee chairs are Republicans):

(One Senate committee held a day of hearings about Puerto Rico ten months ago. Remember: “Fast and Furious” hearings and investigations went on for more than five years.)

And here is a list of GOP senators who are not committee chairs but have called for such hearings in response to Trump’s comments, or for public explanations from the president:

Fifty-four days to go.

The brand-new print issue of The Atlantic, available online today (but Subscribe!), is all about the structural contradictions in modern democracy, and why it may be more imperiled around the world than many Americans would like to think.

The U.S. version of representative democracy has always involved a careful calibration of the balance between direct-democratic popular sentiment, and deliberately less-democratic buffers. These range from the original intention of the Electoral College (to ensure that the populace didn’t choose the wrong person, and that “the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications”), to the Senate’s supposed function as a more deliberative balance to the curb-to-curb excesses of the House.

But modern developments have pushed the U.S. toward a predicament in which it has all the defects of a non-democratic, non-majoritarian system, but without any of the supposed benefits. Consider:

Two of the past five presidential elections—versus zero of 27, from 1892 through 1996—have gone to the candidate who lost the popular vote. Both of those majority/minority presidents—George W. Bush in 2000, and Donald Trump in 2016—governed as if they had won FDR- or Reagan-scale mandates.

The 51 senators who now make up the GOP’s governing majority represent about 30 million fewer constituents than do the 49 Democrats and independents. And thanks to gerrymandering and similar factors, a 1 percent GOP edge in House of Representatives voting in 2016—just over 63 million total votes for Republican candidates, versus just under 62 million for Democrats—translated into a 47-seat majority in the House.

These House and Senate measures are of course imperfect—vote turnout varies in contested House races versus safe seats, and I’m doing the Senate tally by assigning each Democratic or Republican senator half of his or her state’s total population. The Democratic total for the Senate comes to about 180 million people; the Republican, to about 150 million. But the figures are in the ballpark, as indicators of the gap between raw popular sentiment and the current governing balance of power. As applied to the themes of The Atlantic’s new issue, they illustrate a more and more widespread and taken-for-granted shift from minority protection to minority rule.

I mention these disproportions to introduce a Time Capsule series for the 55 days between now and the 2018 midterm elections. It will focus on the 51 people who have disproportionate power. Unlike the other 330+ million Americans, members of this group could do something directly to hold Donald Trump accountable for what nearly all of them know is his reckless unfitness for office—but who every day choose not to act.

Those 51 are, of course, the Republicans who make up Mitch McConnell’s current Senate majority. What could they do? I’ve laid out the basic case here, but in brief:

• Any one senator, of majority or minority party alike, has vast power to hold up the Senate’s business in order to get his or her way—on a point that really matters to the senator. The filibuster is one obvious tool. Ever seen the old movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? Ever watch Rand Paul try to hold up renewal of the Patriot Act? Ever watch Ted Cruz hold the floor for 21 straight hours, to slow down Obamacare? Ever hear about Tom Cotton putting a personal hold on an ambassadorial nominee—waiting it out until the nominee died? These give you an idea of what even one senator can do—if it matters.
• Any one senator, who happens to be a committee chair, is in a very strong position to: hold hearings, issue subpoenas, and generally direct public and governmental attention to an issue. In the House, think of Representative Trey Gowdy, and what he did for years with the Benghazi hearings. Think of Devin Nunes. In the Senate, think back to what J. William Fulbright, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, did with his hearings on the Vietnam war—a war being carried out by his own party’s president. And think then of the current chairman of that committee, Senator Bob Corker, who is not running for re-election and thus in theory has nothing to fear from any opponent, PAC, or donor.
• Any two senators could decide, temporarily, to declare themselves independent and “caucus with the Democrats” and thus shift operational control of the Senate from Republican hands to the Democrats’. The chairmanship of every committee would change. So would the majority lineup in every one of those committees. Hearings, subpoenas—these could be used to call Trump to account, rather than to avert public eyes.
  The two senators who had thus shifted control could still vote with Republicans on issues they cared about, from budget matters from the Kavanaugh nomination. But they could switch the machinery of this powerful part of the legislative branch back toward the check-and-balance function that at least two of them know is necessary. (At least two? Think of what Jeff Flake has said, and Bob Corker, and Ben Sasse.)

But 55 days before the election, not a one of these 51 people has dared act. Not after the “anonymous” op-ed in The New York Times; not after Bob Woodward’s Fear (and the dozen previous books to similar effect); not after … anything.

One of the senators I’ve often mentioned as an example of talking a lot, but doing very little to stand up to Trump, recently phoned me up, unhappy. “OK, it’s easy to criticize, but what exactly do you expect me to do?” he asked. I said, “Of course I’m not a legislator. But it looks from outside as if you could hold a hearing. Or hold up something the administration wanted. Or even—even—vote with the other side, if you thought the danger was really as great as you say.”

I inferred an “oh, sure” eye-roll through the phone line. The senator pointed out that steps like those would represent a total challenge to the party. The lesson I took was that if senators are going to think of themselves as party loyalists apart from anything else—apart from local concerns in their state, apart from historic positions of their own party, apart from what their own judgment said, apart from anything except what Donald Trump wants—then voters should rationally make their choices on party-ID above all. A Republican in the Congress will stand alongside Trump, whatever direction Trump goes. A Democrat may challenge him. That’s the choice.

Will anything about GOP bashfulness change in the next 55 days, or through the month-plus after that in which this Congress will still have power? Will one of them act, or even two?

I don’t know, but as with the original Time Capsules I’ll try to record this every day or two, for the long-term record. History is being made in real time.

This is a point acknowledged even by the very harshest overall assessment of Woodward’s books, Joan Didion’s essay back in the 1990s in the New York Review of Books. Specific parts of Woodward’s reportage have been challenged — including by John Cassidy in The New Yorker, who questioned an allegation concerning early-Obama-era economic policy. But over millions of words, and thousands of quotes and anecdotes, in 20-some books, the vast majority of what Woodward has reported has either stood unchallenged, or been acknowledged long after the fact as having been correct.

This is of course the very opposite of President Trump’s track record and reputation when it comes to verifiable fact. And even people who haven’t followed every twist and turn of Woodward’s journalistic output have probably been aware of him long enough, on the national scene—and over the past decade, as a more-conservative-than-liberal figure on cable news shows. This is why Trump’s “Woodward is a liar” campaign, while consistent with his standard response to any criticism in the press, seems unlikely to pay off.

***

There isn’t, and can’t be, any modern counterpart to the mainstream consciousness-of-the-nation role that Walter Cronkite played through the 1960s and 1970s, as anchor of the CBS Evening News. But Bob Woodward occupies at least a distant-cousin version of that information-world niche. He has been around forever; he has seen everything; he has a track record that has generally stood up; and he features a just-the-plain-facts / “that’s the way it is” retro affect.

Historians still argue over whether it really made any difference in mainstream support for the Vietnam War, when Walter Cronkite announced on his broadcast, after a trip to Vietnam in 1968, that he considered it a lost cause. (“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, if unsatisfactory conclusion…. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”) But it seemed at the time that it mattered.

Maybe historians will argue 50 years from now whether Bob Woodward’s catalogue of incompetence, madness, and deceit made any difference in reckoning with the gravity of our current governing emergency. Let us hope that those future historians will say that Americans with influence “did the best they could.”

The gist of the early critiques, beyond (serious) disputes about factors that were included and excluded, and the very idea that institutions as different as the University of Minnesota and Pomona could be ranked on a precise linear scale, involved the monoculture dominance of this single ranking system. As you might put it, and in fact as I put it nine years ago:

The practical solution to ranking mania is not to try to eliminate them -- it's too late -- but instead to crowd the field so that no one "Best Colleges" list has disproportionate influence.

Toward that end, The Washington Monthly's latest iteration of its college rankings is valuable simply for existing and adding diversity to the ranking field. It's more valuable than that, because of the way it carries through its analysis about the traits we really should value in universities, plus letting people tailor their own rankings based on the qualities that matter most to them.

Three years ago in The Atlantic, Alia Wong explained how far the healthy proliferation of rankings had spread—again, at least partly offsetting the distortions of any one scale—and Li Zhou surveyed them and noted how different their judgments of “best college” were. Stanford was on top on one scale, Washington and Lee on another, CalTech on another, UC Irvine on yet one more.

***

This is all prelude to this year’s cycle, in which the US News rankings are more or less what they have traditionally been, and The Washington Monthly extends its practice of ranking schools not just on strictly “academic” metrics but on their broader effect on the nation. As Kevin Carey says in an introduction to this year’s TWM college edition:

Thirteen years ago, the Washington Monthly set out to solve a problem. The higher education market was dominated by the U.S. News & World Report rankings, which reward wealth, fame, and exclusivity. College leaders responded to the temptation of better U.S. News scores by raising prices, chasing status, and marketing themselves to the children of privilege.

We thought the nation needed exactly the opposite: smart, well-run colleges that enrolled students from all walks of life and helped them earn a high-quality diploma at an affordable price. Colleges that instilled a sense of service and public obligation while producing groundbreaking research.

So we decided to do something about it and create our own ranking—not based on what colleges do for themselves, but on what they do for their country. After all, everyone benefits when colleges push the boundaries of scientific discovery and provide paths to opportunity for the next generation of low-income students. And everyone pays for college, through taxes and other forms of public support.

This year’s innovation is to provide—not in place of, but in addition to, the previous ranking metrics—a guide to how colleges compare on vocational certificates. Nursing, auto-engine or airplane-engine technicians, welding and other (good-paying) skilled-trade jobs—this kind of training has traditionally been disdained by “ambitious” institutions and students.

But as TWM’s editor Paul Glastris lays out in this article, jobs in this category are essential to American business resilience and, more important, to greater economic opportunity and justice. As I’ve argued in The Atlantic — in this piece about “career technical” education in Georgia, and this one about maker-movement manufacturing startups in Kentucky, and this overview article this past May--and in the new book I wrote with my wife, Deb Fallows, “career technical education” may be this era’s most important part of the U.S. schooling system.

The rationale is similar to what Audrey M. Hutchinson, of the National League of Cities, laid out in this essay, “Community Colleges Will Shape the Workforce of the Future.” I won’t belabor a case you can read elsewhere (including at many of these links), but the essential point is: since the era’s main economic problems are inequality, disruption, and blocked opportunity, institutions that can match people with the era’s fastest-growing skilled jobs are newly important.

Deb and I will have more in this space about community colleges, vocational certificates, career-technical programs in high schools, and other aspects of this valuable next wave in American education. For now, please check out TWM and its steadily expanding approach to rankings.

***

Next, from a no-longer-so-young veteran, of the Vietnam era:

I echo the point of a vet that we are a slice of America (at least we were when I volunteered in 1965-67 and among the vets I know now).

The one advantage vets may bring to politics is, if like me, they had been in school for 18 years and had never known working class folks.

My 2 years in the Army were a profound education in class, especially in learning how radically different the life horizons of kids just waiting to get back on "the block" were from mine.

Oh, and I also learned that officers could lack principles and lie just like everyone else.

***

Last for today, a recent-era veteran, with a previous elite-college background, on a related piece of conventional wisdom on the right background for people seeking political leadership:

The drum that folks like Seth Moulton keep beating, and that groups like With Honor march to, has to do with an idea of military veterans being more prone to bipartisanship, to selfless service, etc. -- in some sense more morally or temperamentally suited to government service.

I don't really know how I feel about that idea one way or another. But, for sure, one lesson of the Trump era is that it's time to put this "businessmen ought to run the government" crap to bed once and for all.

Certainly in the Trump Cabinet the folks whose "qualification" for office was their success in nongovernmental pursuits -- Tillerson, Cohn, DeVos, Carson, and the C-in-C himself the most high-profile -- have been spectacular failures — thwarted in their aims by a complete inability to understand how government functions, who continually make pronouncements about their intent and direction that are rendered comical by their complete obliviousness as to the concrete steps needed to implement a policy.

On the other hand the folks with prior government experience -- Mattis, Kelly, Sessions, Perry, Purdue -- have been, for good or evil, quite able to run their departments (to the extent Kelly can't run the CoS mission smoothly, well, c'mon)….

I think we can all sensibly agree that to be good at government takes experience with government.  Note that all the Presidents before Trump, in recent memory, did have some of that. [JF note: All of the first 44 presidents, Washington through Obama, had experience either as elected officials (most of them); military commanders (eg Taylor, Grant, Eisenhower); or judges or cabinet officials (like Taft and Hoover). Trump is the first person to take office with absolutely no elected, administrative, judicial, or military public-service experience.]

On _that_ score, veterans are great!  In my time in uniform, and since then working in the intelligence and military communities, I've had to spend a whole lot of time thinking about the Federal Acquisition Regulations and government personnel policies, and doing interdepartmental coordination of various kinds, and so on.

It's a bit off-message because I think groups like With Honor are drawing your attention to the mission-driven, dedicated, all-for-one spirit of the forward patrol in Kandahar, and here I am telling you: No, the special thing is that they navigated the Godawful predeployment paperwork maze and box-checking to get there and then then the postdeployment hell--and then when they weren't in Fallujah they were pushing paper to send taskers via a SecState contractor or to shepherd fielding of new body armor or to fill out an SF0-86 RIGHT for cryin' out loud or to hire (or fire) a staffer. But there it is.

If you want a guy who already gets the government but for whatever reason are averse to voting for "politicians," then, sure, you can't really do better than a vet.  Hell, I was never a logistics officer but I bet any one of those guys anywhere -- especially the warrants -- could be put in the Oval Office tomorrow and at least keep the lights on everywhere.

In the first place, I don’t think that the military experience doesn’t, in and of itself, make one a better congressperson or senator.  And certainly, veterans don’t have any sort of entitlement to political office.

People enter the military for a variety of reasons.  Certainly, some join out of a genuine desire to serve, to “do their duty.”

But others join because it’s a family tradition, or because it’s an alternative to jail, or to escape an oppressive civilian life.  There are also some—and I suspect that Tom Cotton and former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens fall into this category—who join as part of a cynical career plan to get elected president.

Trump didn’t serve, and notoriously evaded the draft.  But neither of the three presidents who preceded him served either (I discount GWB’s National Guard duty which itself was an alternative to real service during wartime).

And while there are plenty of reasons to find McCain a more admirable person than Trump, I was troubled by the constant comparison McCain’s military experience to Trump’s lack thereof. His service and undoubted heroism as a prisoner of war did not make McCain a saint, nor did Trump’s failure to serve make him a devil.

I’m much more interested in the positions on the issues taken by a candidate, by what the person’s full adult career says about their commitment to public service, by his or her education and demonstrated intelligence, by his or her relative honesty in campaigning and serving in government.

Military service is a small part of this and not necessarily a defining one, and I find slightly offensive campaign pitches which seem to rely almost entirely on the candidate’s military service, as though that alone entitles the candidate to my vote.

Finally for this installment, a Boomer-era reader on the varied effects of a veteran perspective:

I will start with the necessary disclaimer: I am not a veteran; I am a Vietnam era Boomer who lucked out with a draft lottery number of 360.  

I hope this does not disqualify me from the conversation. There was a  time when NOT being a veteran was a disqualifying factor in politics and in conversation: having a lucky draft number was barely rated above getting out because of a bone spur.  (The Swift Boat veterans managed to turn that on its head, setting the stage for Trump to derogate the quality of McCain's service by the fact of his capture.)

As with all things, there are pluses and minuses to military service. Honor, discipline, respect, valor, sacrifice; these are all noble traits.

On the other hand, to avoid being drafted for two years as an Army grunt, [someone I know] enlisted for four years to be a Marine aviator. He flew A-4's off of aircraft carriers and dropped napalm on Vietnam.  He has never, in any conversations I've had with him on the subject, expressed any compassionate concern for what he did; quite the  contrary...  Consequently I believe he lacks the qualifications necessary to be sitting in legislative judgment over the welfare of the disadvantaged or others he considers to be weak and unworthy.

There is a similar kind of glory attributed to participation in sports, which celebrates teamwork, and personal dedication toward excellence, to achieve a common goal; all noble things. But so often the common goal is simply moving a ball through some (objectively) meaningless place, whether it's a goal line or a hoop.  Which obscures the question: Is dedication to "winning" a worthwhile value?...

Theater, ballet, opera, orchestras, all require discipline, incredible teamwork, hours of practice, sacrifice, and individual attention to excellence. They have the added advantage of welcoming all-  the nerds, the cheerleaders, the brawny and the frail- into a collaborative enterprise the purpose of which is the elevation of the human spirit. However, we don't seem to weight this qualification very much in our political conversations.

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The one overarching value of military service which makes me want to support this PAC is the ability to subordinate self to a larger value or purpose...  Whether it is law, norms, ethics or standards, the strength of America's democracy is our collective and individual willingness to seek individual fortune, but never at the expense of external standards...

One of the most important things we are losing in this time of Trump is the idea that a person of any ethnicity or religion or orientation can subordinate their individual predilections and greed, to external guiding standards, principles, norms, ethics and rules articulating American Constitutional values. (Trump's amorality is proof that he utterly lacks this capacity.)

Military service is certainly proof that the candidate can do this.  The remaining question for me is what other desirable human qualities remain after their military service.  I would hope that this PAC spotlights values beyond the fact of service itself.