I’m kind of waiting around to see what emerges out of the chaos in Congress at the moment, so I’m going to give you two stories I found last night while researching my Murkowski-Collins defection piece. They both come from the Senate floor on January 5th, 2001 as the agreement on how to organize the 50-50 Senate was being announced and debated. The first story comes from Republican Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico and talks about his experiences dealing with the legendary Democratic senator, Russell Long of Louisiana.

Did I have any real friends in the Democratic Party who went to exceptional ends to be helpful to me.

Let me tell you a brief story.

I was a pipsqueak in the Senate, and Senator Long was a very big Senator. I was just starting my first term. I passed only one bill. It was a big bill. It imposed a 10-cent gasoline tax–Senator Byrd, you remember that–on the users of the inland waterways. Do you remember that fight?

It went on forever, but I won fair and square, and I went home to campaign. And, believe it or not, a Senator from that side of the aisle, in my absence–I was in New Mexico–was going to undo my victory because they had the votes and he had the floor. A staffer called me and said: You better come back, get off the campaign trail and come over here and defend the only legislative victory you have, of any significance, in the first 6 years. I was prepared to do it.

Guess what the next call was, in about a half hour–Russell Long. I had defeated him on the floor in that debate.

And he said: Pete, they won’t do that.

I said: What?

They will not upset your victory. You won. You stay home and campaign.

Think of that, telling a Republican to stay home.

You stay home and campaign and I will take the floor in your place and object to what is contemplated. And the victory that you got will not be undone here on the floor by a Democrat.

That is friendship, right? But, listen, I didn’t agree with Russell Long on a lot of things–and he knew that–here on the floor of the Senate.

I say to my Democrat friends on the other side of the aisle, all kinds of expressions have been used talking about what is going on: “We extend a hand to you,” and all those other wonderful words. All I can say is, I am going to do my best to work with you, and I hope you will do the best you can to work with me on the Budget Committee and get something done.

The second story comes from Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and likewise involves his early experiences in the Senate.

When I was a very new and appointed Senator, I asked a Senator here who was managing the bill on the other side of the aisle to call me when it came time to offer an amendment. I was tied up in a committee. I was surprised that the bell rang in the committee and the vote was going on. I came to the floor. I am not one to be shy in expressing my opinions, and I went to the then manager of the bill and started to berate him. Senator Mike Mansfield came to me and said: Senator, you should not use language like that on the floor of the Senate. I told Senator Mansfield what had happened. He, as the majority leader, looked at that Senator and said: Is that true? The manager of the bill said: “That’s true, but that amendment would not have passed.” Senator Mansfield said: “Have you got your amendment, Senator?”

He took the amendment from me, he stopped the vote that was going on, he returned the bill to second reading, and he offered my amendment. That amendment passed, and it has benefited my State for a long time.

I merely state it here today to say every Senator on this floor has equal rights. The 50/50 that we have is the result of the voters of the country, but there need not be a division between this body in terms of the 50. We work on the basis of a majority. We can have a tie at almost any time, or a majority with a quorum.

We are looking at a process where every Senator has the right now to understand the responsibility that comes from this agreement that has been reached. I congratulate the Democratic majority leader; I congratulate our future Republican majority leader for reaching this conclusion. I share the feelings of my friend from West Virginia [Sen. Robert Byrd] that this is an act, really, of true statesmanship. I believe those who have not agreed should help us make it work because it will take the relationships that exist between myself and my great friend from West Virginia to make this work. I not only trust the Senator from West Virginia, I trust him with my life, and he knows that. We have never had an argument. I have served with him as chairman; he has served with me as chairman. We have resolved every difference we ever had before we came to the floor. That is what is going to happen now.

Most of the work we do will be in committee. This resolution gives us the ability to work in committee on the basis of trust. I honor the two leaders for what they have done. I am proud of the Senate today.

I can get impatient with pundits and commentators who wax poetic about the good old days in the Senate when everyone went to each other’s homes for dinner and drinks and bipartisanship was in vogue. But there really has been something lost in the last two or three decades, and it has to do with honor and decency.

In my opinion, while it’s true that there is some measure of “both sides” being responsible for the breakdown, by far the most damaging development has been the emergence of Senator Mitch McConnell as the leader of the Republicans. I can get into all the reasons why I believe this some other time, but here I just wanted to give you a little peek at how things used to be different, and better.

Rachael Bade of Politico has an excellent article on a topic I’ve been writing about now for more than half a decade, which is the true governing majority in the House of Representatives. Back before John Boehner lost his job as Speaker, I could see that he had no future as the Speaker if he insisted on simultaneously being the leader of the House Republican caucus. I encouraged him repeatedly to face reality and strike a deal with the Democrats to create a functional majority that reflected the actual group that was willing to pay our debts on time and keep the government operating by passing appropriations bills.

I, of course, knew that Boehner lacked the foresight, creativity, cunning or independence of mind to follow my advice, but I also knew he was doomed if he did not. He tried to govern with the majority he had, and it wasn’t a Republican majority so the hardliners orchestrated his defenestration.

Paul Ryan finds himself in the same situation, although his first true tests haven’t occurred yet. The difference is that his centrists, who are his most crucial members for actually governing, are more organized and rebellious than they were under Boehner. They have already sunk a number of bills, blown up more than a couple of legislative plans, and they’re sick and tired of being forced to imperil their reelection by taking unnecessary votes that divide their constituents. They’re telling Ryan to quit holding votes as negotiating and messaging tools and start negotiating the budget deal and debt ceiling with the Democrats.

The centrists have always had more clout than they’ve been willing to use, but their influence is at a high point at the moment because they’re not just the folks who can give Ryan the votes he needs to avoid a government shutdown and a credit default, they’re also the folks most likely to lose in the midterms. In other words, their political interests have to be considered more now than ever, because Ryan can’t remain Speaker if they get wiped out.

The problem for Ryan is the same at is was for Boehner, but worse because Obama was a unifying force in his caucus and Trump divides them. Everything Trump is doing right now is aimed at appeasing the far right, especially the religious far right. This may be in part to retain good relations with them as he tries to push Attorney General Jeff Sessions aside, but it’s primarily about preventing his polling numbers from collapsing to a point where his impeachment becomes a real possibility. With Trump moving hard right, this provides Ryan with little room to pivot towards his most vulnerable members.

Yet, he will eventually have to pull a Boehner and go crawling to Pelosi for the votes he needs to govern. The centrists want him to get started now and to stop screwing around. But he’s not ready to heed their advice. As a result, the centrists are getting more organized and more willing to gum up the works.

I predicted that Ryan wouldn’t last through this phase, and we’re beginning to see why I made that prediction. He and McConnell are still engaged in the initial phase of their strategy which involves using the budget reconciliation process to avoid making any concessions to the Democrats on anything. The strategy has failed so far and will continue to fail, and it never could have avoided the reckoning that came after, which is the need to get the conservatives to help them govern by providing the votes for their own spending bills.

What will happen when Ryan can’t get the conservatives to pass a budget, pass appropriations, or raise the debt ceiling? We know what Boehner did and what happened to him in much easier circumstances.

After she cast a vote against the motion to proceed to Mitch McConnell’s health care bill, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska received a threat from the Trump administration. The threat was delivered by the person most likely to strike fear into her, which in this case turned out to the Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke. The Interior Department is very important to Alaska and important to Murkowski in particular because she chairs the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and the Appropriations Subcommittee on Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies. She also serves on the Committee on Indian Affairs which oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs which is an agency within the Department of the Interior.

Of course, this cuts both ways. If pretty much everything Murkowski does in the Senate has something to do with the Interior Department, it’s also true that she probably exercises more control over the Department than any other senator. A normal Interior Secretary would not mess with her.  The only limit on her ability to exact retribution is her self-interest in maintaining a good working relationship.

A more astonishing aspect of this, however, is that the White House instructed Secretary Zinke to issue the exact same threats to Sen. Dan Sullivan who also represents Alaska but voted with the administration on the motion to proceed.

Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan said the call from Zinke heralded a “troubling message.”

“I’m not going to go into the details, but I fear that the strong economic growth, pro-energy, pro-mining, pro-jobs and personnel from Alaska who are part of those policies are going to stop,” Sullivan said.

“I tried to push back on behalf of all Alaskans. … We’re facing some difficult times and there’s a lot of enthusiasm for the policies that Secretary Zinke and the president have been talking about with regard to our economy. But the message was pretty clear,” Sullivan said. The Interior secretary also contacted Murkowski, he said.

Here are some of the ways that White House can make things uncomfortable for the two Alaskan senators:

Efforts and issues on the line include nominations of Alaskans to Interior posts, an effort to build a road out of King Cove through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, and future opportunities to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and expand drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, among other regulatory issues that are a priority for Murkowski and Sullivan.

The other Republican who voted against the motion to proceed is Susan Collins of Maine. She has a different profile in the Senate, so a different messenger may have been used to issue threats of retribution. I don’t know whether she was contacted or not. But both she and Murkowski now have reasons to seriously consider bolting the Republican Party and caucusing with the Democrats. Murkowski is already half an independent, having been defeated in the Republican primary during her last reelection effort and winning nonetheless on a write-in slate. Susan Collins comes from a state famous for successful independent politicians, including her colleague Sen. Angus King who caucuses with the Democrats and served as an independent governor of the Lobster State.

If he’s doing his job, Chuck Schumer is now working on packages he can offer these senators that would make their transition as comfortable as possible. This has been done in the recent past, with Tom Daschle wooing Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords to his side back in 2001, and Harry Reid doing the same with Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter during President Obama’s first term.

As I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that neither Murkowski nor Collins would have enough incentive to jump alone, but they might jump together because it would create a 50-50 split in the Senate. And then I recalled that there was initially a 50-50 split in the Senate after the 2000 elections, which created a unique power-sharing arrangement. It didn’t last because the Bush administration so badly disrespected Sen. Jeffords that he quit the GOP and gave the Democrats an outright majority that lasted until after the 2002 midterms.

I wanted to understand how that power-sharing arrangement worked, so I consulted the congressional record and refreshed my memory. The story was a lot more interesting than I expected, so I’ll share some of it with you now.

The context was the contested 2000 presidential election which left the Democrats’ seething at the Supreme Court, the Senate evenly split, and partisan feelings at a modern-day high. The Republicans insisted that the true split was 51-50 in their favor since incoming Vice-President Dick Cheney was constitutionally empowered to break ties. The Democrats pointed out that the Constitution allowed the vice-president to break ties on votes on the floor, but not in committees. They insisted that the real split was 50-50 and that all committees, office space and funding had to be evenly split.

A compromise was struck between Trent Lott and Tom Daschle in which everything would indeed be evenly split but Lott would become the Majority Leader and Republicans would be the chairpersons on the committees and subcommittees. If a tie occurred in a subcommittee, it could still be advanced to the full committee, and if a tie occurred on a full committee, it could still be advanced to the floor.

Even some of the more moderate Republicans, like Sen. John Warner of Virginia, objected to this deal on the premise that if he were to take the responsibility of a chairman he ought to have the ability to advance bills without a partisan logjam. But Lott convinced them to relent, correctly assessing that nothing would get done in the Senate if the Democrats weren’t appeased.

There wasn’t much precedent for figuring out what should happen because, at least in modern times, the Senate had never been evenly split after an election before. But there was a situation that came close in 1953.

After Dwight Eisenhower was elected President in 1952, the Republicans took control of the Senate for the first time since 1932, but by the narrow margin of 49-47. Ohio Sen. Robert Taft became the majority leader. Before long, though, Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon had a major disagreement with the Eisenhower administration, announced himself an independent, and tried to insist that he would not caucus with either side of the aisle but take his committee assignments from the Senate “as a whole.” When he discovered that this was magical thinking and he would get no committee assignments, he decided to caucus with the Democrats. This created a 48-48 split.

Shortly thereafter, Sen. Taft succumbed to cancer and the Democratic governor of Ohio appointed Thomas Burke to serve in his place. This then caused a 49-47 Democratic majority. As you might expect, the Democrats expected to take control of the Senate at that point, but it didn’t happen.

This is how Utah Sen. Bob Bennett explained it during the debate on the organizing resolution in January 2000.

Now this was the situation: Because the Republicans had organized the Senate with 49 Senators to begin with, they had organized it with a Republican majority on every committee. They held that Republican majority on every committee until Senator Taft died, and it switched.

At that point, Senator Morse–this I do remember–said, A, he had been elected as a Republican and, B, the Republicans controlled the administration and, therefore, in order to prevent the new President from being frustrated in his opportunities to get things through, he would, even though he had denounced his Republican party membership, vote with the Republicans on organizational issues, giving the Republicans 48, the Democrats 48, and with Richard Nixon in the chair giving the Republicans 49.

Here is the key point. Under those circumstances, the Democrats said: We will not ask for a realignment of the committees. We will allow the majority that was there on the committees to be maintained through the balance of this Congress.

So it was 48 Democrats, 47 Republicans, and 1 Independent, with the Independent vowing to vote against any organizational resolution the Democrats might bring forward, and of course Vice President Nixon would vote also that way, so the Republicans, even though they had only 47 seats, in a 96-seat Senate, maintained the chairmanships and a 1-vote margin on every committee.

Obviously, everything about what happened in 1953 was just slightly different from what happened in 2001. The most consequential difference was that the Senate started out split in 2001. The other very important difference was that Jim Jeffords wasn’t as charitable as Sen. Morse had been after his defection.

If Murkowski and Collins were to split the party now, the precedent would be more like 1953 than 2001 because the Senate has been organized with a Republican majority, not to accommodate an even split. However, if they were to vote with the Democrats on organizational matters, the precedent would also resemble 2001.

These precedents are key to gaming this scenario out correctly, because the Republicans would surely point back to 1953 as the only meaningful precedent, and with justification. They would argue that they they should retain majorities on all the committees and their better office space and higher levels of funding because that’s what had happened the last time even though in that case the Democrats eventually attained an outright majority.

The Democrats would argue that 2001 was the more appropriate precedent and point out that Morse’s decision to vote with the Republicans on organizational matters was discretionary and not the basis for a binding precedent.

Today’s Republicans would not likely yield on these issues and reach a compromise, at least not initially. And that makes it a little harder to recruit Murkowski and Collins in the first place, because they’d more clearly be moving from the majority to the minority.

So, there you have it. That’s all I can tell you about what would happen if Trump’s threats caused the Republicans to lose their majority in the Senate. Schumer should be working on it nonetheless, because it would improve his ability to stymie the Trump administration and make it more possible to win a majority after the 2018 midterms. But even if the effort were successful in the short-term, its impact probably wouldn’t be all that we might hope.

The new White House communications director may have the look and mannerisms of The Sopranos’ Christopher Moltisanti, but he’s less effective as a hitman. Anthony Scaramucci claims that he’s a front-stabbing kind of guy, which must be why his effort to exact revenge on White House chief of staff Reince Priebus lacks the slightest hint of stealth.

Yesterday, Politico reported that Mr. Scaramucci makes a lot of money and hasn’t divested from his investment firm, which they figured out by looking at the financial disclosure form that he filed with the government on June 23rd after he took a position with the Export-Import Bank. You see, this is public information that anyone can request after it has been on file for thirty days. Reporters tried to explain this to Scaramucci but he stopped responding to their emails because he’d already tweeted out to the world his conspiracy theory that Priebus was behind the Politico article and promised to send the FBI after him.

Asked why he thought the report had been leaked illegally, Mr. Scaramucci responded by text: �They aren�t in process yet.� But when told his form could be released on July 23, he did not respond further.

In an interview on Fox News earlier in the day, Mr. Scaramucci complained about leaks and Washington�s backstabbing culture.

�What I don�t like about Washington is people do not let you know how they feel,� he said. �They�re very nice to your face and then they take a shiv or a machete and they stab it in your back. I don�t like it. I�m a Wall Street guy, and I�m more of a front-stabbing person, and I�d rather tell people directly how I feel about them than this sort of nonsense.�

So, some people might have thought that having falsely accused the president’s right-hand man during his first week on the job Scaramucci would lie low for a while. But that’s not how front-stabbers operate. He called in to CNN this morning and said that Priebus is �his brother” but that �some brothers are like Cain and Abel.� He also suggested that only modern norms prevent him from seeing Priebus strung up from the nearest flagpole. People �would have been hung for these leaks 150 years ago� Scaramucci declared, while asserting that �The fish stinks from the head.�

It’s true that Priebus intervened back during the transition to prevent Trump from hiring Scaramucci to a position in the administration, and it’s also true that Priebus vocally opposed the hiring of Scaramucci as the new communications director. It may even be true that Priebus has leaked things that the president did not want leaked. But there’s no reason to suspect that Priebus was behind Politico’s reporting on Scaramucci’s financial disclosure form. And, even if he was, all he needed to say was that the information is now publicly available.

So, now Scaramucci wants Priebus gone which must mean that Trump wants Priebus gone. But Trump doesn’t fire people in real life the way he does on The Apprentice. In real life, he hires wannabe mobsters to sloppily attack people using false allegations. Or, in Jeff Sessions’s case, he just insults them in public in the hope that they’ll quit on their own.

This is a just a casual observation, but I think we really should solemnly consider the implications of the following:

At the Pentagon, the first of the three tweets raised fears that the president was getting ready to announce strikes on North Korea or some other military action. Many said they were left in suspense for nine minutes, the time between the first and second tweet. Only after the second tweet did military officials receive the news the president was announcing a personnel change on Twitter.

Here are the three tweets in question. Notice the nine minute gap between the first and second of these:

After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2017

….Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2017

….victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 26, 2017

If anyone thinks this is tolerable, they’re just not people we should be listening to. This isn’t how a president should announce a policy change. It’s not how he should treat service members. It’s not a level of trust between the president and the Pentagon that is acceptable. It’s not a tolerable national security risk, since the North Koreans must have been wondering the same thing.

It can’t be accepted. It must come to a prompt end.

Yesterday, I wrote that I was surprised that the Senate Republicans agreed to bring up the health care bill because “losing this vote would have been the most painless way to end their agony.” A reader of mine reacted with some confusion, asking me, “Agony? Show me the agony.” And he followed that up with an astute observation: “It is beginning to become somewhat evident to me that there is not really a significant amount of agony among Republicans at all. I think that deep down, they really want this win more than they fear the results of actually doing this.” In this assessment, he is joined by many others. I think James Hohmann put it best because he backed up my reader’s point while also doing a decent job of explaining my own:

“It’s hard to overstate the degree to which White House officials and Senate GOP leaders just want to pass something — really, anything — to show the base that they are keeping their promise to roll back Obamacare. They would happily portray even most modest tweaks to the Affordable Care Act as major successes to save face. As far as they’re concerned, whatever gets passed will be the basis for negotiations with the House. So this is not even a final product.”

“Opening floor debate may be a Pyrrhic victory for the GOP: Democrats are going to force Republicans to cast some uncomfortable votes in the coming days as part of the freewheeling amendment process. Regardless of whether a bill ultimately passes, and how they try to spin it, every senator who voted for the motion to proceed just gave years of fodder to Democratic admakers.”

For one thing, the agony comes from an inability to reach consensus within the party which has imperiled their entire legislative strategy for the year. At a certain point, it’s just embarrassing and a huge time sink, and the best thing to do is to cut your losses and stop humiliating yourself. This has the advantage of letting you move on to things their either need to get done or at least have some prospect of getting done in a satisfactory manner.

But Hohmann points out something additional, which I have also mentioned before. And this is the fact that the Democrats can now offer one brutal amendment after another that will before fodder for running against Republican senators for years to come. Even the vote that happened yesterday on McConnell’s bill was brutal. Why do you think senators like Capito and Heller and Portman voted for a bill that they said they would never vote for? It’s because they want to minimize how many times they have to vote no. They don’t want to hear the criticism from the base, but they’ve opened themselves up to the most accurate charges of hypocrisy and cowardice. I’d add McCain to this list, but he’s not likely to be worried about reelection. I don’t know what he is thinking.

Republican senators didn’t need to be taking these votes that will nail them coming and going. I referred to this process as McConnell trolling his own caucus either out of spite or because he’s too weak to stand up to the president and protect his members.

Yet, the other motivation is a kind of desperation to pass the buck. The House passed an unworkable bill to the Senate to get the heat off themselves. The Senate can’t quite reciprocate, but they can at least pass some kind of skinny repeal and bounce it back in the House’s lap for a while.

If they do this, it will be one of the most irresponsible things our government has ever done because they’ll remove the employee and individual mandates (along with a medical device tax that is important for revenue) simply because they’re unpopular measures, without the slightest regard for what this would do the insurance markets that would be crippled with overly sick pools of customers. I do not doubt that the Republicans in the Senate will succeed in this if for no other reason than almost none of them have any courage.

This would not solve their problems. It would exacerbate them badly because they’d now own the resulting damage. It’s like trying to kick your prescription painkiller addiction by taking up a needle and shooting heroin into your veins. It solves the pains of withdrawal by making it even more painful to quit.

As disastrous as this now likely outcome would be, it would still represent a victory of sorts for ObamaCare because it would keep the Medicaid expansion in place and the regulatory scheme. What would be left is a collapsing individual marketplace and a political party and administration in charge with no ability, knowledge, or willingness to fix it.

The sheer self-injurious stupidity of this move might prevent it from happening. It will only take the courage of three Republican senators, after all, and there are two who have already shown that they have a little courage. It’s depressing that even with these seemingly good odds, I can’t express optimism.

If they had any sense, they would have cut bait long before now.

Since he works for the “failing” New York Times, I don’t imagine that Ross Douthat has much juice with Trump supporters, although he probably has somewhat more influence with the Capitol Hill crowd. He’s reflective, at least, of a small subsection of the conservative movement that has only recently become truly uncomfortable with the modern Republican Party. I can’t say that what he thinks and writes doesn’t matter at all, in other words. He’s representative of a class of people who ran the GOP until very recently. They have wealth. They either buy ink by the barrel or get paid by those who do. They know how to operate in the corridors of power. What they don’t seem to know anymore is how to win a Republican primary.

And based on what Douthat wrote today, they're ready for Trump to be removed from power either through impeachment or by Trump’s cabinet invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment on the basis of the president’s mental incapacity.

Referring to Trump’s war on his own Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, Douthat writes:

So it�s basically madness all the way to the top: bad policy, bad strategy, bad politics, bad legal maneuvering, bad optics, a self-defeating venture carried out via deranged-as-usual tweets and public insults.

He then approving cites a dated piece by Megan McArdle in which she makes the case that George W. Bush would have been removed under the 25th Amendment if he had suddenly begun acting like Trump at some point during his second term:

…the only possible explanation for such a quick succession of stunning lapses in judgment would be a severe stroke, an aggressive brain tumor or some other neurological disaster that had rendered [Bush] unfit to continue in office, at least until it could be treated. I don�t even think this would be controversial, even among his supporters. �Poor fellow,� they�d murmur, �the strain of the office has destroyed his health. He has given more than his life for his country.� Time to let him rest and heal while someone else shoulders his Sisyphean burdens.

And then Douthat concludes:

Trump hasn�t had a stroke or suffered a neurological disaster, and his behavior in the White House is no different from the behavior he manifested consistently while winning enough votes to take the presidency.

But he is nonetheless clearly impaired, gravely deficient somewhere at the intersection of reason and judgment and conscience and self-control. Pointing this out is wearying and repetitive, but still it must be pointed out.

You can be as loyal as Jeff Sessions and still suffer the consequences of that plain and inescapable truth: This president should not be the president, and the sooner he is not, the better.

I, of course, wholeheartedly agree with all of this, but I think we really do ourselves a disservice if we focus on sideshows like his treatment of Sessions. I know full well that underneath the Sessions insanity is some kind of panic and desire to avoid legal scrutiny, and that this controversy has the most immediate potential to cause a constitutional crisis. But it’s Trump’s insanity that is the real reason he should be removed. It’s the risk involved in having him handle our nuclear weapons and be responsible for dealing with the nuclear weapons and ICBM’s under development in North Korea. It’s a close look at how he’s going about setting our policy in Afghanistan based on 19th-Century ideas about colonial exploitation of mineral resources and claiming the spoils of war. The man is nuttier than a Snickers Bar, and a real live demonstration of The Emperor Wears No Clothes fable. I don’t care that he routinely incriminates himself. In fact, that makes it easier to make the case for removing him. What I care about is that he’s in charge of the largest and most lethal arsenal ever assembled on Earth, and no human being can safely trust him with that responsibility.

I’m glad that Douthat and his ideological kin see things largely the same way that I do, but I wish they’d make their argument more urgently and with more focus and punch.

This is admittedly, not a subject that I have had my eye on or researched, but the president’s announcement seems impetuous.

In tweets Wednesday morning the president wrote: �After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you�

A quick glance at Wikipedia refreshed my memory and taught me a few things I did not know.

Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James openly supported a change to the military’s transgender policy, stating in 2014 that it was likely to be reviewed in the next year or so. In February 2015, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter made a statement suggesting an openness to including transgender people in the military, stating he was open minded about it, and that nothing but individual lack of merit should preclude such people from service.

Carter’s statement was later endorsed by President Obama. On August 19, 2015, Carter stated in a memo that the Defense Department had begun the process of dismantling the ban and that transgender people would be able to openly serve in the U.S. military by May 27 of the following year.

It was announced on June 30, 2016 that, beginning on that date, otherwise qualified United States service members could not any longer be discharged, denied reenlistment, involuntarily separated, or denied continuation of service because of being transgender.

Obviously, the Obama administration went through a fairly lengthy process before they made these changes in policy. From reporting I found in The Hill and elsewhere , I learned that these policies were to apply to people already serving in the military and that Defense Secretary James Mattis needed to decide if transgender people would be accepted as new recruits. Maybe that decision has been made in the negative and this is what Trump is describing. If so, maybe there was some kind of deliberative process, although the way the president announced his decision seems preemptory and unfeeling.

On the other hand, what Trump actually wrote is that “the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military.” If that is accurate, then it’s a pure reversal of Obama’s policies and maybe the announcement of something more discriminatory than what existed prior to those reforms.

Here’s how things looked at a week ago:

Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work issued a memo on May 8th of this year instructing service secretaries and chiefs to assess the military’s “readinesss to begin accepting transgender applicants on July 1st, 2017.” Those assessments were due on May 31st. Transgender advocates argue that Work’s statement left room for services to pull out of the implementation plan. “The personnel policies of this Department are designed to enhance the warfighting readiness and lethality of the force that protects our country,” Work wrote. “We do not intend to reconsider prior decisions unless they cause readiness problems that could lessen our ability to fight, survive, and win on the battlefield.”

Since readiness and health-care costs are ostensibly the primary concerns of top military personnel, let’s look at the evidence to see if this supposed well-placed hand-wringing might actually be window dressing that obscures more deeply rooted bigotry.

The centrist RAND Corporation issued a report in 2016 that found that open transgender service would have “minimal impact on readiness and health-care costs.” Researchers estimated that “10 to 130 active component members each year could have reduced deployability as a result of gender transition-related treatments.” In terms of health-care costs, “the study estimated that between 30 and 140 new hormone treatments could be initiated a year and 25 to 130 transition-related surgeries could be utilized a year among active component service members. Additional health-care costs could range between $2.4 million and $8.4 million, representing an approximate 0.13-percent increase.”

Similarly, a 2014 report�by the Palm Center, an independent think tank, found that creating a policy that would allow open transgender service would be “administratively feasible and neither excessively complex nor burdensome.”

Estimates of how many transgender people are already serving in the active military and reserves vary from 2,500 up to around 15,000, but this is really more about rights and principles than numbers.

Trump has made his decision, and it looks like he took the harshest option.

At this point it would be a mercy if we had to unconditionally surrender to some foreign liberator.

The Senate hasn’t posted the roll call yet, but the Republicans managed to clear a major hurdle in their quest to deny tens of millions of Americans access to health care. With Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska dissenting, the Senate voted 51-50 on a motion to proceed to some nebulous set of amendments that doesn’t currently even resemble a bill. Vice-President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote. This is further than I thought they would get, mainly because losing this vote would have been the most painless way to end their agony. Instead, they must go through an exhausting process that will be humiliating and dishonorable.

After the vote, Sen. John McCain was provided fifteen minutes to talk to his fellow senators, and he made clear that he did not think that a bill will pass using this process and that he had no intention of voting for anything he can see as being on the table. Without his vote or the votes of Collins and Murkowski, the bill will fail. But it will also fail if it includes crippling Medicaid cuts or if it does not include crippling Medicaid cuts. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has never been able to resolve that conundrum, and it’s not at all clear that he’ll discover a solution now. Finding a solution that can satisfy senators from states that have expanded Medicaid like Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, Dean Heller of Nevada, and Shelley Moore-Capito of West Virginia might be possible, but not in a way that will be acceptable to hardcore opponents of Obamacare like Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and Mike Lee of Utah.

Still, the battle is now on. Even if what emerges from this bill is watered down, it’s likely to be quite damaging to our health care system if anything passes. The Democrats better have had a big bowl of Wheaties this morning, because they’ll need to be ready to use every parliamentary trick and every poison amendment to assure that the end product will not be broadly acceptable to the entire Republican caucus.

The danger could have ended today, but it did not. If calls to your representatives were urgent yesterday, they’re doubly so now.

Once I heard that Mueller was looking into Trump's businesses, I knew Ivanka would be lawyering up soon.

Things seem to be moving fast on the Jeff Sessions front.

#BREAKING Decision 'soon' on fate of US attorney general Sessions: White House

— AFP news agency (@AFP) July 25, 2017

That’s sounds to me like Trump is about to fire his Attorney General, but maybe it’s just a head-fake.

I asked two ppl close to Trump why he is tormenting Sessions instead of firing him. The answer from both, paraphrased: Because he can.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) July 25, 2017

It could be that Trump just wants to tear the legs and wings off Sessions and watch him writhe around in pain, but there may also be a legal and political strategy involved, however misguided. If Sessions were to resign voluntarily, it would be hard to pin on Trump as more evidence of obstruction of justice. If he were to leave of his own volition, Trump would also have an easier time getting his replacement through the confirmation process in the Senate.

So, it could be that Trump is torturing Sessions for the pure sadistic pleasure it brings him, but there’s another possibility.

Finally, it could also be that Trump has now run out of patience and will just go ahead and can Sessions since the Attorney General clearly can’t take a hint.

If this is all part of an effort to kill the Russia investigation, it won’t be smooth. Sessions has many friends in the Senate, and the Senate will insist that any replacement agree not to fire Mueller without cause. My suspicion is that Trump has another plan that will involve utilizing an interim replacement to fire Mueller, but that won’t be easy, either. I’m not clear on all the rules and norms of what happens when an Attorney General resigns, so I can’t game this all out at the moment. It looks like I have homework to do.

I wrote yesterday about the possibility that Rex Tillerson might resign as Secretary of State. He has a list of things he’s angry about, but one item is that he doesn’t like how Attorney General Jeff Sessions is being treated. If Erick Erickson can be believed, Tillerson isn’t the only cabinet member who is displeased with the president’s attacks on Sessions.

�If he can get treated that way, what about the rest of us?� one of the President�s Cabinet secretaries asked me with both shock and anger in his voice. I am told reports about Rex Tillerson (not who I talked to) are legitimate. He is quite perturbed with the President�s treatment of his Attorney General and is ready to quit. Secretary Mattis (also not who I talked to) is also bothered by it. They and other Cabinet members are already frustrated by the slow pace of appointments for their staffs, the vetoes over qualified people for not being sufficiently pro-Trump, and the Senate confirmation pace.

In fact, the Cabinet secretary I talked to raised the issue of the White House staff vetoes over loyalty, blasting the White House staff for blocking qualified people of like mind because they were not pro-Trump and now the President is ready to fire the most loyal of all the Cabinet members. �It�s more of a clusterf**k than you even know,� the Cabinet secretary tells me about dealing with the White House on policy. It is not just Tillerson ready to bail.

This is all cast as largely about staffing and independence, and then secondarily about basic respect. But it has to be about the whole package represented by Trump, including his lack of ethics, discipline, focus, knowledge and common sense. And, of course, there’s the lack of effectiveness and the fact that Trump often makes their jobs harder, especially if they have to interact with foreign countries or are responsible for our security.

Trump doesn’t treat his cabinet well and can’t even show loyalty to his most loyal supporter, and he makes their jobs unpleasant and needlessly difficult and thankless.

This is easy to see even from the outside, but now we’re getting dispatches from the inside. I expect that the edifice of this administration is made of straw. It is not built to weather a storm.

The Washington Monthly has been writing about issues related to monopolies, corporate consolidation, and antitrust enforcement since at least 2001. If has often felt like a lonely quest. So it was with some considerable satisfaction that we looked in our daily issues of the Washington Post and New York Times this morning and saw editorials by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer indicating that the Democratic Party is finally getting our message. The party leaders wrote that the Democrats are going to “fight to allow regulators to break up big companies if they’re hurting consumers and to make it harder for companies to merge if it reduces competition,” and emphasized that they intend to start “cracking down on the monopolies and big corporate mergers that harm consumers, workers and competition.”

Last October, Editor in Chief Paul Glastris put together a comprehensive recap of our magazine’s greatest hits on these issues. He noted that we ran articles starting in the first year of the younger Bush’s administration by Karen Kornbluh, Nicholas Thompson and John Podesta about how telecom monopolies were crushing competition in the broadband market. In 2004, we published a piece by CNN founder Ted Turner explaining how the broadcast and entertainment industries were rapidly consolidating, making it impossible for a younger generation of media entrepreneurs to get a foothold. Here are some of the other pieces that Glastris identified:

In 2010, New America’s Barry Lynn, author of the book Cornered, and Phil Longman published a seminal Monthly cover story  revealing that virtually every industry sector, from banking to beer to eyeglasses, had become similarly controlled by one or a few big corporations and that this locking up of markets is a major, under appreciated cause of the long-term slowdown in job growth. Lynn and Longman also made clear that consolidation was not some natural occurrence but the result of a deliberate strategy by the Reagan administration to all but end antitrust enforcement, a policy the next four administrations, to varying degrees, continued.

Subsequent pieces in the Washington Monthly by Lynn, Longman and others connected with New America’s Open Markets program filled out the picture. They showed how strong antitrust enforcement beginning in the latter New Deal years set the stage for four decades of strong economic growth. They explained how monopolized markets threaten unions; how growing monopoly power has warped the airline and hospital sectors; and how U.S. entrepreneurship, once thought to be America’s great competitive advantage, has in fact been in decline due to consolidation. Finally, they demonstrated how consolidation is driving the growing regional inequality of America, with half a dozen big metro areas, mostly on the coasts, gobbling up all the income growth and corporate headquarters while  smaller metro areas sink into relative decline despite their best efforts to compete.

More recently, we’ve run a piece on how conservatism can make itself great again by rediscovering its historic hatred of monopolies, another linking the decline in black business ownership to reduced enforcement of anti-monopoly and fair trade laws beginning in the late 1970s, and I had a piece in the latest issue of the magazine on How to Win Rural Voters Without Losing Liberal Values that emphasized the need to reinvigorate small-town America’s economic vitality by utilizing greater anti-monopoly regulation.

Maybe our sheer persistence has finally paid off, but other factors certainly contributed. Donald Trump’s shocking strength in rural and small-town America won him an Electoral College victory, indicating a level of stress in those communities not sufficiently recognized by the Democratic party leadership. And new post-election polling came out that validates what we’ve been saying, which is not only that these issues are of concern to the American people and that they understand them better than they are often given credit for, but that there is real political potential here. In a memo from Geoff Garin of Hart Associates Polling, some of these numbers were spelled out:

As Senate and House Democrats begin to roll out their new Better Deal Economic Agenda, a review of recent public opinion polling shows that the central themes and frames that are at the heart of this agenda match closely with the experiences, values, and priorities of American voters today. Moreover, the Democratic policies related to curbing excessive corporate power that are being highlighted in the first day of the rollout have real resonance with voters and are strongly supported by a significant majority of Americans.

For example, fully 79% of voters in Senate battleground states agree that, “the rules of the economy today are rigged against average Americans, and America’s working families need a better deal.” Eighty-five percent (85%) of those who voted for Hillary Clinton agree with this statement, but so do 74% of those who voted for Donald Trump (43% of whom strongly agree). Indeed, more voters in the battleground states agree with this critique of the economy than a critique that says “the problem with the economy today is a big government that spends too much, taxes too much, and puts too many burdens on businesses.”

What’s remarkable about these numbers is that the Republicans have been hammering on excessive government spending, regulation and taxation for decades and yet the American people largely reject that in favor of a rigged system explanation for their economic problems that neither party has been hitting with any consistency or sustained broad focus. To be sure, we’ve heard some rhetoric from candidates like John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders emphasized the rigged nature of the economy while focusing more on banks and billionaires than antitrust and antimonopoly policies. The message Sanders sent is possibly still fresh, but you can see that it has resonance:

Similarly, a large majority of battleground state voters respond favorably to a statement of the premise and direction that define the Better Deal Economic Agenda, transcending partisanship even when the statement is explicitly described as coming from Democrats:

”Too many families in America today feel that the rules of the economy are rigged against them. Special interests have a strangle-hold on Washington—from the super-rich spending unlimited amounts of secret money to influence our elections, to the huge loopholes in our tax code that help corporations avoid paying taxes. The basic bargain that hard-working men and women can keep a good job, make a decent living, and provide for their families is no longer attainable for too many people. But it does not have to be this way. If the government goes back to putting working families first, ahead of special interests, we can achieve a better deal for the American people that will raise their pay, lower their expenses, and prepare them for the future.”

In the red states of Indiana, Montana, Missouri, North Dakota, and West Virginia, 73% express a favorable reaction to this statement of Democratic economic thinking, as do a similar proportion of voters in the purple states of Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Support for this Democratic approach withstands Republican criticisms that it would lead to bigger government, higher taxes, and more interference with free enterprise—a contention that only three in 10 voters find to be convincing.

On the specific issue of too much corporate consolidation, you may be surprised to see how strongly it polls:

National polling also shows the breadth of concern about excessive corporate power and its impacts. By two to one (67% to 33%), for example, Americans believe it is a bigger problem that “huge corporations and billionaires are using their political power to reduce competition, keep wages low, and get special tax breaks” than that “government is imposing too many job-killing regulations on businesses and taxing people too much.” Indeed, 86% of voters agree that, “our economy is increasingly dominated by a small number of very large corporations,” and most voters believe this leads to consequences that often affect them personally. Fifty-seven percent (57%) say it is true that President Trump and Republicans, “are driving up prices for consumers by allowing a few huge corporations to dominate our government and economy.”

We often get pushback from liberal-minded people that Trump voters are out of reach, motivated more by fear and hatred than economic self-interest, and too unsophisticated to respond to wonkish talk about antitrust enforcement. But these polling results indicate that they understand and that they figured out the problem with corporate dominance of the marketplace long before Pelosi and Schumer did.

Whether the strength of our arguments finally broke through or the polling numbers were too clear to be ignored, the Democratic leadership has finally gotten our message. And that is vindication enough for us, at least for now.