Yeah, It's A Quiet Constitutional Crisis

I think there are numerous signs now that the lizard people are scrambling for a Plan B:

• Hillary Clinton 2024 Gains Steam
• Biden-Cheney 2024?
• VP Harris Dodges on if There Will Be Same 2024 Democrat Ticket
• Nancy Pelosi's Eyebrows Are A Thing -- No, Really
• Nancy Pelosi makes millions off tech stocks

It's becoming harder and harder to finesse the failure of the Biden-Pelosi agenda, and one sign of it is, as I pointed out yesterday, that the elevation of the speaker's eyebrows is an annual event that up to now has caused little comment. Today, it's a thing.

One did not, up to now, disrespect the speaker. Indeed, the direct comparison to Michael Jackson raises the even less mentionable circumstance, that Speaker Pelosi's public persona is basically that of a drag queen. The media at this point, now that her signature issue is lost, has no reason to cover for her.

It's also significant that Hillary Clinton is reemerging as a potential cure to the problem:

In the last few weeks, Hillary Clinton has been all over the media, sounding warning bells about the midterm elections and the dangers of President Trump returning to the White House in 2024. Many commentators wondered if she was positioning herself to run for president again.

. . . The rumor mill cranking was crazy enough. Now two long-time Clintonites are advocating for it. Douglas Schoen and Andrew Stein opined for 17 paragraphs on the case for the Empress of Chappaqua to run in 2024. Their reasoning is pretty astounding. First, they note Joe Biden’s age; he will be 82 at reelection time. They also note Vice President Kamala Harris’s unpopularity, which surprised no one who watched the Democratic primary. She was the first to drop out, and black voters never flocked to her. She did not even lead in her home state of California.

Unfortunately, as Schoen and Stein note, there is not another leading Democrat burning up the national stage ahead of 2024. The attempts to make Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg a thing fizzled. The other prominent members of the administration have approval ratings hovering around 30%. Former stars have also lost their shine. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo resigned in disgrace. California Gov. Gavin Newsom faced a recall and has radical COVID policies that are unpopular nationally. Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s tin pot dictator, faces reelection in 2022, and it is not clear she will be successful.

All of this while President Brandon, still with days remaining in his first year in office and, unable to secure unanimous votes for his program in his own party, is effectively denouncing fellow Democrats as domestic terrorists. And the lizard people are out of Democrat options, while the entire line of presidential succession is hemorrhaging credibility. In 1974, the lizard people were able to resolve a constitutional crisis (effectively of their own making) quite smoothly.

This constitutional crisis, while it's certainly the result of electoral consequences that were of the lizard people's making, has spiraled into something beyond their control. They don't have ready replacements for Agnew and Nixon the way they did in 1974. The best outcome we can hope for is a year, or maybe three, of this bizarre comedy.

Updating The Götterdämmerung Strategy

Last summer, I posted on

what in early 2021 seemed to be a consensus "Götterdämmerung strategy" among the elites, whereby Speaker Pelosi, possibly expected to retire after the 2022 election, would use slim congressional majorities, plus control of the White House, to enact a massive Great Reset agenda and ignore the post-2022 consequences because, well, she'd be retired by then. I likened this to someone who, assuming the world would end on December 21, decided to run up a huge credit card bill that would never need to be repaid.

I was always skeptical that this would work, but there have been only a few voices of sanity over the past year who raised the point that Pelosi had only a single-digit majority in the House, with the Senate evenly tied. Throughout the fall and winter, it became more clear that there weren't enough votes among Senate Democrats even to reach a tie on the Götterdämmerung agenda. Beyond that, House Republican leader McCarthy is announcing plans to nationalize the 2022 midterms by directly opposing any Götterdämmerung grand reset.

The reaction among Democrat leadership so far appears to be denial. Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, who would presumably be among those who would benefit most by the reset, distanced herself from its most prominent advocate by missing President Biden's speech endorsing ending the filibuster:

Failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams declined to attend the event in what was seen as a snub of the Biden administration. However, her team claimed her absence was the result of a scheduling conflict. However, some have speculated that Abrams is hesitant about appearing on a stage with President Biden given his sagging approval ratings.

MSNBC media activist Joe Scarborough on Tuesday pointed out that this would have been “an event custom-made for Abrams” and that “she obviously doesn’t want to be on the same stage as Joe Biden.”

Meanwhile, Speaker Pelosi is the subject of renewed speculation about plastic surgery. A web search suggests that questions about her eyebrows have come up in recent years on an annual basis, and yesterday's comments are nothing new. The photo below is from 2019:

The annual re-raising of the eyebrow level suggests Speaker Pelosi is so far still reluctant to acknowledge the passage of time. Although the headlines are that she's "expected" to retire, there's been no announcement.

If you think about it, believing the world will end on December 21 is at least a consistent set of beliefs, and in that case, it could well be reasonable to calculate that you could run your credit cards up to the limit by November 30, enjoy the last few weeks on your new yacht, and never have to repay the card when the bills come in over the next month.

But that does require minimal attention to the calendar and your credit limit, even leaving aside the possibility that the Götterdämmerung doesn't happen on schedule. The current leadership doesn't seem capable of even this.

Let's hope that this provides only amusement over the next year.

COVID Narrative Collapsing

On Friday, President Biden gave a typically incoherent statement on COVID:

President Joe Biden said on Friday he did not believe the coronavirus will be a permanent affliction for Americans.

"No, I don't think COVID is here to stay," Biden told reporters after remarks on the U.S. economy. "The new normal is not going to be what it is now, it's going to be better."

But all of a sudden, for reasons that aren't clear to me at all, the emphasis has shifted from shots to tests.

Nearly 50 House and Senate Democrats are calling on the Biden administration to substantially increase the nation's supply of rapid COVID-19 tests.

In a letter led by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the lawmakers acknowledged efforts already underway, like acquiring 500 million additional tests and setting up federal testing sites, but said the administration needs to do more to boost supplies.

"But as the Omicron variant spreads and we enter an ominous and unprecedented next phase of this pandemic, it is critical that we ensure these efforts meet the severity of the moment," the lawmakers wrote.

So the next phase is "ominous and unprecedented". The increase in positive cases is exponential and off the charts. But instead of new demands that the unvaxxed get vaxxed, we now need to have -- more rapid test kits?

The lawmakers had a list of specific policy asks, including manufacturing enough tests that every American could take at least one rapid test per week, and ensuring that Americans without internet access can order free COVID-19 rapid tests delivered to their home.

So the new new normal is going to be better than the old new normal, and that will include everyone getting the jabs, as well as everyone taking at least one rapid test per week? Doesn't sound better to me. Nevertheless,

We’re seeing a massive shift from the Biden team and the Democrats.

. . . “Everyone thought the vaccines were going to solve everything, which meant the administration took its eye off the ball when it came to testing,” [Dr Zeke] Emanuel had said earlier last week.

Emanuel noted that they finally had gotten a reasonable testing process in place [under Trump] but then that got dismantled under Biden after the vaccine when they then came to rely upon that.

The Biden team fully focused on vaccines and masking, to the detriment of testing and treatment. So that explains why Biden ran on testing, promised Americans tests, and then didn’t come through with them? And now you have all kinds of restrictions and mandates that are conditioned on tests?

On one hand, yes, if you take seriously the vax mandates that say more or less that you can keep your job without the jabs if you get tested once a week, but I have no idea how that gets enforced. But with the federal vax mandates on shaky legal ground, why does everyone need a weekly test otherwise?

And if everyone gets tested, what do they do if they get a positive? Emergency rooms were flooded last year when people got positive tests and, though without symptoms, thought they needed to do something about it. More recently, the CDC has issued confusing guidelines:

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance on the recommended Covid-19 isolation period Tuesday, telling people that if they have access to a Covid-19 test and want to take it, the best approach is to use a rapid test toward the end of their five-day isolation period.

The agency has faced pressure over the past week from outside medical experts to include a testing component in its new shortened isolation period. The updated recommendations do not advise a test for isolated people, but they offer guidance on how those people should respond to a test result if they choose to take one. If the test is positive, isolated people are advised to continue their isolation until 10 days after their symptoms started. If the test is negative, isolated people can end their isolation but are advised to wear a mask around other people until day 10.

As far as I can tell, this is for people without COVID symptoms who for whatever reason are moved to take one of those free rapid COVID tests and, without symptoms, turn out to test positive. If they have no symptoms, as far as I can understand this, they can take another test at the end of the five-day isolation period if they want to. If they do and they test positive, they isolate for five more days. If it's negative, well, OK, but wear a mask for five more days.

If they want to. Or do I have this wrong? Just a month ago, President Brandon was predicting "a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated -- for themselves, their families and the hospitals they'll soon overwhelm." But if everyone gets their rapid COVID test and follows the new isolation protocols, well then, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Forecast: More Angry Joe

According to Politico yesterday,

Fresh off a high-profile speech in which he warned that a dagger had been placed at the throat of American democracy, President Joe Biden will travel to the state that White House officials view as “ground zero” for Republican-led election suppression efforts.

Biden will speak in Georgia on Tuesday. In his remarks, he is expected to not only echo the themes of his address on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection but to expand on his endorsement of a filibuster carveout to pass voting rights legislation in the Senate.

. . . “We are doubling down, kicking it into another gear, we are going right to the belly of the beast, or ground zero, for voter suppression, voter subversion and obstruction,” said Cedric Richmond, White House senior adviser and director of the Office of Public Engagement.

Politico makes the point that the real issue isn't Georgia, it's Sen Manchin, though Manchin himself isn't named:

“It's really about the fact that there's a vote coming up,” said Richmond. “The Senate leader has voiced his plan. We supported his plan, and we're going to use the White House to try to galvanize the votes.”

Despite the renewed push by the White House, major hurdles remain in the form of Senate Democrats not yet willing to make changes to the filibuster rules. Richmond said that Biden continues to talk to lawmakers one-on-one and with the group of senators spearheading talk of how to get the voting and elections reform bills passed. “He’s been working the phones on voting rights,” he added.

Here's what's puzzling. Manchin has been sending the message, as of last weekend at least twice, that scolding him in public is counterproductive. Apparently Biden's staff is continuing to reassure him that instead, it will bring Manchin around if he just does it more. As I noted yesterday, the staff appears to be leaking stuff to the press that negotiations are under way, while Manchin keeps saying no such thing is happening. The last paragraph above seems to be a variation on this theme.

Last week I linked to stories that also suggested the angry tone of Biden's January 6 address came from Biden himself, not just his staff. We may assume that any continued angry tone in Atlanta will come from Biden himself as well. This will mostly just galvanize the Trump base and poison the atmosphere going into the midterms.

This also effectively plays into House Republican leader McCarthy's strategy for the election:

“Any time you have an election that has contrast, clear contrast—like, if Republicans were trusted with the majority, what would you do?” McCarthy said. “We’ll come out with a Commitment to America. What we’ve been doing for the last year is all the members are on task forces. We’ve been working on policy.”

Some specific policy items he previewed that will be in it include the GOP’s “Parents’ Bill of Rights,” plans to secure the border and for holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable for the coronavirus pandemic, Republicans’ public safety vision to contrast with Democrat pushes to defund police, energy policies, and perhaps most importantly economic policies to stop inflation.

One thing that stumps me is that, in the wake of the Christmas Eve Let's go Brandon troll on national TV, Biden didn't immediately shift to endorsing, but redefining, Let's go Brandon himself. In his public statements earlier last fall, Brandon Brown expressed the idea that the chant was more of a positive message about America than a specific denunciation of Biden, and the announcement of his aborted NASCAR sponsorship made the same point. Biden himself missed an opportunity at Christmas to use his gaffe to co-opt the chant and even insist that it reflected his own positive agenda.

Instead, his message is angry and scolding. I'm more and more convinced that it doesn't come from his handlers, it comes from the big guy himself. Some of his handlers may even know better, but that's how they keep their jobs.

Dual Narratives At The Highest Level

Two recent stories provide what I think is an insight into high-level thought processes in Washington. The first is from Friday in Politico:

The White House is looking to Sen. MARK WARNER (D-Va.) to help thaw out its frosty relationship with Sen. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.) in hopes of resurrecting President JOE BIDEN’s Build Back Better plan.

Two senior Senate sources said that Warner, one of Manchin’s closest friends and his former housemate, will be involved in any future BBB talks. Manchin has said publicly that he’s not negotiating with the White House. Privately, he has been even more pessimistic.

. . . Spokespeople for both Warner and Biden demurred about the specifics of the Virginia senator’s exact role in the effort to win over Manchin.

“Sen. Warner and Sen. Manchin are good friends,” a Warner spokesperson told Playbook. “They talk regularly, sometimes about policy and sometimes just shooting the breeze. I wouldn’t call those conversations ‘negotiations.’”

But yesterday, according to the New York Post,

Sen. Joe Manchin has yanked his proposal for a $1.8 trillion compromise on President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan off the table, according to reports — potentially the final nail in the coffin of the Democratic Party’s signature social-spending agenda.

The West Virginia Democrat’s about-face was reported Saturday by the Washington Post, citing three unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter.

The report came days after Manchin told the media that he was no longer discussing Biden’s long-sought bill with the White House.

. . . With the Senate divided 50-50, lockstep Democratic unanimity is required for the budget bill to become law.

But insiders say he would be a “no” vote even on his own compromise, as a result of the White House’s blistering response when Manchin put the kibosh on the bill in a Dec. 19 Fox News appearance.

As best I can surmise, White House people are doing their best to feed a narrative into legacy media that efforts are still underway to pass the BBB, while Sen Manchin, the most visible obstacle, seems to be increasingly frustrated that his position is being mischaracterized in those efforts. I don't think his Saturday statement is just a coincidence.

Other stories seem to project the same unwarranted optimism:

According to a report, Democrats are so desperate to eliminate the Senate filibuster — which would enable the Democrats, who control the Senate, to pass legislation regarding voting that would be highly favorable to them— that two former presidents and celebrity Oprah Winfrey have contacted Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who is considered the pivotal vote in the Senate, to pressure him into accepting the filibuster’s demise.

Former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have joined Winfrey in the cooperative effort to persuade Manchin, according to Politico.

“Manchin has told colleagues that his phone line has been lighting up with prominent names outside the Senate in recent days. He’s heard from former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and talk-show legend Oprah Winfrey, plus former staffers to both Manchin and former Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), according to a person familiar with the talks,” Politico reported.

At whom are these stories directed? The public at large is yawning, and indeed, his home state constituency likes him twice as much as they like President Biden. Attempts by the White House to spin things to make it look like Manchin will cave are either feckless or completely counterproductive, which is what we saw yesterday.

So who benefits from the false optimism? I'm convinced it's the current Democrat leadership, Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer, and their immediate staff, who are maintaining their positions by enabling the leadership's fantasy that things are just on the verge of being turned around. But this is nothing but fantasy.

Stein's Law: That which cannot continue must stop.

"Donald Trump Was The True Winner"

Even the legacy media is acknowledging, as Newsweek did, that Donald Trump was the true winner of the January 6 commemorations.

After the storming of the U.S. Capitol, GOP insiders told The Intelligencer they had lost patience with Trump, whom they predicted would face waning influence within the party. Trump's closest allies also feared that his role as the riot's catalyst would hurt his legacy and the party.

However, Civiqs' daily tracking polls have shown that following the tumultuous 12 months since the riots, Trump's standing among Republicans is largely unchanged.

Just before the insurrection, 83 percent of registered Republican voters surveyed said they had a "favorable" opinion of Trump. That rating stayed above 80 percent every month until August 2021, and was still as high as 76 percent by the end of December.

CNN went a little farther and acknowledged that the problem isn't just with Republicans.

It was only a little more than a month ago when President Joe Biden, asked about another head-shaking revelation regarding his predecessor, seemed to balk at a mere mention of the man.

"I don't think about the former President," he claimed, pausing for dramatic effect before walking offstage at the White House. But on Thursday, it was evident Biden has actually been thinking quite a lot about Donald Trump.

. . . As he prepares to enter the second year of his presidency, advisers say Biden is still adamant about not allowing his predecessor to overshadow his administration. But on the one-year anniversary of a historic day, Biden not only signed off on the fiery tone he brought to his speech marking the occasion at the Capitol, he also helped write some of the lines himself.

The Babylon Bee was even more incisive:

As a dismal job numbers and economic data were released this week, many are regretting Buffalo Guy didn’t manage to body-slam Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and seize the presidency.

The superviolent insurrection on January 6th was initially met with disdain by a majority of Americans, but though they may disagree with the methods, they now find themselves wishing Biden was not the president.

. . . Experts agree that in addition to creating more jobs, Buffalo Guy would have restored a sense of grace and dignity back to the White House.

We're in an odd set of circumstances. On one hand, there's so far not much evidence that the 2020 election was actually stolen. And on the whole, most voters are behaving as though it was legitimate and are trusting their ability to work through the political process to resolve the issues.

On the other hand, the result on the ground of the 2020 election has been, as I've been saying, a quiet constitutional crisis notwithstanding its apparent legitimacy. This is the subtext of the Babylon Bee story: if the crazies who surged into the Capitol had actually taken over, maybe things would even have turned out better than they have with Biden, Harris, and Pelosi.

It's plain that the unspoken issue is that a year after the election, Donald Trump hasn't gone away. As Rush Limbaugh would have put it, Trump is living rent-free in Biden's head. As of now, Trump is the overwhelming favorite for the 2024 Republican nomination, and will likely defeat either Biden or Harris if either is the 2024 Democrat candidate.

Indeed, the whole intent of the January 6 commemoration was to cook up some sort of consensus that Trump must be made somehow ineligible to run. It that, it failed, and it even unintentionally focused even closer attention on the failure of Biden's leadership.

I Don't Think We've Seen The Last Of Brandon

As a non-lawyer who nevertheless got a lot of experience covering lawsuits in the former blog, I'm particularly interested in developments with NASCAR driver Brandon Brown's efforts to find a sponsor in the face of corporate NASCAR's wish to make him just go away. No lawsuits have been filed yet, but they're plainly just offstage, yet the usual independent media legal commentators have so far had nothing to say. They're still preoccupied with Ghislaine Maxwell, which has turned out to be a bore, or January 6, ditto.

There are three parties to this matter. The first is Brandon Brown himself, who had been developing a promising career as a driver, and who had just celebrated his first major win as Talladega, AL spectators chanted "[redacted] Joe Biden!" in the stands. An interviewer attempted to sanitize this by saying they were actually chanting "Let's go Brandon!", but perversely, this immediately became a meme for the other expression in the national consciousness, to the extent that a Christmas caller was able to get an unwitting Biden himself to repeat it on national TV, to the glee of just about everyone but corporate NASCAR.

Corporate NASCAR is the second party. It was already highly uncomfortable with the implicit association of those sentiments with its audience and brand, and it had already made attempts to suppress "Let's go, Brandon!" at its events, as well as assiduously suppressing merchandise that implied any NASCAR endorsement of the chant. As for Brandon Brown himself, it was clearly NASCAR's wish that he be quietly airbrushed from the picture. Sorry, guy, breaks. Nothing personal, just learn to code.

Brown himself, however, had already said in various public statements that he wished to continue a NASCAR career, where he had become a promising second-tier driver, but the completely involuntary association had made it difficult to get sponsors. Enter LGBcoin, which Fox News describes as a collectible meme coin associated with the chant but is apparently a cryptocurrency. According to the story,

Brown’s team received approval from a racing operations employee for its sponsor and paint scheme on Dec. 26, but NASCAR indicated that sponsorship needed approval from higher-ranking officials.

On Tuesday, NASCAR announced its decision to not approve the sponsorship.

The situation has turned into a polarizing story with lots of chatter about whether the sponsorship was approved and then NASCAR backtracked, or whether Brown’s team should have known that NASCAR senior management wouldn’t approve the sponsorship based on a meeting with the team in November. The largest investor into LGBcoin is threatening a lawsuit, citing damages to those who invested in the cryptocurrency, the value of which dropped in the hours after NASCAR’s decision.

LGBCoin is the third party, which has interests allied with, but not identical to, Brown and his team, and it is clearly already threatening legal action. James Koutoulas, the investor, retweeted a summary of the situaion as he sees it (click on the image for the full text):

Someone smart on @NASCAR @Reddit Re @LGBcoin_io pic.twitter.com/68eQPd2ROw

— James Koutoulas (@jameskoutoulas) January 5, 2022

The Brown team's version is more restrained but makes the same basic point:

"The bottom line is that Brandonbilt Motorsports followed the standard process for sponsor and paint scheme approval and received approval from a NASCAR official empowered to make those decisions, and who makes those decisions on a regular basis. This official then confirmed and reiterated that we had received approval in a phone conversation after the announcement was made.

. . . "Like every team, we rely on productive and friendly working relationships at all levels of NASCAR. Unfortunately, NASCAR leadership's handling of this situation now threatens to strain our relationships and places us in an incredibly awkward position, yet again."

It's hard not to surmise from both these statements that lawyers are working on the matter as we speak. It sounds to me as though there is written confirmation of a sponsorship approval from NASCAR, as both Brown and Koutoulas refer to it. In that case, the legal principles behind both the Brown and Koutoulas strategies would at least be tortious interference by NASCAR with a contract between Brown and Koutoulas, as well as bad faith. Bad faith in turn would allow punitive damages. In fact, "Joe Blow was not authorized to approve that deal", which is essentially NASCAR's position in public statements, is a standard bad faith tactic.

In addition, NASCAR has historically approved political sponsorships, including BLM but also Trump 2020, as the photo at the top of this post indicates. The problem for NASCAR is that their choices look arbitrary.

On top of that, Koutoulas has strongly implied, and Brown has implied more subtly, that they will create a public relations firestorm for NASCAR. The first upcoming NASCAR event is the Daytona 500 on February 19-21, a little over a month away. It will be interesting to see what sorts of chants emerge from the stands then.

My wife, a retired attorney, thinks both NASCAR's inside and outside counsel have been AWOL. Get out the popcorn.