Threat To Trump In November If Democrats Flip House?

Over the past couple of days, I've seen two references to a potential problem for Trump, even if he continues to do well in the polls, if enough Republicans resign from the House to give the majority to the Democrats.

Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) will retire from the House months before his term ends next year, setting up a scenario where House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) could have a one-seat majority.

. . . Gallagher's departure will bring a math problem for Johnson as the chamber seeks to fill a slew of other vacancies announced over the last few months. As of next week, there are four empty seats vacated by Reps. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Bill Johnson (R-OH), Brian Higgins (D-NY), and Ken Buck (R-CO), whose last day in office was Friday.

With Gallagher's absence, that brings the Republicans' majority to 217-213 as of April 19. That will be further narrowed for Republicans after the special election for Higgins, which is expected to favor Democrats, bringing their majority to just 217-214, meaning Republicans can only afford to lose one vote on any given measure to pass the lower chamber.

The biggest worry from a worst-case scenario, as articulated by YouTuber Robert Gouveia above and Emerald Robinson below, is that a Democrat majority in both houses could block Trump, either from the ballot or, as Robinson suggests below, via the electoral count.

The early retirements of Ken Buck and Mike Gallagher are part of a scheme by the uniparty cabal to stop Trump from winning the 2024 election.

How? They want to flip the House blue in time to nullify the electoral vote via the 14th Amendment.

— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) March 23, 2024

Robinson doesn't go into detail, and she's a reporter, not a constitutional lawyer. Gouveia, while he's a criminal defense attorney who has specialized in DUI cases, is also not a constitutional lawyer, and so far, I haven't seen any takes from the usual constitutional law commentators like Glenn Reynolds or William Jacobson (I, of course, am no attorney at all). But here is Gouveia's take in the YouTube link above:

[I]f the Democrats retake the House, . . . they may have what it takes to get Trump off the 2024 ballot, and they're going to be able to hang their hat on the SCOTUS decision in Anderson, which of course was the Colorado ballot removal case, which came back out 9 to 0. . . . Why are [Republican Congressmen Ken Buck and Mike Gallagher] leaving right now? . . . If the House flips to the Democrats, . . . we're gong to talk about how this might implicate a ballot removal strategy in five steps.

The steps he outlines are:

1. Dems retake House
2. House Dems pass legislation declaring Trump insurrectionist
3. Senate passes
4. Biden signs
5. Trump removed supported by 9-0 Supreme Court

He explains further, relating to Anderson,

Here is what this opinion says. For its part, the Colorado Supreme Court, which was wrong, they overturned it, they concluded there must be a determination before you remove someone and disqualify them under the 14th Amendment. That's the Insurrection Clause. "What is the deermination?" you're asking. "Who gets to decide?" This was the whole point of the ballot removal case. Jenna Griswold and the Colorado courts, they thought they could make the determination. The Supreme Court said no, you don't get to make that determination. You know who does? Congress.

He doesn't go into any detail on exactly how Congress could make this determination, and at least in Anderson, neither does the court. However, I think he leaves out several key steps. One is that the Democrats have just as slim a majority in the Senate as the Republicans do in the House, and it's questionable whether certain Democrats like Manchin and Sinema, who have announced their retirements, would support this putative "determination" that Trump is an insurrectionist.

Second, the Republicans could invoke the filibuster, requring a 60-vote majority, which would be another obstacle, even if some Republicans like Mitt Romney supported it. In the 2021 Trump impeachment, even though some Republicans voted for removal, only 57% of the Senate voted for it. Although removal requires a two-thirds majority, the "yes" votes didn't even reach the 60% that would be needed to invoke cloture.

Third, any "determination" that Trump is an "insurrectionist" short of a trial and conviction for violation of a specific insurrection law would almost certainly be a bill of attainder, which is prohibited under Article 1 Sections 9 and 10 of the US Constitution. This legal dictionary defines a bill of attainder as

A law that sentences a person, or group of people, to suffer punishment for a crime without being able to exercise their judicial rights in defending themselves.

One of Trump's arguments already before the Supreme Court is that he was already tried for "insurrection" by the Senate in the 2021 impeachment and acquitted, and there has been no other conviction for such a charge; the Washington January 6 case is currently on hold and unlikely to reach a verdict before the election, much less survive inevitable appeals. Thus any congressional action declaring Trump an "insurrectionist" for the purpose of keeping him off the ballot without a trial and guilty verdict would be a bill of attainder. Trump would likely appeal such a "determination" directly to the Supreme Court.

So far, I think linking the resignations of RINO Republicans frustrated with the Freedom Caucus and others is multiplying entities without necessity. The congressmen like McCarthy, Buck, and Gallagher have simpler motives; the're unhappy that the Republican balance is shifting away from Bush-era moderates. I'm sure they have no good wishes for either Trump or Speaker (for now) Johnson, but I don't think there's a deep state plot behind them.

On the other hand, I think Robert Gouveia is normally a better commentator. In this case, he's not thinking things through.

Yeah, It's So Wacky, It Had To Come From Joe Himself

Following up on yesterday's post, I've found a few more data points that make me think Joe is actually driving key parts of foreign and military policy himself, although it's in the context of Robert Gates's assessment, "I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

On Ukraine, Seymour Hersh remarks on Substack,

President Biden’s foreign policy problems in the Middle East and Ukraine are daunting, especially in an election year, but the war between Russia and Ukraine could be nearing a military endgame, and not via negotiations. Vladimir Putin’s military is more entrenched inside Ukraine than ever, and the undermanned and under-equipped Ukraine military is facing a stalemate at best and the permanent loss of four oblasts. In essence, it is a defeat.

. . . Even amid a difficult and costly war that he initiated, Putin remains firmly in control of Russia, despite a series of Western sanctions and wishful thinking in Washington that its military expertise, weapons, and enthusiasm for the war would loosen his grip on power. Blindfolded by ideology, Biden wants the candy of regime change, but Putin has proven to be an iron-clad piñata.

It's difficult to parse out what Biden's strategic goala are here, except that there doesn't seem to have been any policy recalibration since early 2023, when the retired generals were still predicting Ukraine would retake Crimea by the end of the year. By November, with no progress on the battlefield, Zelensky canceled elections. At this point, although we hear of Joe shouting and cussing out his staff over the polls, we see no similar impatience over Ukraine.

Maybe he's just happy with things as they are. We still don't have a clear idea of who paid him for what in 2015 -- except that he seemed to work very closely with Victoria Nuland and several Ukrainian oligarchs, who seem to have worked to put us where we are now.

Then there's Gaza:

President Joe Biden’s plan for the U.S. military to construct an artificial port to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza puts U.S. troops at risk for political reasons, experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

. . . However, key aspects of the plan remain undeveloped, including how the administration will ensure the safety of at least 1,000 U.S. troops involved in the mission, calling into question how deeply the administration thought through the plan before announcing it, experts told the DCNF.

“I think the administration is looking for a way to look like they’re increasing aid to Gaza, in some sense to placate their own domestic constituencies,” Michael DiMino, a fellow at the Defense Priorities think tank and former intelligence officer, told the DCNF. “It’s a terrible idea.”

. . . Experts said the plan appears rushed, leaving questions that should be answered already regarding security for U.S. and NGO personnel and the logistics of aid distribution without putting American boots on the ground.

As I noted yesterday, the plan seems so muddled that Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to think the only reasonable use for the port will be to evacuate Palestinians from Gaza, something he would likely appreciate, but the only foreseeable destination for the evacuees would have to be the US. Otherwise, the question remains open how US military and civilian personnel at the port would be protected in a war zone, and precisely what they are expected to accomplish, other than evacuate Palestinians.

Meanwhile, although historically the US has intervened to resolve crises in Haiti, nothing seems to be in the works this time around:

But if the arrival of a multinational security mission seems far off, any hopes for an American intervention appear to be the stuff of history books; US operations in Haiti have so far focused on evacuation flights for American citizens, an undertaking that only started Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the air above Port-au-Prince buzzes constantly with private flights for diplomats and the well-connected.

"Multinational security missions" have always been a euphemism for US intervention:

Headlines have reported that Haiti has requested intervention. This is inaccurate. It’s Haiti’s premier, Ariel Henry, who has requested it. Henry more or less appointed himself prime minister following last July’s assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. He has never had any sort of constitutional authority and indeed, is implicated in Moïse’s assassination. The people he claims to speak for revile him. His only constituency is outside the country. Over the past 15 months, the US has insisted that the opposition, a remarkably broad-based coalition of civil society leaders, activists and popular organizations, negotiate with him.

The last big intervention also began with a “request” by an unelected official. This led to a UN peacekeeping force called Minustah, brought in to “stabilize” Haiti after the US-backed removal of president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. It stayed for 13 years.

The one thing we can be sure of is that under Joe, there won't be any new ideas.

I'm Starting To Wonder If Joe Has Thought This Up Himself

Sometime around February, it looks like the message started to go out to Democrats: we're backing off Israel. My reflexive attitude up to this week had been that this was the brainchild of the big guy's handlers, and they were just feeding him talking points. Now, I'm not so sure. What's changed my mind starts with a Fox News op-ed from Clinton pollster Mark Penn:

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., set off a firestorm of his own making last week as he decided to intervene in Israeli politics by telling Israel to abandon its leader right in the middle of sensitive negotiations with Hamas.

I don’t think Schumer will do that again. He heard from pretty much the world and it’s clear that Schumer is out of touch with Israel or he would have known that telling Israelis what to do is likely to produce the opposite result.

But OK, here's Schumer, apparently not a very observant Jew, but a Jew nonetheless, who represents New York Jews, an important constituency not just in terms of US politics, but in terms of world influence roughly equivalent to Israel itself, and he's throwing Israel under the bus. Mark Penn, who has worked for Israeli politicians as well as the Clintons and others, seems to have a pretty good grasp of how this is playing among Jews and mainstream Americans alike:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired right back, calling it inappropriate to tell an ally and a democracy when they should hold elections and who they should vote for, especially during a war. Israel is the only democracy within the region which otherwise features everything from monarchies, theocracies, Putin puppets, and terrorist regimes. In fact, 72% in the February Economist/YouGov poll see Israel as an ally and friend, while most Americans (57%) see "Palestine" as an enemy and unfriendly.

. . . By about 82 to 18 Americans support Israel over Hamas in this conflict and nearly two-thirds believe that any ceasefire should occur only after Hamas releases the hostages, according to the latest Harvard CAPS Harris poll.

. . . The danger in the politics of what Schumer and Biden are doing is that it emboldens Hamas and actually complicates arriving at any kind of peace. If Biden had remained steadfast in his support for Israel and put the blame on Hamas for creating a tunnel city intertwined with civilian life instead of singling out Netanyahu, Hamas would be fearing extinction and would be much more likely to send out the hostages.

So it isn't bringing about peace in the region, and Penn's argument is very similar to Alan Dershowitz's the other day, that after all, there was a cease fire in effect on October 6; going squishy simply encourages Hamas. But Biden isn't helping himself domestically, either. Penn continues,

The truth is that the electorate is about 2% Jewish and less than 2% Muslim and when asked to name the most important issue, 2% named the Israel-Hamas policy.

In Michigan, 100,000 votes for uncommitted is a small fraction of the 10 million people there and just how likely are they to help elect Donald Trump? And the more Biden has waffled on Israel, the lower his Israel approval ratings have sunk.

. . . Playing domestic politics with the issue will only backfire.

The fact that this idea seems to be so counterproductive in any important way is what suggests to me that Joe came up with it himself. He seems to have a visceral reaction to Netanyahu:

President Biden unexpectedly crossed himself Wednesday [September 20, 2023] during a one-on-one meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in Midtown.

The 80-year-old Roman Catholic president made the conspicuous hand gesture — touching his forehead, stomach and left and right breast area with his right hand — as the Jewish leader began speaking.

And it's hard to avoid thinking the White House has sent the message that senators must get with the program.

In an early general election-phase gift to Republicans, incumbent Democrat U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio was reportedly caught on video saying he "frankly" doesn't "trust" the government of Israel to abide by a ceasefire any more than he does the Hamas terrorists seeking to eliminate the Jewish state.

. . . After some pre-approved questions were answered by Brown and Booker, according to [TikToker] Jordan's retelling, he decided to ask one of his own as the event was ending. "Do you support a ceasefire in Gaza?” Jordan asked while recording with his phone.

"I would answer that question for weeks, 'no,' only because I don't trust that either Hamas or frankly Netanyahu would live up to that ceasefire," Brown said in his off-camera answer.

After capturing Brown's answer, Jordan said in a TikTok recapping the meeting that a staffer for the senator asked Jordan to delete the video and at one point asked for Jordan to "Give me your phone," two requests with which Jordan did not comply.

. . . the reactions from Brown's aides once they realized his comments had been recorded seem to speak for themselves.

Another indication that Joe is running the administration's Gaza policy comes from Netanyahu himself:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly suggested that the new US-built makeshift port off Gaza, which was installed to help ship aid to the besieged enclave, could be used to deport Palestinians.

. . . [S]peaking at a private meeting of the Knessett's Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, Netanyahu suggested the port could also facilitate the removal of Palestinians from Gaza.

Netanyahu said there was "no obstacle" to the Palestinians leaving the Gaza Strip apart from the unwillingness of other countries to accept them, according to a Kan News journalist.

Isn't this just the sort of idea Joe might come up with, importing a whole new set of refugees with a whole new bundle of angry demands on top of the millions already coming over US borders? If Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt don't want that sort of thing, then hey, we'll take them ourselves!

But the actual threat is more immediate:

The New York Sun reported Monday that Old Joe and his henchmen are “reportedly considering leaving Israel short of the armaments it needs to fight Hamas.” The veiled threat was there on that same day, during the callow but thoroughly indoctrinated National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s White House press briefing. A reporter reminded Sullivan that “the deadline for Israel to comply with the National Security Memorandum 20 is coming up on Sunday,” and asked him: “Has Israel responded in writing?”

National Security Memorandum 20 . . . . is only a few weeks old, dating from Feb. 8. It seeks, among other things, to “prevent arms transfers that risk facilitating or otherwise contributing to violations of human rights or international humanitarian law.”

. . . [Y]ou will be absolutely unshocked to learn that Old Joe’s new rule is being applied selectively. The Sun notes that “In reality, arms are sold to foes and allies alike in all five continents, with little notice of rights violations. Mr. Biden urged Congress last month to approve the sale of F-16s to Turkey, even as it massacres Kurds in Iraq and Syria.” No one asked Jake Sullivan at Monday’s press briefing if arms sales to Turkey would be cut off.

Alan Dershnowitz, in the YouTube I linked Wednesday, said at 21:00

Everybody has their red line. I'll tell you what my red line is. If you stop supplying ammunition and arms to Israel and deny them the right to defend themselves, you have crossed my red line. I hope that doesn't happen. I now have a more open mind than I ever thought I would have about whom I will vote for in this election. The Democratic Party cannot take me, the people who listen to me, the people who vote the way I do, they can't take us for granted, sorry.

This particular issue is causing me to move away from the idea that Joe is somehow less than fully functional, at least in certain areas. I really think he's capable of making at least some decisions -- they're just bad ones. If he's losing Dershowitz, which he clearly seems to be in the process of doing, he has a problem of political judgment that goes beyond some potential issue of medical diagnosis.

Joe's Schedule

Over the past couple of weeks, I thought I was beginning to see a pattarn of increased activity from the big guy, if only due to the increased coverage of his fumbles and gaffes on the road. It turns out I was right, I checked his daily public schedule. Yesterday and today, he's in Texas. Tuesday,, he was in Arizona. On Saturday, he gave the Gridiron Club address; on Sunday, he had St Patrick's Day activities.

Last week, he was in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Michigan. There's been a flurry of activity ever since the State of the Union, but before that, it was business as usual, long weekends at Camp David or in Wilmington. although there were similar campaign trips in February. This is in major contrast to his schedule last year; via the Washington Times,

Leisure time has become a factor in the White House — and the Republican Party is tracking the trajectory of it while providing the damning numbers as well.

“President Biden requires a lot of vacation. In 2023, Biden spent 142 days — 38.9% of the year — on vacation. That includes at least 30 trips to Delaware, 10 trips to Camp David, portions of two visits to the U.S. Virgin Islands, and vacations in Nantucket and Lake Tahoe,” said Jake Schneider, director of rapid response for the Republican National Committee.

“After nearly three years in office, Biden remains well on track to outpace each of his modern-day predecessors in leisure,” he said in a written statement shared with Inside the Beltway.

It's become clear that the big guy is under pressure to look like he wants to keep his job. His public activities over the past couple of months, though, are campaign appearances, aimed at November, which is still eight months away, and this current level of appearances is quite a bit more than he's been used to. Beyond that, they aren't having the intended effect. In the Washingtonm Examiner, Democrat pollster John Zogby observed,

The newly energized president hit the road with a message of real projects for communities, while Vice President Kamala Harris made an historic first visit to an abortion clinic, emphasizing a key issue for Democrats in the fall.

But Biden’s approval rating barely moved. He is still at 40% approval. The national polls continue to show a close race between him and former President Donald Trump, whether in a two-way or five-way race. And, only one in four feel that the country is headed in the right direction. I could possibly copy this report card so I can paste it another time when I need to.

The problem continues to be what Nate Silver has been pointing out, increased public appearances mean increased opportunies to wander around stages, utter gaffes and malapropisms, lose his temper, and chat up pre-teen girls. So far, it's the same problem Hillary Clinton had, the more people saw of her, the less they found to like. This is an important contrast to the conventional wisdom on Biden's lawfare campaign against Trump, for instance from Byron York:

So far, the lawfare directed at Trump — two federal indictments from a special counsel appointed by the Biden Justice Department, plus two local indictments from elected Democratic prosecutors, plus a financial lawsuit from another elected Democratic prosecutor and a sex-and-defamation lawsuit financed by a Democratic megadonor — has backfired at the polls. It helped boost Trump to a runaway victory in the Republican primaries, and so far, it hasn’t hurt him in general election matchup polls against Biden.

. . . But the lawfare campaign is already having another effect on Trump. It has put the former president under severe financial stress in two ways. The first is the tens of millions of dollars in legal fees Trump has already spent defending himself against the onslaught of criminal charges and lawsuits. The other is the crippling financial penalty, $454 million, in the lawsuit brought by the elected Democratic attorney general of New York, Letitia James.

The difference is that, even if James seizes Trump Tower, the Donald still lives at Mar-a-Lago, and he's still ahead in the polls. He's still got a constantly mutating version of the Chicago Seven defense, for which Alan Dershowitz, who helped originate it in the 1960's, gives Trump his grudging admiration. Instead of a single Judge Julius Hoffman, Trump has an expanding range of foils, not just Judge Engoron, but now, in addition to Letitia James, he's got Fani Willis, Nathan Wade, Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, and no doubt more. It's not just publicity, it's comic book villain-vs-superhero material. (Isn't there an element of Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne in Trump's image?)

This is what Joe, basically an over-the-hill nebbishy mediocrity, has working against him, he's a bore, but even more so is the calendar. He's having to conduct a national campaign, which normally lasts from September to November, that's already begun in early March. I don't think he can sustain it.

Alan Dershowitz On Biden's Two-State Solution

He begins his discussion above:

The war in Gaza is becoming a major issue in the American political campaign. . . . What we're seeing is a very, very nasty debate over support for Israel, with the hard left of the Democratic Party saying to President Biden that they're not going to vote for him if he continues to support Israel, and there's no way, even if Biden were to abandon Israel, there's no way he would ever give the hard left enough. They don't want a cease fire, they want the end of Israel. . . . They don't want a two-state solution. The problem is that Biden has a two-state solution. His two states, however, are Michigan and Minnesota. . . . He's particularly focused on Michigan, because Michigan, has a population of several hundred thousand Muslims and Arabs, who will never be satisfied with a president who supports Israel in any way, and the ceasefire is just a pretext.

This is a continuation of the Democrat dilemma since the 1960s: as their middle American appeal has gradually fallen away, by the Pelosi-Biden era, they've had to appease their hard left fringe to maintain a steadily shrinking majority. But caving on hard left issues from unlimited abortion to same-sex marriage to unisex restrooms and now to Israel has driven away large swaths of their traditional base, first Catholics and now, apparently, Jews as well.

On one hand, it's understandable that Biden would cave on Israel -- he's tired, he's focused on re-election, and he seems to see Netanyahu as a lesser Satan nearly as bad as the Great Satan Trump. But this is pushing him into foreign policy, his weakest area. As the Bush-Obama fusion defense secretary Robert Gates put it, "I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” It also seems as though Senate Majority Leader Schumer has now bought into the Pelosi-Biden cave:

“The world has changed — radically — since [October 7], and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past,” Schumer said in what was described as a major speech.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “lost his way,” Schumer added, “by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.”

Schumer went on to accuse Netanyahu of aligning with “far-right extremists” who are “pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows.”

The State Department has gone so far as to nuance the administration's stated position on "defeating" Hamas:

State Department Deputy Spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday that the U.S. shares the goal of “degrading” Hamas — avoiding the use of the word “defeating,” in an apparent shift of U.S. policy on the Gaza war.

On Monday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters that President Joe Biden shared Israel’s goal of “defeating” Hamas, but believed it was not necessary for Israel to attack Hamas in the last stronghold of Rafah to do so.

On Tuesday, as Breitbart News reported, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his view that while he was happy to talk to the Biden Administration about it, there was no way to defeat Hamas without entering Rafah.

. . . Later, on Tuesday, Patel was asked to respond to Netanyahu’s statement. Patel said that the Biden Administration was looking forward to discussions with Israeli officials in Washington about “alternative approaches” to “target key elements of Hamas, help secure the Egypt-Gaza border, and do so without a major ground operation in Rafah.”

Patel then referred to “our shared goal of degrading Hamas,” which is significantly different from “defeating” Hamas.

Schumer himself seems to recognize where his stance on Israel puts him with his Jewish constituents and Jews nationally:

Mr. Schumer said he spent hours after his speech talking with conservative Jewish constituencies whose members were enraged. On Tuesday, he addressed a broad spectrum of Jewish American leaders, facilitated by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, by Zoom. In a statement after the meeting, the group said “our membership continue to have deep reservations about Senator Schumer’s speech.”

In the interview, Mr. Schumer was characteristically more eager to recount the kudos he received. “Did you see Nancy today?” he said of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, who in a CNN appearance on Sunday called his speech an “act of courage.” He directed an aide to share a letter he received from Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister, that called him “honest and ready to step forward and say what needs to be said.”

Pelosi, of course, isn't Jewish; she's a nominal Catholic who has nevertheless been denied communion in her home diocese. It appears that Schumer is now simply part of the Democrat movement away from traditional religious affiliation, to the point that even liberal Jews are beginning to have second thoughts about the Democrat party.

At about 12:00 above, Dershowitz says,

If Hamas knew that Israel had the unequivocal support of the United States, and it would never back down, and it would always veto resolutions at the Security Council against Israel, Hamas would not continue fighting. They would give back the hostages, call for a cease fire, the war would be over. So yes, I am pointing a finger of Blame at President Biden for not doing what he should have done, which could have ended the war more quickly, it could have saved more lives. Hectoring Israel doesn't save lives. Threatening Israel doesn't save lives.

The problem is that Biden is tired, and whatever it may specifically be, something ails him, he's sick, and he's being pushed into an area where he's never had strengths, foreign policy. He's the creature of his handlers, who right now are sending him out on grueling campaign trips that are doing nothing to help him in the polls, apparently in hopes of keeping their jobs just a little longer, and which he almost certainly can't maintain. But whatever his fate between now and November, handlers of one sort or another will be in charge, and there's not much anyone can do before then.

The Cheneys

I'm a little puzzled at Dick and Liz Cheney. The Buish dynasty's time has come and gone, the Bush family itself seems to have decided to keep quiet, but the Cheneys are raging on. Last week, "Sleazy" Liz Cheney Loses It After Bombshell Report Claims She "Suppressed Exonerating Evidence" With J6 Committee, The story refers to a Mollie Hemingway piece in The Federalist that claims she helped the January 6 committee suppress exculpatory evidence for Trump:

Cheney and her committee falsely claimed they had “no evidence” to support Trump officials’ claims the White House had communicated its desire for 10,000 National Guard troops. In fact, an early transcribed interview conducted by the committee included precisely that evidence from a key source. The interview, which Cheney attended and personally participated in, was suppressed from public release until now.

Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato’s first transcribed interview with the committee was conducted on January 28, 2022. In it, he told Cheney and her investigators that he overheard White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows push Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to request as many National Guard troops as she needed to protect the city.

. . . Not only did the committee not accurately characterize the interview, they suppressed the transcript from public review.

According to Wikipedia,

She represented Wyoming's at-large congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2017 to 2023, and served as chair of the House Republican Conference—the third-highest position in the House Republican leadership—from 2019 to 2021. Cheney is known for her vocal opposition to former President Donald Trump.

. . . She was once considered one of the leaders of the Republican Party's neoconservative wing, and was critical of the foreign policy of the Donald Trump administration while consistently voting in favor of Trump's overall agenda.

However,

Because of her stance on the Capitol riot, her impeachment vote, and her opposition to Trump's false stolen-election narrative, pro-Trump Freedom Caucus members of the House Republican Conference twice attempted to remove her from party leadership. With House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy supporting her removal, Cheney was removed from her position in May 2021.In July 2021, Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Cheney to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. Two months later, she was made vice chair of the committee. As a consequence of her service on the Select Committee, Cheney's membership in the Wyoming Republican Party was revoked in November 2021. She was censured by the Republican National Committee (RNC) in February 2022.

On August 16, 2022, Cheney lost renomination in Wyoming's Republican primary to Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman in a landslide, garnering just 28.9% of the vote.

Among other things, this suggests that Trump's influence in the Republican Party even while out of office has been underrated. And generally, Liz Cheney's star has waxed and waned with the influence of the Bushes and her father; she carried little weight on her own. Wikipedia:

Cheney worked for the State Department for five years and the United States Agency for International Development between 1989 and 1993. After 1993, she took a job at Armitage Associates LLP, the consulting firm founded by Richard Armitage, then a former Defense Department official and later the Deputy Secretary of State.

. . . In 2002, Cheney was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, a preexisting vacant post with an "economic portfolio", a mandate to promote investment in the region.

. . . After two years, Cheney left her State Department post in 2003 to work for the Bush–Cheney 2004 reelection campaign. She participated in the campaign's "W Stands for Women" initiative to target female voters.

. . . On February 14, 2005, she returned to the U.S. State Department and was appointed principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and coordinator for broader Middle East and North Africa initiatives.

She lasted another year at the State Department until Condoleeza Rice, the Secretary at the time, dissolved her area of responsibility in response to adverse press reports. Her father as vice president seems to have been unable to secure other work for her in the State Department, and it's hard to avoid thinking the jobs she held there were effectively sinecures.

In June 2007 Cheney signed on as one of three national co-chairs of Fred Thompson's 2008 presidential campaign. . . . After Thompson dropped out of the race, Cheney joined Mitt Romney's presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy advisor.

After that, she seems to have had a series of failed career attempts, ranging from founding a short-lived advocacy group with William Kristol and Deborah Burlingame, to guest-hosting on Fox News, to a failed primary bid for the Republican-held Senate seat in Wyoming. Only in 2016 did she succeed in running for a House seat, but by 2021, she'd managed to ruin her career prospects as a Republican. By May of that year, it emerged

Rep. Liz Cheney secretly masterminded an extraordinary Washington Post op-ed authored by top military leaders, just three days before the Capitol riot, it has been claimed.

The letter published in the Washington Post contained a stark warning from 10 Defense Secretaries from both parties.

. . . The letter from the Defense Secretaries stated that the time for questioning election results 'has passed' and said involving the military in electoral disputes would take the nation into 'unlawful and unconstitutional territory.'

It was a key break as members of the military, lawmakers, and retired statesmen issued public statements in an effort to promote a transition in power despite Trump's refusal to concede the election.

'She was the one who generated it, because she was so worried about what Trump might do,' Eric Edelman, a friend of Cheney's and career diplomat who served as national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, told the New Yorker. 'It speaks to the degree that she was concerned about the threat to our democracy that Trump represented.'

But it's hard to avoid she was also casting about for a new career option, given Trump's electoral loss, her limited ability to work with other Republicans in the House, and her father's diminishing influence in the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, Trump's prospects continue to improve -- in part, that's because he can use figures like Liz Cheney as foils.

Why The Continued Silence?

While the Senate bill providing roughly $60 billion in continued Ukraine aid remains stalled in the House, the overall picture for Ukraine continues to deteriorate.

The French paper Marianne has published excerpts by secret military documents that are causing an uproar in Europe and the world, for dealing with the situation on the ground in Ukraine without the disguise of propaganda that pervades almost all reports on the subject.

. . . The greatest takeaway from the documents is that ‘a Ukrainian military victory now seems impossible’. The Russian forces are waging ‘a slow and long, high-intensity war based on the continued attrition of the Ukrainian army’.

The defense reports harshly criticize the ‘disastrous’ planning done by western military and Ukraine:

“‘The planners believed that as soon as the first Russian lines of defense were crossed, the entire front would collapse […] These fundamental preliminary phases were carried out without taking into account the moral strength of the enemy on the defensive’.

"[…] These Ukrainian ‘Year II soldiers’ were launched to attack ‘a Russian fortification line which proved to be impregnable’. Without any air support, with Western equipment that is disparate and less efficient than the old Soviet equipment (‘obsolete, easy to maintain, and capable of being used in degraded mode’), the Ukrainian troops had no hope of breaking through. Let us add ‘Russian arch-domination in the field of electronic jamming penalizing, on the Ukrainian side, the use of drones and command systems’.”

In other news,

Russian President Vladimir Putin won a landslide reelection victory on Sunday, taking 87% of the vote after a three-day election derided by government critics and the West as neither free nor fair.

Going into the vote, the Kremlin was believed to seek not merely victory but a historic turnout: one that showed the country more united than ever behind their leader, more than two years into the full scale invasion of Ukraine.

Russia's Central Elections Commission later issued data showing 77% of the country's eligible 114 million voters had cast ballots — a new post-Soviet record.

Wait a moment. Wasn't Putin not long for this world? As of June 2022,

The US intelligence community believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s health is suffering and that he’s being treated for cancer, according to a new report.

The assessment, attributed by Newsweek to high-ranking officials at three separate intelligence agencies, comes after months of speculation that the Russian strongman is suffering from terminal ailments.

“Putin is definitely sick,” an official from the office of the Director of National Intelligence told the outlet, while noting, “whether he’s going to die soon is mere speculation.”

Two other officials — one from the Defense Intelligence Agency and one retired Air Force officer — also claimed to have access to a comprehensive intelligence assessment of Putin’s health, and said the outlook for the Russian leader is bleak, according to the report.

I assume these are among the 51 intellgence officials who signed the letter saying Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation. Well, but wasn't Putin irreparably damaged by Prigozhin's coup last June?

With a so-called 24-hour coup by Russia’s mercenary boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, ending in an anticlimactic pullback, Russian President Vladimir Putin was able to avoid a dramatic and bloody standoff with his one-time ally.

Nonetheless, the fact that the outspoken Prigozhin could even mount an armed mutiny with his private military company, the Wagner Group, with little resistance and an apparently muted response is widely seen as a deep political blow for Putin and his regime.

“Prigozhin’s armed rebellion indicates a political crisis within Russia and shatters the myth of Russia’s invincibility and overwhelming power,” Hanna Liubakova, a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, and a journalist and researcher from Belarus, said in a note Sunday.

Except,

A top confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin approved the plan to kill Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the security council for Russia, set in motion the operation to take out Prigozhin, according to a former Russian intelligence officer, per the Journal. The plans were later seen by Putin, who didn’t push back against them, Western intelligence agencies told the outlet.

Prigozhin died in a plane crash in August only a few months after he and his mercenary group launched a short-lived rebellion with a goal of ousting Russia’s defense minister.

We must infer that Putin never lost the support of the organs of state security (otherwise his own plane would have crashed, right?), which operated with accustomed efficiency, and less than a year later, those organs reestablished him in power with near-Stalin era levels of popular support. Recent photos show Putin in apparent perfect health.

As of May 2023, this was the US scenario for that year's projected Ukraine counteroffensive, via the Atlantic Council:

If a thrust to sever Russia’s land bridge proved successful, two options could then be considered. One would be to wheel westward and isolate Russian troops in the Kherson region. Alternatively, Ukrainian forces could turn to the east and attempt to recover Mariupol, which has been occupied by Russia since May 2022.

In either case, seizing Melitopol would cause a crisis among Russian political and military leaders, as Russian forces in the south and east would be cut off from each other, rendering a coherent defense at the operational level impossible. This would dramatically undermine Russian morale and encourage further international support for Ukraine.

If mounted in June, Ukraine’s counteroffensive could potentially be concluded by summer’s end, leaving the Crimean Bridge as the only remaining option for ground resupply of Russian forces in Crimea. Campaign success, however, would bring Ukrainian long-range missiles within range of the bridge, which would also be vulnerable to drone attacks.

Why have these projections, advanced with the prestige of the US deep state, proven so incorrect? Why is the administration so far doing nothing to telegraph necessary changes in policy and just continuing with "as long as it takes"? So far, all we've had has been Tori Nuland announcing her retirement. How many other intelligence and foreign policy chiefs should be resigning in disgrace?

It's been almost 50 years since the Church Committee. We badly need a new one. Short of that, Trump's outright firing of James Comey should be a precedent for much more decisive action -- change their office locks overnight, revoke their clearances, and publicly fire them the next day.