Leadership in a Democracy is Not About Willpower
PLUS: A review of "Black Rainbows" by Corinne Bailey Rae
When I was a grad student at the University of Maryland, I was fortunate to serve as a teaching assistant for Dr. Frances Lee, one of academia’s foremost experts on Congress. Near the end of an undergrad course about Congress, she showed her class the following commercial (c. 2009) to illustrate why the American people despise our national legislature:
It’s an idealized, no-bullshit (and, in case you hadn’t noticed, no-female) portrait of legislating. Order is established immediately and everyone falls in line. A problem is identified, and then an obvious, straightforward solution is offered and unanimously approved. The process is super-efficient: It happens quickly with no thought or deliberation. We are led to believe solving public problems is like firefighting: Hear the alarm, go to the fire, then put it out. It’s “easy.”
But notice the commercial never really specifies a problem. Instead, the fire chief simply announces topics: “How about the budget?” “And the taxes?” “Anyone want better roads?” “Need clean water guys?” And the solutions are woefully inadequate. If they want a balanced budget, how exactly will they allocate public funds, and what gets cut? How might a tax cheat take advantage of a one-page tax form? How much will it cost to make the roads better, and which roads get improved first? What exactly needs to be done to make the water clean? Those are complicated questions without “easy” answers. That fire chief is certainly in charge and he’s got the full-throated backing of his fellow firefighters, but problems don’t get solved simply by banging a magic gavel.
Sure, it’s only a thirty second commercial. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. It’s just a funny take on our frustrations with Congress. But the commercial hits the nail on the head, doesn’t it? Americans hate Congress because its members don’t act like firefighters, who see a problem they are tasked to solve, and, working together without disagreement, fix it. Instead, Congress argues too much over issues we think have obvious answers. It is cacophonous and unruly. Instead of coming together to solve the problems that are staring the nation right in the face, members of Congress quarrel with one another, dither about, grandstand, obstruct the process, and waste time on trivial matters. When Congress does pass a law, it’s only after a bunch of deal-making and horse-trading that ends up watering-down the final flawed product. Congress is a hot mess.
Americans’ frustration with Congress is understandable. We can look at our nation’s problems or problems with the government itself and wonder why Congress isn’t doing more. It’s always been like this, too: If you visit the Capitol building and go on the official tour, you’ll watch a short film chronicling all the great things Congress has accomplished in its 230something years. The captions list all the monumental legislation—“19th Amendment: Women’s suffrage (1919),” “Fair Labor Standards Act: Child Labor Laws (1938),” “Civil Rights Act of 1964: End of Segregation”, etc.—and I’m like, “What the hell took them so long?”
But the reasons for congressional inaction are often explicable. Congress is a captive of public opinion, its members careful not to do things that might upset the people. When those firefighters approved balancing the budget, the people likely cheered, but left unmentioned was if the firemen cut Social Security benefits or raised taxes in the process or both. Doing so would probably be necessary to balance income with expenses, but that would also likely anger the people, which probably explains why we don’t have a balanced national budget. As that example also shows, the sort of public problems that land on Congress’s lap are often difficult to solve or require trade-offs that will leave many dissatisfied or angry.
Congress is also composed of many members representing a variety of constituencies who each face different electoral pressures or come to Washington with different priorities and perspectives. That makes building legislative majorities difficult and time-consuming. Negotiation and compromise are necessary. The makeup of any particular Congress—the size of party caucuses, the prerogatives of committee chairs, the number of vulnerable members, the size and relative power of subgroups within a party caucus, the apportionment of congressional districts, etc.—will determine the prospects of many bills. Yes, politics and gamesmanship frequently weigh in on this process, which can be maddening, but remember it is often hard in many instances to separate the pursuit of power from the pursuit of policy.
Congress is the deliberative branch. It is supposed to move slowly, which allows for debate and negotiation. Deliberation also implies a range of voices. Congress is how the People, in all their diversity, get to weigh-in and shape the laws of their land. Yet one should not expect an institution of over 500 ambitious, opinionated people spread over two houses and from a variety of backgrounds to find common ground quickly or effortlessly. I wouldn’t even expect to find that in a firehouse.
None of this is meant as an excuse for Congress. I, like others, am often frustrated by the actions and inaction of our legislative branch. But knowing how Congress works can help us better understand congressional processes and outcomes, diagnose problems, and envision ways forward. A critique of Congress must be more than a critique of its basic deliberative nature or the idea of “Congress” itself.
Last week, insurgent Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida orchestrated the ouster of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. The scheme would only require six Republicans to break ranks and join Democrats in approving a motion to vacate. Gaetz found eight. It was unprecedented in the history of Congress.
McCarthy’s fall came three days after he turned to House Democrats in a last minute effort to keep the government funded. He had spent the weeks prior trying to convince hardline Republicans to pass a funding bill of their own, but they consistently rebuffed him, even as he made each successive offering more and more to their liking. Even more ridiculous was the fact these bills never stood a chance at becoming law, since the Senate had already passed a bipartisan bill that would serve as the framework for the final version of the bill that would need to be approved by both chambers. It was all just shadow theater.
Some have argued Democrats should have stepped in to rescue McCarthy (and in the process bury Gaetz) since McCarthy did ultimately do the right thing by avoiding default last spring and a shutdown this fall. That’s a reasonable argument, and as the days pass, I wonder if Democrats won’t come to regret their decision. But the problem with McCarthy is that while he may not be a tried-and-true MAGA Republican, he has always accommodated the MAGA movement. On 1/6, he condemned Trump for inciting that day’s attack before validating the lies that inspired the riot by voting against the certification of the electoral results. Three weeks later, he traveled to Mar-a-Lago to begin his party’s rehabilitation of the ex-president. The problem with McCarthy is that he’s not out there on the ramparts of the republic defending it from those who would tear it down. He has instead spent the past five years weakening the republic from within, hoping as it cracks that it does not crumble so that one day his portrait may hang from its damaged walls.
McCarthy made a fateful choice in January 2021. He could have empowered Liz Cheney to steer his party away from Trump. Instead, he coddled the former president and his acolytes in the House. For a man who spoke at length this past week after declining to run again for Speaker about how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reminded him of the mistakes made by appeasing Nazi Germany, one would think McCarthy would have chosen the former, but no. McCarthy instead chose to cozy up to Trump and kicked Cheney out of the party, only for one of Trump’s acolytes to ultimately end his Speakership while the loudmouth former commander in chief stood by in silence.
McCarthy sowed the seeds of his own destruction by currying favor with a group of legislators who despised the democratic legislative process. Gaetz ultimately lost trust in McCarthy because Gaetz believed the Speaker had failed to follow through on a promise to use every legislative advantage Republicans had to ram through a right-wing policy agenda. According to Gaetz’s narrative, McCarthy had caved on default by never forcing Democrats to choose between what Republicans wanted and a global economic meltdown. McCarthy repeated the error when it came to the shutdown. Gaetz expected McCarthy to drive the hardest bargain possible, to give Democrats the option of the unacceptable or the irresponsible, and not blink.
What would Republicans have won in return? A balanced budget purged of nearly all non-defense discretionary spending? A crackdown on immigration? The end of military aid to Ukraine? In truth, I’m not sure it matters. When Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency from 2017-2018, they didn’t balance the budget or pass immigration reform. Those policies didn’t matter because all that mattered was that the right people—Republicans—were in charge. When power is shared, on the other hand, people like Gaetz believe the opposition must be brought to heel. Rule must be re-established on Republican terms. Our way or the highway. “How about the budget?” the Speaker should ask. “Balanced,” everyone replies, with the opposition knowing a national disaster looms if they dissent.
But again, it doesn’t really matter what the policy is. Tomorrow, Republicans could take aim at wokeism, the IRS, Mexican drug cartels, or Biden’s green energy agenda. Any grievance works. What matters is they are in command, that they dictate the agenda, that they use every tool at their disposal to get what they want. That requires a Speaker who is a hostage-taker, someone ready to play hardball by exploiting the opposition’s sense of responsibility, someone prepared to reduce the messy and complex process of legislating to a simple and obvious binary choice, someone who won’t back down.
But willpower in a democracy only gets someone so far. There is nothing preventing Biden and the Democrats from, say, demanding universal health care or else during negotiations with Republicans. With such slim majorities, many legislators are well-positioned to demand make-or-break concessions on must-pass bills. That would lead to a stalemate between the parties. The reason Democrats don’t do that is that they tend to believe government has a positive effect on American life and want to keep it in good standing. Republicans have dimmer views of government, but many still feel it is their responsibility to serve as caretakers of the commonwealth. Realizing they share power, they negotiate. It requires forbearance, an awareness you’re not going to get everything you want even if you push your advantage to the breaking point. McCarthy realized this, too, even as he, like so many of his predecessors, recklessly stoked the fantasies of the hostage takers.
But people like Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump—two reckless men whom McCarthy allied himself with—could care less. What matters more to them and their supporters is that the right people control the levers of power and that that power is used to bend the opposition and the deliberative process to their will. Congress may be the deliberative branch, but negotiation and the very idea of Congress itself becomes distasteful when you’re bargaining with people you believe don’t deserve a share of the power. In lieu of negotiations, policy solutions become blunt objects. There is nothing to disagree with, as the alternatives—either catastrophe or round after round of negotiations—are unacceptable. All it takes is a leader willing to stand his ground to restore discipline and impose his will onto others.
Dartmouth political science professor Brendan Nyhan is known for outlining the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency. Green Lanterns are comic book characters who are basically an intergalactic police force. They derive their superpowers from rings that grant them all sorts of abilities and that are powered by the wearer’s willpower. If, for example, a Green Lantern wants to punch a bad guy with tremendous force, they can use their ring to project a massive fist that can be used to clobber their opponent. The success of the attack depends in large part on the Green Lantern’s will and determination: To punch someone hard, the Green Lantern must really, really want to punch the bad guy hard.
The Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency is the belief that a president’s success is dependent on their willpower. To realize their agenda, all a president needs to do is try harder, communicate more forcefully, be tougher with recalcitrant opponents, drive harder bargains, and refuse to back down. Nyhan correctly points out this is all a fantasy. Presidents cannot impose their will onto others. Circumstances often limit the influence they can exert over certain situations. Those they try to cajole often have their own sources of political power they can fall back on to resist a president’s strongarm tactics. A really good speech or ultimatum is not suddenly going to bring an opponent over to their side. In fact, some studies have found that when presidents attempt to bend public opinion to their side, their opposition is often emboldened to push back. There is no better way to prove the impotence of a chest-thumping president demanding capitulation than by telling him, “No.”
The Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency has been extended to the military (the belief that the United States can generate any outcome it wants on the world stage through the use of military force) foreign policy (the belief that other nations will acquiesce to American demands if our threats are serious enough) and border policy (that’s the thought behind the border wall, the child separation policy, and more recent calls to bomb Mexican drug cartels.) We can also now declare a Green Lantern Theory of Congress, which postulates congressional actors can emerge victorious in legislative fights if they insist on winning, that is, by declaring what they want, refusing to compromise, demanding surrender, and being prepared to push the institution and the country over the edge if they don’t get their way.
That’s a ruinous philosophy. I can understand how a Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency emerges—grant one person a lot of power, including the power to launch nuclear weapons, and people will assume that person can get what he wants with a stern order or a snap of his fingers—but who takes their seat alongside 434 other members of Congress and concludes I can bend not only this institution but the American system of separation of powers to my will? Who wouldn’t look at that situation and realize their success and their country’s success will hinge more on their powers of persuasion and deal-making than their determination as a hostage taker?
The reason Gaetz succeeded is the result of unique mathematical circumstances: A small Republican majority enabled him to band together with no more than a handful of anarchic lawmakers to topple a chamber of Congress. It’s also a byproduct of bad Republican politics that cost them a larger majority in the House in 2022. And as much as this was about mathematics, it’s worth noting it appears neither McCarthy nor Gaetz seemed to bother counting how many supporters they had prior to Tuesday’s votes. Gaetz, it seems, got lucky. But for McCarthy not to have a better sense of where he stood with his caucus and put together some contingencies just in case, well, that’s the height of carelessness.
As preposterous as a Green Lantern Theory of Congress may be though, after watching the shutdown and Speakership drama unfold over the past two weeks, I remain worried there is a large contingent of lawmakers and Americans determined to will the theory into existence. After countless failed government shutdowns, threats of default, and leadership coups, Republicans have yet to learn their lesson. Each time, they come out of the experience more determined to win the next round. For them, it’s just a matter of using their own willpower to break the Democrats and bring dissenters into line, and to do that they will need more willpower, enough willpower to finally break the system so that they can prove they are in charge and command the system’s power without check or impediment.
The result would be a political system founded on order, efficiency, and unanimity. It would look a lot like the fireman’s assembly. Yet as lighthearted as that commercial may be or as much as its vision of a national legislature may resonate with us, it should also disturb us, as the alternative it offers to the messiness, contentiousness, and diversity inherent to Congress is a fascist fantasy.
FURTHER READING: “Kevin McCarthy Found Out He’s No Donald Trump” by Jill Lawrence of The Bulwark
Signals and Noise
DEVELOPING: War has erupted between Israel and Hamas fighters based in Gaza. Tension between Israel and Palestinians has been growing all year, but Hamas’ Saturday morning assault against Israel—which included thousands of rocket strikes, as well as land, sea, and air operations—came as a complete surprise to Israel. Hamas has occupied multiple towns and military posts in southern Israel, taken numerous hostages, and struck Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with rockets. Over 250 Israelis have died and thousands have been injured. Israeli counterstrikes have also killed more than 200 Palestinians and injured thousands.
By Graeme Wood of The Atlantic: “Images on social media show Israeli soldiers in states of dress and undress, apparently dead in the dirt, and Hamas fighters celebrating the destruction of armored vehicles and the looting of lighter ones. The images from Israel show carnage and cruelty comparable to Mesopotamia during the campaigns of the Islamic State. Much worse than the images of dead soldiers are those of Israeli civilians seemingly having been killed in incursions into towns and settlements nearby. Some images show old women at a bus stop, their possessions still next to them, and their blood and viscera leaking from their corpses. Others—all still unconfirmed—are even worse, with indications that gunmen went door-to-door and killed indiscriminately while residents huddled in fear. More and more videos are emerging of civilians beaten and sometimes soaked in blood, either their own or others’. They appear to have been transported to Gaza as hostages. The dead are not spared this fate.”
By Juliette Kayyem for The Atlantic: “One aspect of this needs little analysis, but a lot of explanation: How did Israel’s extensive counterterrorism efforts fail to pick up an attack waged by land, sea, and air? How did its defenses fail so extensively? This wasn’t just an intelligence failure. It was an everything failure. Israeli and American commentators are already describing this as Israel’s 9/11, but that comparison is a crutch—9/11 was about, in the words of the commission that reviewed it, a ‘failure of imagination’ to understand what could happen in America, a nation that had not encountered foreign terror threats of any significant magnitude. Israel has existed, still exists, with that very imaginable prospect as part of its national being.”
The Washington Post reviews the events over the past year that have led up to the conflict. Vox has an explainer.
Some memes:
An observation: Republicans want to impeach the president, replace him with a defendant in multiple criminal cases, shut the government down, leave the highest-ranking positions in our military vacant, just fired the Speaker of the House, and have now shut down the House of Representatives for a week to figure out who they want to lead them. Republicans complain all the time that government doesn’t work right. Seems to me Republicans are the reason why.
Ronald Brownstein writes in The Atlantic about the thirty-year history of House Republican insurgents throwing their own bellicose leadership under the bus for cooperating too much with Democrats and trying to govern.
Peter Wehner of The Atlantic runs down the disgraceful, pathetic, and unprincipled career of Kevin McCarthy (“I consider Matt Gaetz to be a maliciously cynical lawmaker, but I can’t say I’m sorry to see McCarthy deposed. After all, he has been a key figure in transforming the GOP into a monstrous political party, one whose contempt for constitutional and democratic norms poses the greatest threat to the republic since the Civil War.”)
By John Harris of Politico: “The House GOP is a Failed State” (“McCarthy’s ouster is dramatic evidence, if redundant, about the state of the modern GOP. A party that used to have an instinctual orientation toward authority and order — Democrats fall in love, went the old chestnut, while Republicans fall in line — is now animated by something akin to nihilism. The politics of contempt so skillfully exploited by Donald Trump is turned inward on hapless would-be leaders like McCarthy with no less ferocity than it is turned outward on liberals and the media.”)
By Jonathan Allen of NBC News: “The GOP Armed Its Bazooka Caucus. What Could Go Wrong?” (“Comedy and comity aside, the Gaetz phenomenon is indicative of a much larger trend within the Republican Party and within the House: the use of emergency measures — the heaviest available political artillery — to thwart majority rule, disrupt democratic institutions and oust political opponents.”)
“Frankly, one has to wonder whether the House is governable at all.”—Republican Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, apparently forgetting recent work undertaken by Nancy Pelosi.
Some things to watch before next week’s vote: It’s not clear if either of the two announced candidates for Speaker—Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan (who has been endorsed by Trump)—can gain the support of 218 House Republicans. If either is able to win moderates over, it will be very interesting to know what sort of deal he cuts with them. On the table: Raising the number of members it takes to file a motion to vacate to prevent a repeat of what happened this week (the next Speaker may demand that anyway, but the hardliners would likely oppose); no more government shutdown/default threats (which would not sit well with hardliners and would be a weakening of McCarthy’s position, who at least entertained those possibilities); an up-or-down vote on Ukraine funding; Matt Gaetz’s head on a pike. Either Republicans will want to move on from this debacle quickly and resolve these issues over the weekend or this search for a new Speaker could really drag itself out.
One other thing to note: The three men at the center of House politics right now—Gaetz, Scalise, and Jordan—have some personal baggage. Scalise is alleged to have once referred to himself as “David Duke without the baggage” and apologized in 2014 for speaking at a white nationalist conference in 2002. No other similar accusations have been leveled against Scalise since. Jordan served as an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State at the same time a team doctor engaged in sexual misconduct with several student-athletes. Some wrestlers allege Jordan surely knew of the doctor’s behavior and failed to report it. While never charged criminally, Jordan has been named as a defendant in a civil suit brought against the university. Gaetz is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for sexual misconduct (which include allegations of underaged sex and human trafficking), drug use, and other misconduct. The House investigation resumed after the Department of Justice did not recommend charging Gaetz given the credibility of two witnesses. An associate of Gaetz’s pleaded guilty to six federal charges, including the sex trafficking of a minor, in 2021.
By Jonathan Last of The Bulwark: “Imagine If Democrats Had Done It” (“The first [advantage Republicans have] is structural: The combination of polarization, population distribution, and the Electoral College has given the Republican party a large advantage in the Senate and presidential elections. Maybe this advantage is transitory; maybe it’s permanent. But it’s real and is probably worth at least 3 percentage points in the 2024 presidential contest. The second [advantage] is notional: The general public holds members of the two parties to very different standards.”)
Sara Ferris and Olivia Beavers of Politico report the bipartisan House Problem Solvers caucus discussed the possibility of moderate Democrats coming to McCarthy’s rescue.
Philip Bump of the Washington Post writes in response to arguments Democrats should have stepped in to bail out McCarthy “Why is Protecting Institutions Largely the Democrats’ Responsibility?”
By Matt Lewis of The Daily Beast: “Democrats Blew a Huge Political Win By Not Saving Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker” (“Although Dems aren’t to blame for this chaos, they have a moral obligation to strive for the best outcome for America, and—based on the likely alternatives—Speaker McCarthy is probably as good as it gets….Had they done the right thing on Tuesday, then going forward, they would have been positioned to basically say, ‘We’re above culture war bullshit, and would not abide a coup by Matt Gaetz. Nobody asked us to rescue McCarthy, but we did. That’s what responsible leadership does. Remember that the next time the GOP says we’re the problem.’ Now they can’t.”)
Matthew Yglesias has “Fifteen Thoughts on McCarthy’s Downfall”. Among them:
“I just reject the Republican establishmentarian spin that the real issue here is Democrats’ refusal to bail McCarthy out. My advice to Democrats was to not drive a hard bargain here — be a cheap date, want to get to yes. But if McCarthy wants Democrats to do something for him, he has to do something in return. I understand he felt that he couldn’t offer any concessions for risk of further increasing the size of the rebellion, but that’s just another way of saying that the GOP caucus is dysfunctional. And people need to know that. Joe Biden is old, but he runs a competent professional administration. Republicans are running a shit show.”
“I don’t know if Donald Trump could have saved McCarthy, but I do know that he didn’t try. McCarthy, meanwhile, has been consistently and dramatically more solicitous of Trump than either his predecessor Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell.”
“An underrated asymmetry in American politics is that ‘extreme’ Democrats are pretty normal people whose ideal policy outcomes just happen to be further away from the status quo than the moderate Democrats, while Republicans aren’t like that. The furthest-right members of the caucus aren’t guys who want to see big cuts to Medicare or whatever, the factional alignment just isn’t about policy ideal points. Instead, to be an extreme Republican is to lust after tactical and procedural radicalism — including forms that don’t make sense.”
“It’s really funny to see Kevin McCarthy get his comeuppance.”
“Look, we have shown, OK, with a very small handful of people, six at times, five at times, that we can have tremendous impact in that body and when a lot of people, unfortunately, were voting to have a 270, 280 Republican House, I was praying each evening for a small majority.”—Republican Rep. Matt Rosendale, admitting he hoped Republicans would win a small House majority in 2022 so insurgents like himself (Rosendale voted to vacate the Speakership) would have more sway in the House.
Why did Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina vote against McCarthy?
The last ditch government funding bill and Kevin McCarthy’s sacking has put additional funding for the war in Ukraine in jeopardy.
“Will Congressman Jamal Bowman be prosecuted and imprisoned for very dangerously pulling and setting off the main fire alarm system in order to stop a Congressional vote that was going on in D.C. His egregious act is covered on tape, a horrible display of nerve and criminality.”—Don Trump on Truth Social, wanting Congress to punish a man who caused a disturbance in the halls of Congress in order to delay a vote. Can we just take a step back here to figure out what the hell is going on with this? Trump surely can’t be serious. But as a joke, it only works if he’s poking fun at his own behavior. It’s not trolling because that only works if he’s admitting what he also did is wrong. Maybe he’s trying to equate what he did to Bowman to suggest neither act was that big of a deal? Or could it be the person handling his social media account is trying to sabotage Trump from within? I think Trump’s just leaning into his role as America’s greatest supervillain.
Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly went on record with CNN to offer a scathing confirmation of a number of stories concerning Trump.
The New York Times looks at how Trump’s idea to fire missiles at drug cartels in Mexico (and see if we could blame some other country for launching them) is now (along with troop deployments south of the border) Republican Party doctrine.
Echoing the language of white supremacists and Adolf Hitler, Trump said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
The judge in Trump’s New York civil fraud trial slapped a gag order on the ex-president, ordering Trump to stop commenting on court staff after the ex-president attacked the judge’s law clerk on social media.
By Margaret Sullivan for The Guardian: “Trump’s Escalating Violent Rhetoric is Straight Out of the Autocrat’s Playbook” (“[I]t’s important to understand this rhetoric for what it is – a crucial tool of a political leader plowing the ground for the authoritarian regime he intends to lead.”)
Brian Klaas writes about the “banality of crazy” and why the press ought to be amplifying Trump’s insanity.
By Dan Froomkin of Press Watch: “To Amplify Trump? Or Not to Amplify? There’s Actually a Good Answer” (“Journalists cannot ignore him. But when he says something that illustrates his continued descent into fascist rhetoric, the real news is not so much the particular thing he said, it’s that he said it and that Republican leaders and Republicans generally still aren’t renouncing him.” I would note this has potential as a strategy given the way many members of Congress go to great lengths to avoid commenting on Trump. They sense it can hurt them politically.)
Interesting poll: Fair Vote did a ranked choice poll of Republican voters and found Trump dominates the field but that Nikki Haley comes in second. Also interesting: In ranked choice voting in the early states, Ron DeSantis barely edges Trump. (Guess that’s incentive for neither DeSantis nor Haley to drop out.) MORE: John Dorman of Insider looks at Haley as Republicans’ last best chance to stop Trump.
Iowa Democrats won’t release the final results of their presidential caucuses until Super Tuesday.
Tesnim Zekeria of Popular Information reports the Republican-led legislature of North Carolina has set up a special police force (Gov Ops) that can investigate and seize the documents of anyone working with state and local government, including government contractors. Gov Ops apparently has the authority to do so without a judicial warrant.
By Lauren Weber, Dan Diamond and Dan Keating of the Washington Post: “How Red-State Politics are Shaving Years Off American Lives” (This article is part of a series about America’s life-expectancy crisis.)
Leap in Logic Alert, from the New Jersey Globe: “A Republican candidate for State Assembly in the 36th district plead guilty to smearing fecal matter on the doors of a children’s daycare center in East Rutherford following a 2009 neighborhood dispute with the owner, police records show. [Said the candidate]: ‘I’m not going to defend it. It was wrong. I was a young man. [Fact check: He was 37.] It was a horrible time, and I made a mistake. Obama came into office the year before.”
The Biden administration has waived numerous federal laws to speed construction of a 26-mile long segment of wall along the United States’ border with Mexico. Biden had pledged not to build another foot of wall while running for president in 2020.
Firearm deaths among children 18-years-old and younger have increased 87% over the past ten years. Firearms are now the leading cause of death among children.
Citing significant progress in negotiations, the UAW has held off on widening its strike.
By Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post: “As Interest Rates Rise, Our Wild Borrowing Might Finally Bite Back”
The Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos) asked Alexa (a popular voice assistant operated by Amazon, which is owned by Jeff Bezos) about the 2020 election. Alexa claimed it was stolen.
Vladimir Putin claimed Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death in a plane crash this past August was the result of passengers on that plane playing with hand grenades while high on cocaine. Putin is suspected of ordering Prigozhin’s assassination.
Top 5 Records Music Review: Black Rainbows by Corinne Bailey Rae
Bravo if you had a Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce coupling on your 2023 bingo card. But who among us had the woman who recorded “Put Your Records On” releasing a great jazz/punk album this year?
Do you remember Corinne Bailey Rae? Back in 2006 she released this song, which landed in the top ten on the US adult contemporary charts and earned Rae Grammy nominations for Record and Song of the Year:
Thanks to its jazzy touches, “Put Your Records On” stood out a bit from the other breezy singer-songwriter tracks that were popular at the time. But that song ended up being her only hit, and Rae slipped into obscurity, an easy-listening relic of the mid-oughts.
Here’s the first single from her latest album:
So, yeah, I did not expect the “Put Your Records On” lady to have a side-gig as Kathleen Hanna. And it doesn’t stop there: On “Erasure”, Rae sounds like she’s channeling Johnny Rotten (the Sex Pistols or Public Image Ltd. version, take your pick):
I need to chalk up my surprise to ignorance. It turns out Rae in her youth in late-1990s England had formed an alternative rock group inspired by Veruca Salt and L7 that was nearly signed to the same label as Slipknot. Rae’s musical inspirations are way more eclectic than her status as a one-hit wonder would suggest: She studied classical violin, performed with a Baptist church’s youth musical group, was weened on Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, turned to soul music after her record deal fell through, and collaborated with a Leeds-based funk band before getting her break as a solo artist.
All of those sounds and more can be heard on Black Rainbows, one of the year’s most adventurous albums. The musical palette Rae draws from here is as vivid as a spectrum: Shades of avant-garde jazz, Eddie Hazel-style psychedelic funk, English punk and post-punk, Chicago house. Rae was likely drawn to these genres due to their experimental natures. Yet within the swell of P-Funk guitars on songs like “Earthlings”, you can still hear Rae’s soulful vocals drifting through the mix. Amazingly, these styles sit comfortably alongside one another on the record, which, despite its high-concept ambitions, never lands with the earnestness of an art school project.
Hearing this album, one can’t help but think Rae has spent her career trying to get out of the box the music industry put her in back in 2006. Had her first record deal stuck, she could have ended up a rebel girl. “Put Your Records On” certainly broke her to an international audience, paid the bills, and earned her more time in the studio, but it also likely pigeonholed her as an easy listening artist in the vein of Norah Jones or Colbie Caillat. Black Rainbows reveals there is much more to her artistry than that, with her album serving as an act of liberation. On the opening track “A Spell, a Prayer”, Rae sings “The freedom of this moment/ Echoes to eternity”.
Later, on “Earthlings”, she delivers that message outward to her listeners:
Don’t you know, Earthlings,
You can start again?
Simply press refresh
To begin again
Yet it’s rarely that simple. Near the album’s end, on the shapeshifting “Put It Down”, she equates “starting again” to “penitence” but acknowledges that “gather[ing] up all my woes” and “throw[ing] it down” is an essential step toward freedom. We are dogged by our past—the pain that has been inflicted on us, the wrong decisions and compromises we’ve made—so our past needs to be reckoned with if any foundational moment of liberation is to echo forward to eternity.
In this way, Rae posits liberation must stretch backward through time, so that the indignations and injustices suffered by past generations—specifically past generations of Black women—do not weigh on current generations. Evoking Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assertion about history and justice, Rae sings on “A Spell, a Prayer” against what sounds like a ticking clock, “We long to arc our arm/ Through history/ To unpick every thread”. (It’s worth observing here that a rainbow is, of course, an arc.) It is Rae’s mission to honor those who found a way to live as freely as possible in a corrupt world and better understand their regrets and sacrifices so that freedom today is a less compromised notion.
For example, that lead single posted above (“New York Transit Queen”) is inspired by this picture of Audrey Smaltz, a fashion show industry icon who won the title of New York Transit Queen in 1957:
“She gets her rides for free!” Rae shouts during the song, celebrating how Smaltz used her beauty and sex appeal to go anywhere she wanted in NYC. But on the following song, “He Will Follow You With His Eyes”, Rae shows how this power—dependent on being able to attract the leering attention of men—comes with a cost (“I don’t want to leave myself behind/ Vanishing into a girl that I don’t recognize”). It’s a double-edged form of freedom. Rae respects those who find a way to use it to their advantage, but she also resents that this is a game women so often have to play.
The album’s penultimate song, “Peach Velvet Sky” (see Exit Music) is a tribute to Harriet Jacobs (pictured below) a woman born into slavery in the early 1800s. As a young woman, Jacobs was sexually harassed by her enslaver. Fearing she would be sold if she did not submit to him but not wanting to abandon her children by running away, Jacobs hid in a crawlspace beneath the roof of her grandmother’s house for seven long years. Eventually she was able to escape to the north and reunite with her children. Her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, is now considered an American classic.
“Peach Velvet Sky”, a spare piano ballad that stands in stark contrast to the rest of the album, honors a woman who, as Rae explains in an interview, “made a prison for herself, but through that prison…created the conditions for safe escape.” It is also Rae reaching back through the arc of history to provide Jacobs with the solace that should have been hers from birth. The song is neither celebratory nor mournful. Knowing full well there are freedoms people shouldn’t have to earn, freedoms that shouldn’t come with a trade-off, freedoms you shouldn’t have to second guess, freedoms that shouldn’t be paired with agony and shame, “Peach Velvet Sky” is instead what so many people navigating impossible situations need: Grace.