How To Deter Epstein Evidence Destruction

Tim Larson: Any chance Schumer was right? Put health insurance subsidies on the back burner, let the Epstein stuff explode without that distraction, and then go back to the subsidies and hammer Trump again while our Epstein victory leaves him in a weakened state?

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The most I think we can say is that, having folded a winning hand, Dems could recoup the winnings in January, and end up more or less where they would’ve been if they’d played the hand through.

I am not surprised that things have worked out OK so far, and tried to be clear about that as events unfolded. News moves fast. Donald Trump has many vulnerabilities. I obviously didn’t know that House oversight Dems were sitting on incriminating emails from the Epstein estate, but I did know (or at least strongly suspect) that intra-Dem recriminations would give way to a renewed sense of purpose once Adelita Grijalva claimed her seat and signed the Epstein transparency petition. That’s exactly what happened, and the capitulation thus feels like a distant memory, even though it was only a few days ago.

But I do not believe this was Schumer’s plan. And I further do not believe that he should use Trump’s moment of weakness as an “opportunity” to save him from his own bad health care policy. Indeed, the only redeeming thing about the shutdown cave is that surrendering was arguably better than the worst possible option of “winning” the shutdown by restoring the ACA subsidies, with no other GOP concession.

After Dems dominated the off-year elections, eyes turned to Republicans to see if they would cave or sue for peace or whatever. And there were a few indications here and there that they might. Trump went so far as to acknowledge in public that the shutdown had hurt the GOP badly. But then instead of forcing GOP senators to negotiate a health-care compromise, he instructed them to abolish the filibuster—cut the Dems out of the equation altogether—which in some ways put Republicans in a tougher bind. A health care deal wouldn’t have required John Thune to do much whipping at all, but a bunch of Senate Republicans think it’s a bad idea to get rid of the filibuster for all time just to soothe Donald Trump’s ego.

That was the moment for Senate Democrats to say Bring It. I think they could have held out long enough to leave Republicans no choice but to abolish the filibuster, tearing themselves apart along the way. Failing that, there was a way to cave that didn’t entail sending Angus King out to tell the world, falsely, that fighting Donald Trump doesn’t work. Here’s how I put it on Greg Sargent’s podcast.

It sounds a little bit contradictory, but there’s strong ways to cave and then there’s weak ways to cave. And what we’ve seen is Democrats say, essentially, we tried to fight Donald Trump and it didn’t work, so we give up. That was Angus King’s line, essentially.

But if they had reached the same decision but from a different posture, it might not have appeared to everyone like surrender, right? If Jeanne Shaheen or Angus King, or ideally just Chuck Schumer, went to the mics and said: We have tried everything we can to make Republicans give you back your health care. They refuse to do so. The only way you’re going to get your health care back is to elect Democrats.

In the meantime, Americans need their government to be working for them. The problem with that is that Donald Trump can’t be trusted with a full-year budget. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to give him one month of budget authority. And if he doesn’t break the law, we’ll give him another month. And we’re going to keep him on a very short leash to keep him in line with the law. And if he and Russell Vought break the budget law even one more time, there will be no more Democratic votes for even a month of budget, of budget runway.

Then at least you’re setting the terms—you’re saying, Look, like they are completely irrational about health care and you’re going to pay for it and we’re sorry about that, vote for us next time.

In the meantime, we have to do something about the lawlessness and this is the only way we can do it.

I’m obviously glad Trump is spiraling at the moment. I suppose I’m also glad that Republicans will have to vote against extending the ACA subsidies—though I’m not certain that this will be an unalloyed political victory for Democrats. At the end of the day, the public will probably blame Republicans for soaring premiums. They’re in charge. This is on them. But the GOP plan seems to be a bit of misdirection, where they introduce their own flim-flam legislation to route ACA subsidies to citizen-owned accounts, rather than directly to insurance companies at the point of sale. A policy along these lines would be deeply inefficient at best and, at worst, a recipe for collapsing the ACA marketplaces. But if the idea is that it will never become law, the existence of the proposal will allow Republicans to say premiums went up because Dems insisted on subsidizing insurance corporations.

In any event, it seems pretty clear at this point that Republicans are at peace politically with their decision to let the subsidies expire. And so when we get to January, my hope is Democrats shift their demands. If Republicans won’t agree to enforceable mechanisms to end Trump’s budget lawbreaking, that’s the end of bipartisan negotiations. Trump gets one month budget extensions and nothing more—and if he continues breaking the law even then, no more Democratic votes for anything.

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Susan Matthews: Would you please address “guaranteed incomes”? Seems to me it’s time to bring the issue to the forefront. Given the lack of interest in regulating AI, while understanding that it will be another method of eliminating paid labor, and add what’s going on with trashing education; I would love to see guaranteed incomes discussed hand in hand with anything AI.

It’s a well-timed question.

Early last decade I was a big proponent in theory of—we typically called it Universal Basic Income or UBI. I understood enough about our political system to know that UBI was unlikely to become law, and that if we did become a UBI country, we’d probably finance it by eliminating a bunch of targeted support programs (for food, housing, health care) and then underfunding the UBI. But as a theoretical matter, I was all for it. Super efficient, super liberty-minded. And times were simpler. Safety nets were the gravitational center of politics, and with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, it made some sense to think ahead to the next time Democrats had big governing majorities.

But then, long before A.I. mania took hold, things began to unravel, and the thought of using UBI to advance economic justice or foster economic solidarity began to seem like a much dicier proposition. Read along for a condensed history of the past decade through my eyes—and don’t worry, we’ll eventually come full circle...