What You Need To Read About Politics 9/15 Edition
My roundup of the week's most important stories
I’ve written less over the preceding month and for good reason.
Beginning with the creation of CNN in 1980, we’ve had a 24/7/365 news cycle. The rise of additional cable news networks and the internet only exacerbated the phenomenon. In this environment, it doesn’t much matter if there is news happening or not. Networks need content. Insider-y publications like Politico’s excellent Playbook publish 365 days per year.
But there is a real cost to this demand for content: stories get blown out of proportion, networks focus relentless coverage on news that doesn’t warrant it, and they lean into partisan battles that make for good television — but help fracture the country. It’s how small misdeeds become big scandals. It’s why the most extreme members of each party saturate the airwaves. And it does real harm. It’s not a coincidence that polarization and entrenched partisanship have steadily increased during the same era.
So one thing I’ve decided to do is when there is no news, I’m not going to pretend. I won’t flood your inbox with columns unless I have something to say. I’m just one cog in the wheel, but this is a far healthier practice than the ones that drive most of the media.
And without Donald Trump creating headlines with his tweets or behavior, the elongated August recess — the House didn’t come back until this week — has thankfully gone back to being a sleepy time in politics. With the House returning this week, that has changed and, accordingly, I’ll pick up my writing volume. Early next week, I’ll provide analysis of the absolute mess in the House that is likely to precipitate at least one — and probably multiple — government shutdowns between now and the end of the year.
I’ve also decided to introduce a new feature into this links column: a quote of the week that jumps out at me in reporting and deserves a spotlight. This week’s is a doozy from veteran Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho).
This week’s collection of 25 links features two absolute must reads. The first is the initial excerpt from McKay Coppins’ hotly anticipated biography of Sen. Mitt Romney. The piece dropped on the same day Romney announced that he would retire at the end of his term. It included all sorts of juicy tidbits and behind the scenes looks into the inner- workings of the Senate in the Trump era. Frankly, Romney’s Republican colleagues came off looking like two-faced stooges, so terrified of losing that they’d do just about anything to avoid it. Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell looked especially bad.
The second is a fascinating piece on populist Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s proposal to cap credit card interest rates at 18 percent. The story is significant because there is a real opportunity for a more populist Republican Party to make gains with blue collar voters of color and to shatter the Democrats coalition. But that would require adopting more populist/liberal economic policies to go with their cultural conservatism and nativism. To date, they really haven’t done that.
Yet, if any Republican seems to understand the possibilities here, it’s Hawley. And this is the first genuinely populist-to-liberal economic proposal he’s come up with. It probably won’t go anywhere with his Republican colleagues for now, but it’s something to watch moving forward. There are a lot of issues where Trump Republicans and Bernie Sanders-Democrats could come together to upend policy if they so chose.
This week’s links also include several pieces that distill cutting edge academic research into digestible bits. I am a huge proponent of such work — I train scholars in doing this type of writing and edit a daily history section. So I always like to include this research when I spot it. That’s especially true when it illuminates the state of the GOP and conservatism, as this week’s pieces do, since that’s my area of expertise.
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