FOCUS: Republicans Are Prepared to Go Down With Trump

31 January 20

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TRYING TO STAVE OFF FUNDRAISING DISASTER - It’s late in the month, very late and we are looking at fundraising returns that again will not address the organizations operating costs. Regardless of what any of us want, this will not work. We have to better on donations. We don’t need a windfall, we need a budget. In earnest. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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FOCUS: Republicans Are Prepared to Go Down With Trump

David A. Graham, The Atlantic
Graham writes: "Just four years ago, the GOP's leaders were almost uniformly reacting to Trump with horror. Today, Republican officeholders have made their calculation: They will either go down with President Donald Trump, or they will rise with him."

The GOP has in recent years been the more disciplined of America’s two major political parties, and although Trump likes to complain that his fellow Republicans aren’t as regimented as Democrats, the Senate impeachment trial shows otherwise.

We won’t know until this evening exactly how many Republicans will vote in favor of witnesses in the Senate—whether Mitt Romney and Susan Collins will be joined by Lisa Murkowski, in other words—but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is now confident he has the votes to defeat witnesses. That vote is now just a way station on the road to Trump’s inevitable acquittal, which could come as soon as tonight.

That outcome will be the latest evidence of Trump’s hold unshakeable hold over the Republican Party. If there were a group of GOP officials who might still resist the president’s style and approach, it might have been found in the Senate. Senators are temperamentally institutional; jealous of their own prerogatives; and comparatively insulated from the most intense electoral demands on other officeholders. In the end, though, GOP senators got in line.

Trump still doesn’t inspire the same level of cultish devotion among Republican officeholders as he does among Republican voters. Time and again during his political career, he has said or done something that has appalled, mortified, or scandalized GOP politicians: There was the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016. There was the week in May 2017 when he fired FBI Director James Comey, then shared classified material with Russian leaders. There was his obsequious appearance with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July 2018. Each time, the initial reaction has been horror and even condemnation from Republican officials, followed—within a few short days—by acquiescence and acceptance.

This happened twice during the impeachment drama. In the early stages of the scandal, Republicans criticized Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Senator Lindsey Graham said he’d be very disturbed if Trump had engaged in a quid pro quo. But eventually the GOP settled down, and Graham now says the quid pro quo is perfectly fine.

The second example arrived this week. After news of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s book, which confirmed the factual case alleged by House Democrats, Republican senators seemed to be reeling. Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats, and is apparently very naive, predicted that as many as 10 Republicans would vote to hear witnesses. Reports said that McConnell didn’t have the votes to block witnesses. Now, of course, it seems obvious that witnesses are out, leaving things right where they were before the Bolton revelations.

Why is it that these moments bend but never break Republican support? This is politics, and the simplest answer is probably political. Vulnerable senators like Cory Gardner of Colorado and Martha McSally of Arizona are risking their seats by lining up behind Trump. Both face tough races in November. Gardner will run against the popular former governor John Hickenlooper. McSally lost an election last November, was appointed to fill another Senate seat, and is struggling against the Democratic challenger, Mark Kelly.

Yet it’s not clear that going against Trump would help either Gardner or McSally, and the opposite is more likely. Candidates occasionally try to run away from presidents of their own party who are unpopular in their state, and it almost never works. Such a maneuver is unlikely to win over Democrats and moderates who dislike Trump—especially for first-termers like Gardner and McSally, who don’t have a long-standing relationship with voters—while it might alienate Republican voters the senators desperately need to hold.

In 2010, for example, some moderate Democrats attempted to distance themselves from Barack Obama, and they were almost entirely swept out of office. Then again, other Democrats tried to stay close to Obama, and many of them were swept out of office too.

Running away from the president is even less likely to work in 2020 than it did in 2010. Not only is the election more nationalized than in previous years, but Trump himself is on the ballot. Although he is historically unpopular, Trump remains wildly popular with Republican voters—hence the bind for endangered senators. If Trump wins reelection, his coattails may save the Gardners and McSallys of the world, but if he is defeated, they’re probably doomed anyway.

While Gardner and McSally offer a particularly dramatic example, this simple political calculation explains the discipline within the Republican ranks: Trump is a fact of life, and if there’s little to gain from backing him, there is much to lose by breaking with him. This is true even for senators who are retiring and don’t plan to face voters again. Republicans who cross Trump risk harming their post-office career prospects, and they risk social ostracism, as Politico’s Tim Alberta notes.

What these calculations leave out is any consideration of the actual charges facing the president and what they mean for rule of law and the future of the American government. Perhaps some Republicans believe that Trump really did nothing wrong, but that hardly speaks well for their judgment, and it is difficult to imagine them feeling similarly about a Democratic president who did the same.

While few Republicans are willing to say so out loud—see above, on the benefits of breaking from Trump—many do seem bothered by his behavior. Some believe that Trump acted inappropriately but that his conduct doesn’t merit removal, the position taken by Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee yesterday, when he announced that he would not vote in favor of calling witnesses. But Alexander is retiring, and nearly 80 years old; his younger colleagues mostly don’t dare say that aloud.

Still, the brief, frantic reaction to the Bolton news this week shows that, contrary to what some critics would claim, the Republican Party hasn’t lost its moral sense. What it has lost is any inclination to let that moral sense weigh on its political decisions.

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Dan Rather | The Questions Keep Coming ... but There Will Be Answers

31 January 20

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Trying to Stave Off Fundraising Disaster

It’s late in the month, very late and we are looking at fundraising returns that again will not address the organizations operating costs.

Regardless of what any of us want, this will not work. We have to better on donations.

We don’t need a windfall, we need a budget.

In earnest.

Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

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Update My Monthly Donation

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If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
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31 January 20

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FINAL DAY OF JANUARY: FUNDING BADLY NEEDED - We don’t have enough funding. There’s really no other way to say it. Every fundraising step we take is an attempt to address that one central problem. Please take a moment to make a donation. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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Dan Rather | The Questions Keep Coming ... but There Will Be Answers

Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page
Rather writes: "The stage is familiar. The hallowed halls of Congress, particularly the Senate chamber. The actors are names we mostly know, playing their parts. But the script is unlike anything we have ever witnessed."
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Democrats address questions about Trump's impeachment. (photo: Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

Trump Impeachment Trial Heads Toward Critical Vote Friday on Witnesses and Possibly Acquittal
Mike DeBonis, Seung Min Kim and David A. Fahrenthold, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The impeachment trial of President Trump is headed for a critical vote Friday that will determine whether the Senate hears from witnesses over allegations that the president pressured Ukraine to launch investigations for his own political benefit."
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Hoshyar Ali, who lost both legs in a landmine explosion, walks in a minefield trying to deactivate the devices on the outskirts of the Kurdish town of Halabja, Iraq, Jan. 4, 2019. (photo: Reuters)

Trump Administration Expected to Loosen Restrictions on Use of Landmines
Ryan Browne, CNN
Browne writes: "The Trump administration is expected to loosen restrictions on the US military's ability to use landmines in the coming days, weapons that have been banned by more than 160 countries due to their history of killing and wounding civilians."
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Anti-war activist protest in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., on January 4, 2020. (photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Getty)

House Votes 'No War Against Iran,' in Rebuke to Trump
Merrit Kennedy, NPR
Kennedy writes: "The House has approved two measures seeking to limit the president's ability to take military action without congressional approval."
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Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, departs at the end of the day in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2020. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)

Postal Workers Union With 200,000 Members Endorses Sanders
Associated Press
Excerpt: "Bernie Sanders was endorsed Thursday by the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union, an influential group that also backed the Vermont senator's presidential bid against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary."
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Ken Ward in 2015. (photo: Lindsey Grayzel)

I Shut Down an Oil Pipeline as Part of a Peaceful Protest. The US Government Claims I'm a 'Domestic Terrorist.'
Ken Ward, Guardian UK
Ward writes: "In the early hours of 11 October 2016, I closed a safety valve on an oil pipeline in Skagit county, Washington."
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A rehabilitated Florida panther released in 2013. (photo: Carli Segelson/Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission)

The Crazy Story of How Florida Panthers Were Saved From Extinction
Tara Lohan, The Revelator
Lohan writes: "There likely wouldn't be any Florida panthers today if it weren't for decades of work to save them."

Cat Tale, a new book by journalist Craig Pittman, takes us on a wild ride into the science and politics of saving an iconic species.

t’s not even February yet, and Florida panthers are already having a bad year. Three have been killed by vehicles and one by a train in the first two weeks of 2020 alone.

The big cats once ranged across the South but now are mostly found slinking between fragments of habitat in southern Florida. Traffic poses a significant hazard: Last year 23 panthers were killed by vehicles — a significant blow to a wild population that hovers precariously at only around 230 animals. 

But there likely wouldn’t be any Florida panthers today if it weren’t for decades of work to save them. The story of how Florida panthers, a puma subspecies, were rescued from the brink of extinction is expertly told in the new book Cat Tale: The Wild, Weird Battle To Save the Florida Panther, by journalist and New York Times best-selling author Craig Pittman. Pittman’s been tracking the story for 20 years at the Tampa Bay Times.

The cast of characters and wild turns of event in Pittman’s book seem like the stuff of fiction. There’s the Stetson-wearing Texas cougar hunter Roy McBride, who becomes a master panther tracker. Veterinarian Melody Roelke rings the alarm on the panther’s genetic problems, only to have her male colleagues look the other way. And the arch villain of the story, a biologist nicknamed “Dr. Panther,” establishes himself as the preeminent expert but is actually fudging his research and colluding with developers.

Pittman traces these and other characters through years of discoveries, mistakes, public backlash and breakthroughs — a fledgling program to radio-collar and track the animals that taught important lessons about tranquilizing big cats high up in trees; a failed captive-breeding program; a failed reintroduction plan in north Florida; and a last-ditch effort to bring in new genes by releasing Texas cougars in panther habitat.

The story is tragic, inspiring and deeply poignant. In his prologue Pittman calls it a “scientific cautionary tale.” As we grapple with mass extinction across the world, he writes, “This is a guide to what extraordinary efforts it takes to bring back just one sub-species — one that’s particularly popular — and what unexpected costs such a decision brings.”

Pittman talked to The Revelator about the threats that panthers continue to face and what lessons we can learn about saving other endangered species.

When you first started writing about panthers 20 years ago, what did you think about their prospects?

My first stories were around 1998-1999. Nobody knew if the Texas cougar experiment had worked yet. Things looked pretty grim and a lot of developers were proceeding on the understanding that panthers wouldn’t be a problem anymore, so it was OK to build in panther habitat.

Things looked dire at that point and it wasn’t until around 2001 or 2002 where you started seeing these new kittens being born and thinking maybe things would be OK. The concern then became making sure that the Texas cougar genetics didn’t swamp the panther genetics.

We know that panthers aren’t out of the woods yet. Is there clear science on what would be considered a recovered population?

Ever since scientists drew up the very first recovery plan decades ago, they said the key was to have three [geographically] separate populations of about 250 or 300 panthers. Obviously, we’re still a long way from that and from even starting a second population. You could call what’s going on in central Florida the start of a new population, but there’s just a handful of panthers there. If they choose to follow those particular goals, they’re a long way away.

But I phrase it that way because [the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service] did not follow their own recommendations when they down-listed manatees [from endangered to threatened]. They didn’t follow their recovery plan. They just said, “Well, this computer model says it’s OK, so we’re going to say it’s OK, even though the threats are still there.”

You know a good bit about manatees, which you wrote about in Manatee Insanity: Inside the War Over Florida’s Most Famous Endangered Species. How does the manatee’s story compare to the panther’s?

I call manatees “the endangered species you can see,” because they will show up everywhere people are — they’re in your backyard canal, swimming around your dock. At the time I wrote that book, they were an endangered species, but one that you could see with your own eyes.

Panthers, not so much. Panthers are very elusive. They don’t like to be around people. So they’re more of an abstract concept to a lot of folks. People know the panthers exist, but they’ve never seen one. So it’s not quite as personal with panthers.

And the other thing that I wrote about in Manatee Insanity is that the Save the Manatee Club, and specifically its cofounder Jimmy Buffett, came up with this brilliant marketing concept called “adopt a manatee,” where they took the IDs from a whole bunch of the manatees that the state had been following and, for a contribution of around $5 or so originally, you could adopt a manatee. You’d get a little adoption certificate with the name of your manatee on it and its background.

People became personally invested in the fate of their particular manatee. I was digging through state archives and I saw letters from, you know, Mrs. Johnson’s fourth grade class in Mesa, Arizona to the Citrus County Commission saying, “Why are you being mean to our manatee and not passing this rule to make boats slow down?”

They found a way to make people all over the country care about individual manatees as a way of getting them to care about the species as a whole. There’s no similar project for panthers and generally most of the panthers don’t have nicknames like the manatees do.

There are people who absolutely love panthers, mostly in the abstract. And there are some folks who would dearly love to see a hunting season opened on them and feel like the government’s lying about how many there are. But I think the majority of Floridians support panthers and are happy that they seem to be coming back.

Your book is a really incredibly in-depth case study of what it takes to save one endangered species. Are there lessons we can learn from it about saving other species?

I like what Melody Roelke said — at the point where they started to realize they needed to take action [to save the panthers], it was almost too late to do anything. So her advice was, if you see it heading this way, take action immediately. Don’t dawdle around and get into arguments and get mired down in bureaucratic red tape about what you’re going to do.

They really were almost too late to save the panther. It basically came down to five female Texas cougars breeding with the remaining male panthers. And had that not worked, that would’ve been it. They’d probably be gone by now.

The other thing is, if you’re going to spend this much money and work this hard to bring back an endangered species, think about what’s going to happen afterwards. What are the ramifications going to be? Because as we saw with the captive-breeding experiment that they started and then dropped, they had not planned very well. They had figured out they were going to take these panther kittens out of the wild and breed them in captivity to put [grown] panthers back in the wild, but they hadn’t really thought about where they were going to put them and how they were going to train these captive panthers to be OK in the wild.

What are the biggest threats they face now?

The reason I waited so long to write this book is because I needed a good ending and I finally got one. [Editor’s note: We won’t give it away, but it’s a doozy.]

But just because I found an ending for the book doesn’t mean the story of the panther is over. We’re now dealing with this mystery ailment that’s afflicting some panthers and bobcats, to the point where they can’t walk and scientists don’t know why.

We’ve also got more large development coming down the pike headed for the area [where most panthers live]. In particular there’s a proposal backed by the governor — who is supposedly pro-environment — to build this enormous toll road right through panther habitat, which would bring more development into that area.

One of my colleagues, Lawrence Mower, just wrote a story where we’d gotten copies of some emails from Fish and Wildlife Service biologists who study the panthers saying this will just basically be a stake in the heart of panther recovery if you build this toll road through there.

So there are continuing threats, and we’re a long way from them being considered recovered. But things are looking hopeful in ways they haven’t for a long time and all because of the very hard work from these folks who labored for years mostly in anonymity because they believed in the cause and they believed that what was going on was something worth devoting their lives to — even though it led to burnout and fighting and depression and, in one case, suicide.

In a way, I wrote the book to call attention to the role of those unsung heroes to say, look at what they did, look at the risks that they took, look at the brutal work days they put in trying to figure this out — sometimes even against the public’s own desires.

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