The price of things versus their cost

Manafort's mug shot, or, the look of a man who is starting to realize the depths of his losses

When we want to buy something, we usually know its price. The story of Paul Manafort shows we rarely realize the cost.

Manafort was an addict, though not in the traditional sense. Looking at the details of his case -- the clothes, houses, mistresses -- he was consumed by acquiring. Seeing the photo of his ostrich-skin jacket is akin to seeing a garbage can full of bottles outside an alcoholic’s house. 

(Yes, some of his spending was cover for money laundering. However, most of his smaller-ticket items -- the dozens of suits, shoes, and jackets -- reflect his spending preferences because they don’t hold resale value well. Also, the fact he bought stuff so he could buy more stuff speaks to his addiction to buying stuff.)

The infamous ostrich-skin jacket

Like most addictions, Manafort’s came at a far greater cost than the exorbitant sticker price of tacky clothes. For one, he’ll be in prison for, if not the rest of his life, the rest of it worth living. But while sad, jail time isn’t unheard of for high profile white collar criminals. People can bounce back from that sort of thing. 

The detail that struck me is how his daughter dealt with the consequences of her father’s crimes: she changed her last name.

Jessica Manafort, 36, filed to change her surname in Manhattan Supreme Court late Friday to "Jessica Bond," multiple reports showed Saturday. The independent filmmaker said she filed for the name change “to separate myself and my work from a public perception that has nothing to do with the person that I am.”

The last name Manafort will be associated with greed and corruption as long as Jessica Bond lives. In a move that matches her father's reputation for ruthlessness, she cut her losses. 

I could see Paul Manafort taking a calculated risk that his crimes could land him in jail. He may have thought some of his deals could've bankrupted him. Given the sketchy Russian oligarchs who paid him, I’ll bet he even weighed the risk of being killed. But having his child reject their shared name out of shame? I doubt Manafort figured that in as a potential cost of his actions. No one would. 

*** 

Entire industries are premised on taking advantage of the difference between the price people will pay for a good versus the true cost of it. Economist Richard Thaler won a Nobel Prize for describing this, and similar, habits of thinking. The most expensive goods -- houses and cars -- are where this is most true. People spend their time negotiating the price down with the car dealer, but ignore the finance charges. We congratulate ourselves for negotiating down the price of the house, but don’t account for the enitre cost of the 30 year mortgage. 

(When I bought my first house, the mortgage salesman showed me the spreadsheet of all that I would pay over the 30 year life of the mortgage -- interest plus principal payments. In a moment of inadvertent admission, he said to me, “Those numbers are so huge, I just try not to look at them.” This was the person selling the mortgage.) 

But cost encompasses so much more than money. Every purchase takes up time, space, and attention. The real cost comes in to play when one factors in the two things we can't replace -- time and people. 

At its core, the story of Paul Manafort is the story of a life spent life in an endless search for more, then paying for it for with his relationships with his family and the time he can move freely on this earth. It is a parable of understanding what wanting something can really cost. 

That is, we are great knowing the price of something and terrible at knowing its cost. 

When should a partisan vote against party?

At what point do you vote against your preferred party?

I've been thinking a lot about this question, mostly because I hope several million Republicans will do so come November 6. 

So, in the spirit of intellectual honesty, I've thought about the times I haven't voted for the Democratic candidate. I've lived and voted in five states, so I've got a decent sample size. Here's what I've got:

- The Democrat is corrupt. In a House of Representatives election for a safe D seat, I voted against an incumbent that was under federal investigation for corruption.

- Voting even though there's not a plausible Democrat running for office. I will still vote in an election even when Democrats don't field a serious candidate. (I figure if someone cared enough to put her/his name on the ballot, I owe the courtesy of taking each office seriously.) One of my deal-breaker criteria is that whoever I cast my vote for should, at minimum, be able to handle the rigors of the office. The Basil Marceauxs of the world, sadly, don't quite make the cut. (He's a Republican, but plenty of nutters run on the D line, too. I just like this video.)

- The Democrat is an idiot. In one gubernatorial election, I had met both the Democratic and Republican candidates. I thought the Democratic candidate, while nominally a serious candidate, would've been a disaster if elected. In this case, the GOP candidate was a moderate and, more importantly, wasn't an idiot. Being governor matters more than most other offices in terms of being able to execute on basic, non-ideological governing functions. Therefore, I put a high priority on a candidate who is diligent, fair-minded, and competent. Ability to do the job matters more than ideology. 

Essentially, I'll vote for a Republican when there's clear corruption or incompetence. 

For Republicans who loathe Trump or just think he needs a more aggressive check on his power, what's your criteria for stepping away from the party line?

Bernie Madoff and a lack of imagination

'Cause this is a man that done stole more money than anybody else, we're talking about anybody else, one old man done took everybody. He done beat the record on everybody. He done went to the top of the list in criminality. Everybody is in there for money. The majority of the cases is about money, do you know what I mean? And here you got a man that done did it, done took it all. He's more important than Jesse James, you know what I mean? Bonnie and Clyde.   

The quote above comes from a man who was in prison with Bernie Madoff, the man behind a $60 billion Ponzi scheme -- the largest fraud in U.S. history. 

It's from Reveal's podcast "How Bernie Made Off: Are We Safe From the Next Ponzi Scheme?"  (Short answer: no). 

It's worth revisiting the Madoff scandal because it's not hard to see how it could be repeated -- and not just in the financial sector.

A couple facts stuck out to me about Madoff and his crimes:

- He was already wealthy before he started the Ponzi scheme. Not as wealthy as he would become, but he was worth plenty. He was also a former chair of NASDAQ. So why did he start the fraud? According to Madoff:

'Cause it feeds your ego. You say to yourself, "All right, all of a sudden, these banks which wouldn't give you the time of day, some of them all of a sudden, are willing to give you a billion dollars." I had all these major banks coming down, and entertaining me. It is a head trip.

- The scheme was simple. He employed a few people with high school educations, paid them enough money to put them in mansions, and they would spend their days scanning the stock quotes in the Wall Street Journal (dead tree version) and reverse engineer plausible trades. No actual trading happened -- he just paid older investors with new investors' money. Then he employed two programmers to write software that printed statements. That's it. 

- He was almost caught by both the feds and Wall Street firms. He fooled them, though, and it's worth examining why. 

First, the feds missed problems with Madoff's firm in part because he had a brand. He projected an image of being an old-school, trustworthy investor. Therefore, the Securities and Exchange Commission went soft on him. They sent newbie staff to investigate his firm. They missed basic stuff, like not knowing to check the amount of his cash holdings in the federal clearinghouse where money sits while both sides verify a trade. If they had a made a simple call, they would've realized his balance there was far, far below what it should've been for a firm worth tens of billions of dollars. 

The Wall Street banks ignored red flags with Madoff's operation because they took a cut on the money they steered to Madoff's firm. Therefore, they didn't want to check under the hood, so to speak. One major investor, a Spanish bank,  asked an employee, Rajiv Jaitly, to conduct due diligence. He wanted to do something simple: go to Madoff's firm and watch them execute a trade from beginning to end. Yet Madoff refused to let him do that. Was that a red flag for the Jaitly's bank? Far from it. Madoff called his bosses, who called Jaitly and told him to back off. 

When I then rang up to sort of see how it was going, he says, "Oh, no. No. We haven't done that." He said, "Look, Rajiv. We all know you're a difficult guy. We had to calm you down at that particular point, so we agreed to it. There's really no need to do it. We're all over this. We understand the investment strategy. It doesn't need this."

Jaitly resigned in protest. The fraud continued for several more years and the Spanish bank lost an undisclosed sum to Madoff's con.

In the end, what exposed Madoff was not the work of investigators, but the Great Recession and its massive losses. Madoff couldn't make the fake numbers work anymore, so he confessed to his sons, who then turned him in. 

***

Bernie Madoff ran his scam for two decades in part because of a failure of imagination from those whose job it was to catch him. No one could picture someone with his stature committing fraud at this scale. Because they couldn't imagine it, they missed or intentionally overlooked obvious signs. 

What else are we lacking sufficient imagination to fully consider?

A trillion dollars is noisier than you (or me)

Norman Rockwell, Four Freedoms

"The cure for bad speech is more speech."
- Popular saying derived Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis' 1927 opinion in Whitney v. California, "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

"We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
- Louis Brandeis, also

Apple made news the yesterday as the first company valued at a trillion dollars. Tennessee also held its primaries Thursday, setting the slate for the fall elections. These events have more in common than just taking place on the same day. 

I don't have anything specifically against Apple. It's more about what the company now represents as one of the richest companies in the world -- a massive amount of money controlled by relatively few people. Apple supports some things I agree with -- gay rights, net neutrality and more open immigration laws. They also lobby for massive tax breaks that result in me paying a greater percentage of my income in taxes than Apple does on its profits. 

It's the principle of who has the ability to be heard in our democracy. Plenty of corporations support some things I like. Many others don't. All well and good, except that we aren't on an even playing field.

Thanks to Citizens United, Apple and other corporations have the same right to free speech as you and I do. Since one way we interpret political speech is to make money = speech, Apple (and other gargantuan enterprises, mega-wealthy individuals, or exists-only-on-paper shell companies that could, among other things, hide foreign contributions)  are free to contribute unlimited amounts in order to sway voters. 

Sure, any of us are also constitutionally free to form or contribute to the same dark money groups, but it's not likely that you or I are ever worth a trillion dollars.

And that's the thrust of the issue.  

***

Louis Brandeis' famous argument against overly limiting political speech is cited at the top of this post. It's a sentiment I generally support regarding content of speech. One of the greatest virtues of this country is the incredible latitude to say what one wants.

But as a practical matter, not all speech is treated the same. Money can amplify speech in ways that weren't imaginable in Brandeis' day. Now, a little less than a century later, many more incredibly rich companies and people vying to influence the world's richest and most influential government. This is why we should return to laws that constrain money's power to act as a force multiplier for certain types of speech. 

We have limited bandwidth. I, like every other voter, can pay attention to only a few things in a given day. Spouse, children, how am I going to eat, job, ESPN....there's a lot of stuff on the list before one gets to politics. And I'm a political news obsessive! People with far healthier news diets go entire day -- weeks! -- without thinking much about politicians and their machinations. (This is a good thing. One of the under-appreciated luxuries of living in a stable democracy is the ability to occasionally tune out. Sadly, not the era we live in now.) 

What unlimited and unchecked amounts of money allow is to fill up our bandwidth with noise. One effect of the bazillion negative ads we'll see and hear until November 6 is that they crowd out other speech. Not only are advertising slots on TV, radio, and Facebook limited, our attention span can only take so much. 

One of the more effective ways to shut up speech you don't like is to deny others the ability to hear and process it. 

***

Among other results from Tennessee's primaries, Phil Bredesen and Marsha Blackburn are now officially set to square off to be the state's junior senator. The winner of the election may determine which party controls the U.S. Senate. Obviously, much rides on whether Mitch McConnell remains the second-most powerful person in government. Perhaps longest-lasting impact will come from whether far-right conservatives or moderates make up a good chunk of the judiciary for the next three to four decades.

The judges appointed in the next few years will likely either be able to build on the Citizens United decision or curtail its excesses in our lifetimes. Another way to think about is that our government will decide how much average citizens' voices can be shouted down or filibustered by the mega-wealthy. 

Though it's hard to discipline our attention spans, we should pay attention to this. 

The slow progress of bad decisions or 'Who risks their half-a-million-dollar-a-year job for $70,000?'

The guy on the left probably isn't evil, but this is not a good look

Despite what movies and cop procedural TV shows would have us think, I don't believe most people who do terrible things are intrinsically evil. Sure, the Stephen Millers of the world exist, but he's an exception. (Even real jerks don't usually make speeches to their high schools arguing kids should be slobs because the school's janitors can clean up after them.)  A good chunk of people in positions of power believe on, some level, they're doing good, or at least, they're not actively evil. 

That's why I was fascinated a by Planet Money episode that profiled a white-collar convicted felon. The cumulative effect of the episode is more like a dark comedy than a business podcast. Then again, this isn't a new feeling since most serious news these days plays like Dr. Strangelove.

LONDON: The people back in the studio on TV after this - they were talking about it. Like, who risks their half-a-million-dollar-a-year job for $70,000 

KESTENBAUM: Scott says his friends asked him that, too. And he does not have a great answer. He can't say exactly why he did it. I asked, was it exciting? Was the thrill part of it? 

LONDON: No - wasn't exciting at all. 

GOLDSTEIN: Was he trying to get his friend to like him more? Is that what was going on? 

LONDON: No. That didn't ever pass through my mind. 

KESTENBAUM: Scott says he was kind of overworked and unhappy with his job, so everything felt a little less important. Maybe that had something to do with it. But he says crossing over that line was somehow just not as hard as it should've been. 

GOLDSTEIN: Scott says what he did was just dumb. He says that. But he says, you know, as best as he can figure out, as best as he can reconstruct, he did it to help out his friend. And he says he didn't think they were going to get caught.

What struck me about Scott London's story was the ease of making increasingly bad choices. Of course, people make ruinous choices all the time and often for reasons as banal as what London describes in the interview with journalists David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein. In this case, London's choices led to criminal behavior, a guilty plea, and jail time. 

***

Some backstory: London was a CPA and partner at the giant firm, KPMG. He led teams that conducted massive audits of Fortune 500 companies. As he said, he made more than $500,000 a year. But he had a friend in the wholesale jewelry business who was struggling. It was during the 2008 recession and his friend asked him for a favor - can you tip some stock info to me? He proposed trades in the five figures, a small amount considering the tidal wave of money moving through stock markets.

LONDON: You know, it's a battle. The simple version of the one side is that I knew it was wrong. It was stupid. And then the other side is, all right, well, he's a good friend. I trust him. You know, if you are trading, and, you know, you're only going to make 10 or $15,000, who's going to know?

The answer to that last question? The feds. (The picture above was taken by FBI agents.) He was arrested in one of those 6 a.m. knocks federal agents pull. London didn't fight the charges, but he also didn't fully understand the ramifications of his actions. 

KESTENBAUM: It got worse. Scott got a lawyer. And one day, they were on their way to court in the lawyer's car. Scott's reading the news on his phone, and he sees this story about his case that has something he says he didn't know. His friend Bryan hadn't been just making small trades for a few thousand dollars. The story says Bryan had been placing much bigger trades, says he made $1.27 million. 

LONDON: And I almost threw up right there in the car. And I actually told my attorney, you got to pull over. He was driving. But I just - you know, I was just fearful that I was just going to lose it right there. So I just couldn't believe it. And once I saw that, I said, holy hell. This is - you know, this is obviously going to be a lot worse.

One would think a top-tier CPA, an expert in fiscal compliance, wouldn't need a reminder that a stock tip can used as easily for million-dollar trades as $10,000 ones. Greed is a funny thing, though. What we assume about others' decisions involving the seven deadly sins is usually wrong. 


***

I'm fascinated in a "can't look away from a car wreck" sort of way by the ostensibly well-off, competent people who've humiliated themselves working for this White House. Sean Spicer, for example, had a decent career as a press flack for Congress, then the RNC before becoming a punchline. Rex Tillerson ran the 10th-largest company in the world and then was fired while taking a call on the toilet. (Side note: Who answers the phone on the toilet?)

It's not hard to see similarities between London and the retinue of folks who've sold their soul for a nominally prestigious position. Take John Bolton, the national security advisor. This is a guy who's made his name pushing U.S military intervention is most every world conflict since Reagan was in office. (A short list of countries he's wanted to bomb: North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia, Iraq two different times.) 

Reminder: last year John Bolton called the Russian election interference "an act of war."

Now as national security adviser he puts out an official statement calling investigation of said act of war "witch hunt."

— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) July 25, 2018

Note how quickly Bolton reversed himself on a fundamental view. I wonder if he even acknowledges the switch to himself. In a way, I thought of Scott London when I read that tweet. Both guys made decisions that seem counter to everything they've done up to that point. 

I'm not sure Bolton (or Spicer or Tillerson) could articulate the rationale for the series of choices they led them to hypocrisy and humiliation. But they -- educated and ambitious men, all -- did what they did. 

It's a bleak comedy, sure, but since we have the live their consequences, there's not much for the rest of us to laugh at.

Except for Paul Manafort -- I will be laughing all week at that crook getting methodically destroyed in a federal courthouse.

***

Update on John Bolton's continuing humiliation:

Lol John Bolton just tore out his own mustache https://t.co/FOxH13GhI3

— David Klion 🔥 (@DavidKlion) July 30, 2018

A newborn and a threenager

So we brought home a newborn the other day.

This is our second child, so the lifestyle switch isn't quite as brutal. (We already weren't going out much.)

Our first child is a three-year-old boy. So, between the two kids, we can never fully focus on any one task at a time. Please take that into consideration as you read my posts going forward.

***

So, some just-brought-her-home reflections:

• A major parenting shift with the second child is that N and I are surprised by less. This doesn't make stuff like "baby wakes up six times at night" physically easier (especially not on mothers), but we can mentally take more stuff in stride. We know that day/night reversal eventually ends, no child cries forever, and that she will someday take a bottle from me.

• Our three-year-old has been all over the place. He wants to be helpful and also senses that he's getting less attention. We've had to be creative in finding ways for him to help -- fetching the nursing pillow and throwing away dirty diapers have been our go-to moves. Even so, he's had some epic meltdowns. A common precursor is delaying behaviors -- for example, he'll go back and forth f-o-r-e-v-e-r when choosing his PJs. The root cause seems to be wanting sustained attention from N and me. We've had to balance a careful line of giving him attention versus not reinforcing undesirable behaviors. Like a lot of parenting moves, the outcomes are delayed, inconsistent, and hazy.  

• N and I are incredibly fortunate to be able to take lengthy breaks from our jobs. Many people don't have that luxury. Family leave policies in this country are awful for babies and parents. We reap the costs of inadequate childcare in this country in all sorts of ways -- a national birthrate that is lower than replacement level, all sorts of negative health outcomes resulting from inadequate early childhood care, to name a few. I can't help but see this as a part of a general political trend of sacrificing the future to cut costs for the present. (Also known as "cutting off one's nose to spite the face.") This is why it is maddening for politicians to treat family leave policy as a "women's issue." If we want men to better partners and fathers, give them time to do so. 

What should we do about the Supreme Court itself?

A wide lens changes perspective

Framing

I'm returning to Amanda Ripley's fantastic article "Complicating the Narrative" about applying professional mediation techniques to writing about conflict in our society. Her first recommendation was to listen to a person, then amplify the contradictions in an answer as a way to tease out nuance. Then, as a person explains more, there's a greater opportunity for common ground.

The second recommendation -- adopt a wider lens -- is useful when you've hit a roadblock in a conflict. The purpose is to "start a bigger conversation," as Ripley writes:

Decades of research have shown that when journalists widen the lens [...] the public reacts differently. Starting in the 1990s, Stanford political science professor Shanto Iyengar exposed people to two kinds of TV news stories: wider-lens stories (which he called “thematic” and which focused on broader trends or systemic issues — like, say, the causes of poverty) and narrow-lens stories (which he labeled “episodic” and which focused on one individual or event — say, for example, one welfare mother or homeless man).

Again and again, people who watched the narrow-lens stories on the welfare mother were more likely to blame individuals for poverty afterwards — even if the story of the welfare mother was compassionately rendered. By contrast, people who saw the wider-lens stories were more likely to blame government and society for the problems of poverty. The wider the lens, the wider the blame, in other words.

Which brings us to the recent nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Mimicking how Mitch McConnell and company treated Obama nominee Merrick Garland, several senators announced their opposition before Trump announced the the pick, citing a corrupt process. It's fait accompli that nearly all Democratic senators will vote against the nomination. 

In short, conflict over Kavanaugh's nomination isn't going to lead us anywhere productive. It's now an exercise in raw power politics. 

We can and should debate the specifics of the nomination. We'll likely have more interesting information in a couple of weeks. For now, let's consider what the Supreme Court could be. 

***
Context

From The Week

First, some factors that got us here:

• Increasing gridlock in Congress made it more difficult to address policy problems through legislation. Major points along this route include instituting the Hastert Rule, banning earmarks, the increasingly regular use of the filibuster (especially during the Obama years), the gutting of campaign finance laws thanks to Citizens United, and the rise of partisan news outlets. 

• This caused presidents of both parties to use executive orders and executive branch rule-making process to enact more policy. 

• This means courts are playing an ever-more important role in deciding how far the president and regulatory agencies can go in enacting policy. This has massive implications for both conservatives and liberals.

• The Supreme Court is one of the few places in the American system where issues can be decided with a sense of finality. This increases the stakes even more.

• The Supreme Court is, by design, not a very democratic (note the small-d) institution. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The purpose of lifetime appointments was to insulate its members from the pressures of elections and politicians. 

• Medical advances like vaccines, antibiotics, and various cancer treatments (among hundreds of others) have made the average lifespan of a highly educated American to be much longer than Founders could've imagined. (Life was a little more capricious in the late 1700s.)

• As Republicans have lost the popular vote more often**, they've depended on anti-democratic (again, note the small-d) measures to maintain power. This includes maximizing the number of conservatives in the judiciary, while curtailing the number of judges nominated by Obama. In addition, conservatives built a massive legal infrastructure since the founding of the Federalist Society in 1982 to ensure the farm system always has enough depth.

** George W. Bush's 2004 campaign is the only time the GOP won the popular presidential vote in 30 years. Separately, Democrats in the Senate have consistently gotten more overall votes, but because of the structure of the Senate, control has shifted back and forth between the parties. Republicans and Democrats in the House have alternated winning the overall vote total the past few elections.

***

Widening the Lens

We are at an unhealthy point for our democracy (for this and a lot of other reasons).  The pressures on the high court increases the likelihood it could lose the trust of the public. Too much is riding on 1) the power held by a small number of lifetime appointees, 2) the physical and mental health of nine people, and 3) the arbitrariness by which presidents get to make appointments. It's possible Trump could make two or three more appointments and the 46th president may not have the chance to make any. Finally, the political norms that governed appointments for most of the 20th century are no longer operable. 

Here's an idea: a Constitutional amendment making the following modifications to the judicial branch:

• All federal judges -- district, appeals, and Supreme Court -- serve 15-year appointments. This would end the morbid watch for septuagenarian or octogenarian judges to retire or die. This would also encourage appointing judges in the prime of their careers rather than handing a Supreme Court seat to the youngest plausible jurist. This could also lessen the stakes of potential battles if a justice became senile, but refused to step down.

• Judicial appointments should be on a cycle so that equal numbers of seats are up per year. Each president would get to appoint two Supreme Court justices per four-year presidential term. Voters get a realistic expectation of how much to weigh judicial nominations when deciding on a presidential candidate.

• Each presidential judicial nominee is guaranteed an up-or-down vote in the Senate within six months of her or his nomination or the nominee is automatically appointed to the seat. No filibusters. 

***

Top of the U.S. Supreme Court

This is less about advocating for a specific set of solutions and more about people thinking what our Supreme Court should be. That's a discussion that could ultimately defuse some of the tensions around both the appointment process as well as the high court's decisions themselves. It's always going to matter, but it shouldn't feel like political Armageddon every time a justice retires or dies.

What say you? Leave a comment here or on Twitter or Facebook. 

'When people show you who they are, believe them.'

The reason it is taking a long time to reunite these kids with their parents is that it was never the plan. https://t.co/Ld4KnPgfxo

— Andy Slavitt (@ASlavitt) July 6, 2018

Maya Angelou famously said, "When people show you who are they are, believe them." We need to keep that in mind because the news of child separation at the border is a few weeks old. There's a tendency to forget the mendacity and cruelty.

A timeline:

* The Trump administration, spearheaded by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and senior White House aide Stephen Miller (a former Sessions aide), implemented a policy of forced separation for all immigrants showing up at the southern border, including those seeking asylum, an internationally protected right.

* After being picked up by border patrol, children were forcibly separated from their parents because their parents were accused of, at worst, a misdemeanor crime. (Note: seeking asylum is not a crime. It is protected by treaty, ratified into the U.S. law by the Senate.) Children and parents were incarcerated in separate locations. In no other context does this happen in America. 

* A federal judge ordered the government to reunite the families within a given time period. Note how the judge lays waste the Trump administration's actions:

The government readily keeps track of personal property of detainees in criminal and immigration proceedings. Money, important documents, and automobiles, to name a few, are routinely catalogued, stored, tracked and produced upon a detainees' release, at all levels—state and federal, citizen and alien. Yet, the government has no system in place to keep track of, provide effective communication with, and promptly produce alien children. The unfortunate reality is that under the present system migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property. Certainly, that cannot satisfy the requirements of due process.

The facts set forth before the Court portray reactive governance -- responses to address a chaotic circumstance of the Government's own making. They belie measured and ordered governance, which is central to the concept of due process enshrined in our Constitution.

* After mass outcry, President Trump signed an executive order to reunite the families and jail the entire family together. By ordering to detain the families indefinitely, the government is violating a different court order. 

* For the overwhelming amount of cases, reuniting families hasn't happened. The federal government hasn't tracked which children and parents are connected. From the NYT:

...In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process.

As a result, the parents and children appeared in federal computers to have no connection to one another.

“That was the big problem. We weren’t able to see that information,” said one of the officials, who is directly involved in the reunification process.

Yet, I've run across a couple of folks (in conversations or on Twitter/Facebook) claiming that the executive order solved the family separation issue. Two things to remember:

1. It did not. See above.
2. Assume for the sake of an argument that it did. Administration officials showed what they are willing to do. Namely, take children away from their parents. 

I don't care what sort of policy end one wants to achieve. If part of the solution involves forcibly taking children away from their parents and not tracking where they go, then the people doing this are committing an evil act. The policy goal is irrelevant. 

Think of this a different way: If I robbed a bank, but gave the money back, the FBI would not forgive and forget. 

One other thing: there's a temptation to put the blame entirely on Trump. That's not quite right. It lets too many people abdicate responsibility. To implement a policy like this takes cooperation from people up and down the federal government hierarchy. Remember the actions Sessions, Miller, and the officers who did things like not even bathe toddlers: 

14. Months. Old. https://t.co/Z3srt7KVco pic.twitter.com/uUgcxgbR0L

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 6, 2018

The people separating children from families have shown us who they are. We should never forget.

***
Update (7/6/18, 4:35 p.m.)

Priorities https://t.co/POUiQFa9Vm

— Dan Pfeiffer (@danpfeiffer) July 6, 2018

***

Yesterday I wrote about how we have multiple views on pretty much every issue. That's true here, too. Even though, I've written quite a bit about immigration and my positions are clear, I can think of some criticisms and conflicting views. 

The nature of these posts is they tend to be strident in one direction. It's worth noting that I believe proper enforcement is necessary. Having a humane and useful immigration system and also improving public safety shouldn't be competing interests. 

In the spirit of bringing out nuance, I'll address some common criticisms of views like mine in the near future. 

Little will change until it costs you lots of money

It will likely take something close to this to substantially move the public's perception of Trump.

Perhaps you, like me, are incensed that our Supreme Court disregards open, expressed religious animus to uphold terrible public policy. 

And maybe you are still furious that we are entertaining bad-faith arguments about who gets to eat at a nice restaurant instead of condemning what seems eerily close to kidnapper's demand: give up your due process rights and the feds will return your children. 

You might have read Michelle Goldberg's op-ed in the NYT today and said to yourself, "Yes. All of this."

Though it’s tiresome to repeat it, Donald Trump eked out his minority victory with help from a hostile foreign power. He has ruled exclusively for his vengeful supporters, who love the way he terrifies, outrages and humiliates their fellow citizens. Trump installed the right-wing Neil Gorsuch in the Supreme Court seat that Republicans stole from Barack Obama. Gorsuch, in turn, has been the fifth vote in decisions on voter roll purges and, on Monday, racial gerrymandering that will further entrench minority rule.

Then you read the umpteenth profile of Trump voters and note that Trump's overall approval ratings are creeping up and Republicans approve of him at the same levels they did of George W. Bush, post September 11.

You, like me, might not be stunned so much as a little more cynical. What's it gonna take, huh? How is democracy supposed to work when public opinion doesn't shift much when terrible things are happening?

***

The answer is that we likely won't see a significant change in public opinion until a recession hits. 

One of the more boring truisms of American politics is that politicians in office will, by and large, remain popular when the economy is doing well. If the economy starts to slow, the ruling party is in trouble.

- In 2012, the economy was on its way up, but growth was slow. Barack Obama won small, decisive re-election and the GOP continued to control Congress.
- In 2010, the economy was still in recovery so the Republicans took back both houses of Congress.
- In 2008, the economy was in crisis, and voters elected Barack Obama by a large margin.
- In 2006, the economy was slowing down, though not yet in crisis. Democrats took both houses of Congress. 
- In 2004, the economy was doing well. George W. Bush was comfortably re-elected and Republicans stayed in control of Congress.

It's not that other political issues don't matter. They do, somewhat. For example, major factors in 2006 -- the last Democratic congressional wave -- included the fallout from the Bush administration's mishandling of Hurricane Katrina and growing public exhaustion with the wars in the Iraq and Afghanistan. It was also a mid-term election taking place during an incumbent's sixth year in office -- historically, when voters tire of the president's party. 

A slowing economy in 2006 made all of the above factors much more relevant and drove a massive Democratic victory. 

A bad economy is often the final push that drives dissatisfied voters to the polls, especially in years where the president isn't on the ballot. 

***

If you are a campaign manager and want to put an incumbent out of a job, two methods are the most effective. One is to change the votes of the 5% or so of people who always show up to vote, but regularly split their ballot between the parties. The other is to bring out people who are generally on your side, but typically remember to vote only in presidential years (if that -- see the Democrats in 2016).

Both are difficult to do. When the economy goes south, though, it becomes much easier. A pissed off voter is one who remembers to show up and vote for the out-of-power party.

This happens because voters pay attention to the stock market and jobs. They notice if interest rates are up because it's costing them money when they want to buy a car or take out a mortgage. Voters see if their retirement savings are stagnating or losing value. If their employer, or a relative's, is laying folks off, then they will take their anger out at the polls.

***

The thing about much of our current news is that it's mostly just angered the same people who were already going to vote for a particular party. (Come November, I may vote so hard that I punch a hole through the screen. I can imagine that some of my Fox News-watching compatriots feel the same anger, though directed at a different place.) 

Knowing that, this story in the NYT caught my attention and made me glad that once upon time, I earned an economics degree. (You are forgiven if you skipped over the article after seeing the term "yield curve" in the headline.)

Every recession of the past 60 years has been preceded by an inverted yield curve, according to research from the San Francisco Fed. Curve inversions have “correctly signaled all nine recessions since 1955 and had only one false positive, in the mid-1960s, when an inversion was followed by an economic slowdown but not an official recession,” the bank’s researchers wrote in March.

What's a yield curve? In short, it's the difference between short-term and long-term bond interest rates. Normally, the rate on the long-terms bonds are higher than the short-term. Among other things, this is how banks can make money -- they take in money at long-term rates and loan it out at short-term rates. Pocketing the difference between the two is one way banks make money. 

If the rates invert, banks aren't profiting from loans and will put the brakes on many types of loans. This matters because debt fuels the American economy.

Currently, the long and short-term rates are close to equalling each other, but haven't yet inverted. It may not lead to an immediate recession, but there's reason for pessimism about the long-term economy -- say, a couple months to two years from now.

From the NYT:

The yield curve, once it inverts, has a track record of signaling that a recession is coming.

percentage points

4

2

0

-2

0.34 pct. pts.

’85

’90

’95

’00

’05

’10

’15

⟵Recession

This downward trend is what a flattening yield curve looks like.
↙     

Another way of thinking about this is the economy is cyclical. It's been growing for about eight years. That's a long time in the life of a growth cycle. Eventually, there will be a correction. 

If it happens by this fall, Trump will see a chunk of his popularity erode and a bunch of GOP congressmen will lose their jobs. Trump's administration will then spend the next two years answering subpoenas from a Democratic congressional committees. If a Supreme Court seat is vacated, Democratic senators could channel Mitch McConnell and leave it open. 

So, you know, nothing big riding on this. 

A reason we are here: A child molester's legacy in the House of Representatives

Denny Hastert's official portrait

Denny Hastert's official mugshot

Denny Hastert is worth two footnotes in our nation's history. One, as former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, he is the highest-ranking U.S. politician to serve hard time. (Note: he was convicted of financial crimes stemming from illegal payoffs he made to a man he molested while Hastert was his high school wrestling coach.)

Two, in order to win election to the speakership, he instituted a policy in the Republican caucus that lives on as the "Hastert rule."

In case you slept through AP Government (shame!), one of the primary powers of the speaker is the s/he decides which bills will be voted on by the entire House. The Hastert rule is a "majority of the majority" rule. Only bills supported by a majority of the party in power would be ever be considered by Congress. In practice, this shifts the center of power from Republican and Democratic moderates to extreme factions within a caucus. 

Previous speakers didn't do this because it hamstrings their ability to get mainstream legislation passed. It can also empower congressmen who have little interest in passing anything at all.

This is why the Freedom Caucus -- a group of lawmakers who, in most previous congresses would've been backbenchers because they are far to the right of the House mainstream -- have, instead, considerable sway. 

So if you are wondering why Congress has accomplished nothing on immigration since the George W. Bush administration (not even popular legislative fixes like granting DREAMers a path to citizenship), the Freedom Caucus bears primary responsibility. 

See, the contours of an immigration compromise have been clear for a long time. This was codified by the "Gang of Eight" senators in 2013 when they worked out a deal with these as the main points:

• A path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already in the U.S.
• Fast-tracking permanent residence for U.S. university graduates with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering or math 
• Improvements to the employment verification system 
• Better work visa options for low-skill workers (impacting mostly farm and construction work)
• More funding for border security

This passed with 68 votes in the Senate, but the House never took it up. Why? It would easily passed a majority of the entire House. However, Speaker John Boehner didn't have enough support within the GOP caucus. 

If he would've brought it to the floor, the Freedom Caucus would've tried to remove him as Speaker. (They later did this anyway.)

Why did the Freedom Caucus resist this compromise? Explanations include**:

**Note: I don't agree with any of these and could make arguments against them, but don't want to stray too far from my purpose in attempting to relay what far-right GOP congressmen believe.

• By granting citizenship to anyone who entered the U.S. without permission, this would encourage more people to do the same, since they would believe they'd eventually be granted citizenship as well.
• Building on the above point, citizenship means granting more legal rights. Cross-border gangs and drug cartels could, theoretically, take advantage of this in some way. (Go ask drug lord and American citizen "La Barbie" how this theory works in practice.)
• Granting immigrants citizenship means they can vote. Immigrants are thought to be a demographic likely to vote Democratic. 
• Many migrants speak only Spanish and anti-immigrant types often use first-generation immigrants' failure to master English as a reason to not have them in the country.
• Increased costs for social services
• Many argue that all of the above are a fig leaf for racism against Latinos.

The upshot is that we continue to deal with the fallout from the same broken system. Real lives -- migrants, homeowners on the border, companies and small businesses seeking workers, even border patrol agents -- are hurt because the status quo lives on.

The thing about broken systems, too, is that they are ripe to be exploited by demagogues. 

To be sure, I could list some other factors that led us to this moment. But none have had the legacy of the child-molesting wrestling coach who did lasting damage to the House of Representatives so people could call him "Mr. Speaker."