https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/05/29/biden-debt-ceiling-deal/

The US President has shown once again his superpower is his normality, transparency and predictability.

A few days ago, in these pages, I predicted that the ongoing debt ceiling crisis would reveal US president Joe Biden to be finally out of his depths or have unexpected depths of sophistication. Or, I added, a jerryrigged agreement could simply postpone a day of reckoning.

The first scenario has been avoided as Mr Biden has neatly escaped a dangerous trap. The emerging solution appears to be a combination of scenarios two and three: a familiar deal that vindicates several of the President’s defining strategies.

On Saturday night, Mr Biden and Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, announced an agreement to extend the debt ceiling for two years in exchange for strikingly narrow spending cuts and caps.

Many significant details are not yet known, but the broad outlines are clear. The White House and the House of Representatives have done a fairly standard deal, at least when Democrats hold the presidency. Republican presidents ask for, and receive, unconditional debt ceiling expansions, which allow the Treasury Department to borrow money to pay for debts already incurred by Congress.

However, a pattern has emerged whereby Republicans do not extend this courtesy to Democratic presidents. Republicans suddenly remember that they are supposed to be alarmed at national budget deficits and debts, no matter whether they are becoming a greater or lesser percentage of GDP.

Many Democrats were petrified that Mr Biden, negotiating almost entirely in secret and apparently on Republican terms, was poised to cheerfully give up far too much to avoid a massive crisis. Yet this does not appear to have happened.

The actual cuts in spending are extremely limited, and even the caps to spending increases seem to hew reasonably well to major White House goals developed under the last Congress. Republicans gained a symbolic sop – at least in terms of national expenditure, although undoubtedly with alarming significance for many individuals and families – with some potential restrictions on nutritional and other support for poor people and, more importantly, new work requirements on “able-bodied” individuals without dependents.

Savings will be decidedly modest. For Republicans, it’s a matter of principle. And while few Democrats are going to be happy about these changes, even fewer will be kept up at night. It was a big win for one side, in their own eyes, and not much of a loss for most people on the other side.

The numbers are not going to be huge. For Republicans, it’s a matter of principle. And while few Democrats are going to be happy about these changes, even fewer are going to be kept up at night. It was a big win for one side, in their own eyes, and not that much of a loss for most people on the other side.

On the other hand, Mr Biden appears to have protected much of the most important spending he was able to secure in the first two years after his election. Total spending cutbacks over 10 years under these terms may be limited to a mere $650 billion.

Mr Biden had no white rabbit to pull out of his hat, no brilliant and unanticipated gimmick, or unexpected genius solution. As is so often the case with the wily old fox, the President’s superpower is his normalcy, transparency and predictability. While he disingenuously insisted he would never negotiate over budget issues with the debt ceiling being effectively held hostage – though of course that’s exactly what he did – from the onset he stressed the two biggest themes of his presidency: bipartisan compromise and political patience.

This approach and rhetoric has consistently infuriated many progressive Democrats. But it has just as consistently worked. It is exactly what secured the huge pandemic bailout which began his term. And the hard infrastructure act. And the high-tech investment act. And the social spending and climate change bill. And more besides. Very little of that appears meaningfully threatened, indeed it would be more accurate to say it largely has been protected, by the terms of this agreement.

In effect, Mr Biden has again delivered what he said he would, in exactly the way he said he would do it, despite numerous doubts, including my own, particularly as the witching hour approached. The Treasury Department, by the way, has cited next Wednesday as the first day a potential default might begin. Presumably it’s ready to come up with a few last-ditch workarounds to buy extra time to test the legislative viability of the agreement.

And here’s where Mr Biden truly got the better of Mr McCarthy.

Both leaders now must sell a compromise agreement that no one is going to be happy with to members of Congress on both sides, including the Democratic progressive-left and Republican hard-right. While their tasks may be roughly similar, the obstacles and consequences for failure each will face are radically different.

The murmurs of unease among progressives is extremely muted compared to categorical opposition already emanating from right-wing conservatives. It may not be simple or comfortable for the President to get his House ducklings in a row, but it just may not be possible for the House Speaker.

And now the political calculation has completely flipped. Before this agreement, there was every reason to suspect the sitting president would face most of the blame for any financial calamity. But if the Republican House Speaker makes a solemn agreement with the President to save the economy, and that is sabotaged by his own extremist faction, they, and he, will be left holding the bag essentially alone.

Unless Democrats make the unimaginable blunder of opposing the agreement in sufficient numbers to create a real obstacle to passage, which seems highly unlikely, this has now become an internal Republican problem and, probably, crisis. There will be members of the extreme right who will tell Mr McCarthy they didn’t support him for Speaker so that he could release the only real “bargaining chip” hostage they have for such limited restrictions. It will be very surprising not to start hearing hyperbolic fulminating about betrayal, treason and a war against the country’s fiscal sanity and financial future.

In the old Roadrunner cartoons, the hapless predator Wile E Coyote – a self-declared “super-genius” – produces one apparently ingenious trap after another, only, in horror, to find himself holding the bomb just as it is about to explode. In the coming days, the House Speaker may discover he, too, is unexpectedly in possession of a round, black, hissing object that his vanished opponent has surreptitiously managed to hand back to him.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-05-27/great-lebanon-bank-heist-needs-solving-for-imf-world-bank-bailout?srnd=opinion&leadSource=uverify%20wall&sref=tp95wk9l

A Ponzi scheme at the Banque du Liban brought the economy to its knees, yet the alleged culprit remains at large.

The pilfering of Lebanon’s wealth is, arguably, the bank heist of the 21st century. The long-serving governor of the Banque du Liban, Riad Salameh, has become the focus of international pressure for accountability, leading to frustration over his, and Lebanese institutions’ generally, refusal to cooperate with Western investigations.

Untold billions of depositors’ money, stored in a number of banks in many currencies and supposedly delivering implausibly generous interest rates, turned up missing during a financial crisis that took hold in 2019.  The BDL is Lebanon’s central bank, controls the lire, and regulates the commercial banks that were once a bedrock of the economy.

The Lebanese lire has since lost more than 90% of its value, and most depositors are still unable to access their savings. They are allowed small monthly withdrawals, almost always in the form of unreliable lire, no matter the designated currency denomination of their deposits. Ordinary people have been repeatedly driven to staging half-baked armed robberies to finance medical emergencies and other crises.

No one knows how much cash was spirited out of the country over decades of systematic plunder, while an illusion of solvency was maintained by a Ponzi structure using newer deposits to back older ones. But the national wealth was gutted. The middle classes who can are leaving en masse. Those who can’t flee have been reduced to poverty, and the working classes to savage penury.

Like all other massive crimes committed in Lebanon in recent decades — including the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 and the devastating 2020 Beirut port explosion that reduced much of the capital to smoldering ruins — there’s been no real effort to investigate or hold anyone accountable. But the de facto cover-up of this financial malfeasance raises particular problems because of the ripple effect into the economy as a whole.

Lebanon requires a bailout from the international community, especially banks and investors taking their cue from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which would have to be at the helm of a rescue. But, while there is every reason for the developed world to want to help save Lebanon, nobody wants to throw good money after bad. Reforms will be required, and before that, an accounting of exactly how much was stolen and by whom.

That places Salameh in the crosshairs. At least six European countries are actively investigating the heist. France, which has deep historical and colonial ties to Lebanon, issued an arrest warrant for him this month when he failed to attend a judicial hearing. So has Germany, which formally asked Interpol to apprehend him. Yet Lebanon does not extradite its citizens, and earlier this month a judge released Salameh from custody pending further investigation.

Salameh, who remains in his top post at the bank, isn’t just accused of participating in the heist to the tune of $300 million for himself. He allegedly oversaw the regulatory and institutional mechanisms that allowed wealthy Lebanese institutions and individuals to surreptitiously spirit billions out of the country. Even the terrorist group Hezbollah, which is allergic to any hint of economic — not to mention institutional or political — reform has said he should resign. He says he intends to step down when his term ends in July.

Salameh is supposedly being investigated by Lebanese authorities, who say they have confiscated his passport and forbidden him from traveling. But that conveniently protects him from real scrutiny in other countries, something he certainly won’t get at home. Growing pressure on the Lebanese state to do a more convincing job of at least pretending to investigate the decades of unimaginable theft is dovetailing with yet another crisis over the selection of a new president.

Gebran Bassil, son-in-law of the outgoing president, Michel Aoun, and target of significant US corruption sanctions, passionately wants to succeed his father-in-law. France has reportedly proposed a compromise: If Bassil will support the candidacy of his top rival, Sleiman Frangieh, he would be permitted to select the new governor of the Banque du Liban succeeding Salameh. But it doesn’t seem as if Bassil is willing to step aside.

In any case, an agreement along these lines would represent a meeting of the minds among Lebanese political elites to avoid any genuine investigation into this mind-boggling crime. They wouldn’t want Salameh to spill the beans.

The Catch-22 for Lebanese power centers is that to admit that the Banque du Liban house of cards collapsed along with the economy would be a confession of the profound corruption in which they are all implicated. But without some accountability, there won’t be an international bailout, and they can continue to lord it over an increasingly hollow, decimated society.

The Catch-22 for the West and the international community is that Lebanon remains strategically and politically well worth saving. Yet there is no real reason to think the Lebanese political class is capable of contemplating, let alone undertaking, the necessary investigations and reforms, beginning with an audit of the bank.

Lebanon will have to be saved, not exactly from itself, but from a united front among its politically dominant factions. Right now, it’s hard to imagine where that even starts.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/05/16/both-biden-and-trump-face-problems-in-the-run-up-to-the-2024-elections/

The incumbent is in more trouble than Democrats anticipated but Trump self-sabotages like no one else.

There’s a long way to go before the 2024 US presidential election, but as things stand a 2020 rematch – incumbent President Joe Biden versus former president Donald Trump – looks likely, though few Americans say they want either man to be their party’s nominee. Democrats, overall, are somewhat more confident about their chances, based on the broader political landscape, the outcome of the 2022 midterms and a widespread belief, including among many Republicans, that Mr Trump may be practically unelectable.

However, both candidates face mounting and significant obstacles to regaining the White House. As with most sitting presidents, Mr Biden is virtually assured of his party’s nomination, and faces no plausible opposition. Mr Trump has a much broader range of potential rivals, but all of them are either slow off the mark and losing momentum (notably Florida Governor Ron DeSantis), have failed to make a coherent case for their candidacy (such as former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley) or just don’t seem to be viable candidates in today’s Republican Party (such as former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie).

Yet Mr Trump’s own candidacy tends to provoke doom, gloom and even despair among mainstream Republican operatives. That’s nothing new. Yet Mr Biden appears to be in considerably more trouble than many of his supporters would have imagined at the end of last year. He faces three obvious and significant obstacles in the short, medium and long terms.

The US president does not appear to have a viable strategy to resolve the rapidly approaching debt ceiling crisis. It’s looking increasingly likely that his failure to do anything to forestall this potential catastrophe after the midterm results were known but before the new Congress came into session, when he held many more cards, was his biggest blunder thus far. If Mr Biden can pull a dramatic rabbit out of a hat in the coming weeks, and not only resolving the debt ceiling in this instance but even potentially taking the issue off the table for the long term, he will have produced one of the most stunning victories in modern presidential history and made a tremendous contribution to fiscal and political stability in the US.

But he doesn’t seem to have any plan whatsoever. Mr Biden is refusing to negotiate with de facto hostage takers in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, who are threatening to force a default on existing US debts – all incurred by Congress in the past – if the White House won’t commit to gigantic and unspecified budget cuts. It is a dangerous and contemptible gambit.

However, if enough Republicans are willing to compromise and give Mr Biden what Democrats several times gave Mr Trump and previous Republican presidents before that, there’s no sign of it. Anyone who thinks the current batch of House right-wingers isn’t capable of deliberately demolishing the national and, to some extent, global economies simply to damage a Democratic president hasn’t been paying attention to their unprecedented radicalism and recklessness.

Mr Biden obviously thinks that when, as Barack Obama’s vice president, he compromised with former House speaker John Boehner, only to see the whole agreement fall apart under pressure from the far-right, he made a huge mistake that he intends not to repeat.

But the White House plan cannot be to simply, no matter however accurately, blame Republicans for a devastating outcome. He is the sitting president, and the chances that he will have to shoulder most of the blame for a probable cascade of ensuing disasters are quite strong – it’s a lot easier for the public to blame one person everyone has heard of rather than a couple of hundred, or even 20, that they have not. This is almost certainly what Republicans contemplating economic armageddon are counting on.

Time is running desperately short. The jig is likely to be up in as little as two weeks and, even if it can be postponed slightly, it will soon after have to be somehow resolved.

In the medium term, Mr Biden finds himself squeezed by a border crisis not of his own making. The US immigration system is badly broken, and a compromise between the parties on even the simplest aspects has proven maddeningly elusive.

A perfect storm of causal factors is driving increased waves of migration from devastated countries such as Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador. They are gathering on the Mexican border and, while the Biden administration is trying to keep them there, immigration remains one of the most potent Republican weapons, appealing even to core Democratic constituencies such as labour, African-American and even Latino groups.

Democrats tend to view immigration as a matter of fairness to migrants and Republicans as a cultural and racial invasion. Both get it wildly wrong: the country badly needs more workers and a rational migration system. But the anti-immigration case is politically much more potent.

Knowing this, Mr Trump has been vowing to restore the borderline-criminal policy of systematically separating children from their parents to deter migration. Unfortunately, there is a real mass political market for cruelty on this issue.

In the long run, Mr Biden is haunted by his age. If he runs against Mr Trump, it will be less of a problem because both men are showing their considerable years. But right-wing media has long ago made the issue a centrepiece and won’t let it go.

Mr Trump’s campaign is already a proverbial dumpster fire. His recent “town hall” on CNNwas an unmitigated catastrophe for his chances. Mr Biden and his policies barely came up. Instead Mr Trump, spouting falsehoods in virtually every sentence, fixated on imaginary fraud in the 2020 election, the glories of the January 6 insurrection, and phony grievances involving the recent civil ruling against him in a sexual assault case and a set of probable looming criminal trials.

Of course it appealed to his diehard supporters. But if Mr Trump wanted to present a message ideally calibrated to convince crucial swing voters in evenly divided “purple” states, such as suburban women, to not even consider voting for him next year, he could hardly have done better.

Much of the country is looking at this emerging campaign with emotions ranging from disquiet to disgust. Most Republicans want to move on from Mr Trump and most Democrats would prefer another nominee than Mr Biden. But it appears the country is going to be facing this unpalatable choice, like it or not.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/05/10/a-jury-of-trumps-peers-have-judged-him-now-more-voters-will-too/

Voters, espeicllay women, will find it hard to ignore the $5 million verdict against the former president in his case against writer E Jean Carroll.

The verdict in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday, in which a jury found that former US president Donald Trump had sexually abused and defamed writer E Jean Carroll at a New York City department store in 1996, cut savagely through the veil of nonsense and gaslighting that has come to dominate US political discourse, especially on the right.

While Mr Trump and his lawyers insist that this is a “hoax” and part of “the greatest witchhunt” in the country’s history, in fact a jury of his peers has formally held Mr Trump to account for his reprehensible actions. He will have to pay Ms Carroll $5 million even though the jury also held that she had not clearly established that he raped her.

Ms Carroll proved an excellent witness. Though taunted and provoked continuously by Mr Trump’s attorneys, who harped on ancient accusations thrown against virtually every rape victim since the dawn of time – for example that she did not scream or immediately file charges with the police – she remained adamant that the attack took place. Given the amount of time that has passed, her account remained impressively consistent.

Two of her friends testified that Ms Carroll called each of them immediately after the alleged attack and told them about the harrowing experience in detail, which strongly corroborates the accusations. One of them recalled imploring Ms Carroll not to go to the police, because Mr Trump would use his financial clout in courts and elsewhere to make her life miserable. It just wasn’t worth it, she says she counselled. Ms Carroll first went public with the story in a 2019 book.

Mr Trump’s attorneys were in the unenviable position of having to argue that these three women colluded in fabricating a vicious tall tale and hugely perjured themselves to try to inflict political damage on a leader they freely admit despising. But they were unable to provide any rational explanation for why these women would do such a thing beyond sharing a highly negative view of the former president.

Moreover, Ms Carroll was backed up by two additional witnesses who said that Mr Trump had assaulted them in similar fashion. A former stockbroker testified that he groped and kissed her in the first-class cabin of a commercial airliner in the 1970s before she fled back to the safety of coach. And a former journalist for People Magazine told the jury that Mr Trump had coaxed her into a private room at his Florida hotel, pushed her against a wall and began kissing her as she tried to get away.

All of that strongly contradicted claims by Mr Trump’s lead attorney, Joe Tacopina, that “everything in this case” is either “Amazing. Odd. Inconceivable. Unbelievable.” It took the jury less than three hours to conclude precisely the opposite.

But Mr Trump proved the strongest witness, by far, against himself. Though he avoided the trial and declined to testify, his own words provided overwhelming circumstantial and characterological indictments against him. His attorneys will never allow the former president to ever again take the witness stand if they can possibly prevent it. He may or may not be the worst US president ever (a lively debate about this continues), but he’s certainly a nightmarish legal client and witness.

The jury got to hear Mr Trump’s bizarre primary argument dismissing these accusations, and the over two dozen others like it, which is that Ms Carroll is, he insists, “not my type”. It was bad enough when these claims seemed to suggest that a sexual assault and rape might be more understandable if she somehow were “his type”. But, disastrously, in a roughly contemporaneous photograph he misidentified Ms Carroll as his then-wife, Marla Maples. “That’s my wife,” he said casually, as his attorneys rushed to contradict him. No juror will have missed the irreconcilable chasm between “she’s not my type” and “that’s my wife”.

The court was also treated to Mr Trump’s account of his own predatory sexual habits as he explained in the infamous Access Hollywood videotape. In an outtake from the series, he notoriously told the interviewer that he made a habit of kissing attractive women without waiting or seeking their consent and grabbing them by their genitals. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he insisted.

When the video was leaked before the 2016 presidential election, Mr Trump dismissed the conversation as “locker room banter”. But the stunning verdict suggests it may have been unnervingly accurate.

Worse yet, in a deposition also played for the jury, Ms Carroll’s attorneys asked Mr Trump about those remarks. He confirmed he considered himself “a star,” and said “If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.” Not only is this highly debatable, that this supposed historical pattern could be construed as “fortunate” appears catastrophically revealing of deep-seated predatory and misogynistic attitudes.

After all that, an effective defense required something more substantial than dismissing Ms Carroll’s allegations as simply inconceivable or unbelievable. The standard in a US civil trial is demonstrating a claim by the preponderance of the evidence, not without a shadow of a doubt. Her lawyers obviously cleared the first hurdle, except on the rape accusation, and most likely even met the second.

Putting aside other potential or looming criminal trials in Manhattan, Georgia and at the federal level, will this judgment harm Mr Trump’s chances for 2024? Thus far, his legal woes appear to have done nothing but strengthen his grip on the Republican voter base, and while he still could be defeated for the nomination, he seems in a very strong position right now.

But in a general election, and despite President Joe Biden’s dismal polling results, this verdict will almost certainly weaken his already bleak prospects. After decades of living in a grey zone of legal ambiguity created by his largely inherited vast wealth, and the protections unduly afforded to white-collar defendants by the US system, reality is finally catching up with the poster boy of privileged impunity.

Voters, particularly women, who pulled the lever for Mr Trump in 2016 while dismissing the Access Hollywood video as irrelevant macho bluster, will surely have a much harder time repeating the gesture next year.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-05-10/saudi-uae-had-to-bring-assad-s-syria-back-into-arab-league?srnd=opinion&sref=tp95wk9l&leadSource=uverify%20wall

Assad is a mass murderer but he won his war, and Saudi Arabia and the UAE have vital interests to protect across the Middle East.

It should have come as no surprise that the Arab League voted overwhelmingly to restore Syria’s membership after more than a decade of suspension. The move isn’t unanimous, with Qatar remaining the primary holdout, and Washington registering muted objections. Yet, while the outrage the vote has provoked is more than understandable, it has long been inevitable.

The protracted isolation of Syria was motivated by clear moral and strategic reasons. The brutality with which the Bashar al-Assed regime put down what began as peaceful, pro-democracy protests has few parallels in the 21st century. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed, including through widespread use of chemical weapons.

Torture and summary execution have been systematic, as thoroughly documented by whistleblowers like the former government photographerknown as Caesar. Nearly 7 million Syrian refugees have been forced to flee abroad, with around the same number displaced within the country.

Because of this incredible record of brutality, much of the world, including many Arabs, are dismayed at the practical re-embracing of the dictatorship. Yet there really hasn’t been any long-term alternative for the Arab states ever since the rebel-held parts of Aleppo fell to pro-regime forces at the end of 2016. That functionally ended the main part of the war for what the dictatorship has called “necessary Syria,” the central swath of the country running from the Lebanese border up the Mediterranean coast and inland far enough to encompass all the major cities.

The regime didn’t survive on its own. In the summer of 2015, high-level Iranian delegations traveled to Russia in a bid to convince Moscow that only an intense, coordinated military intervention could save their mutual ally, Assad. That fall, Iranian forces and militias they controlled, including Hezbollah from Lebanon, made a decisive intervention on the ground, with Russia providing crucial command-and-control, air and intelligence support.

Rebel groups were no match for this new coalition, and within a little more than a year the war more or less ended when eastern Aleppo fell to the pro-Assad forces. Fighting continued in peripheral areas, involving Turkey, Kurdish fighters and a small number of US troops in the north; Iranian, Kurdish and US forces in the East; and significant remnants of terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

However, re-engagement by the major Arab countries was always a matter of time, because they continue to have significant interests in Syria but no way of securing them. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have led the reintegration of Damascus into the Arab League, have legitimate concerns involving undue Iranian and Hezbollah influence in the country, Syria’s role in Lebanon, Turkey’s role in Syria, refugee return, and drug smuggling and other crimes associated with the regime, to name just a few.

Although Arab countries have made tough-sounding demands of the regime on many of these issues, it’s unlikely functional reintegration will be contingent on their implementation.

Arab governments were hoping to see the back of Assad after the uprising broke out in 2011. But with his survival, they are not prepared to walk away from Syria permanently, and don’t feel they can rely on outside forces like the US, Turkey and Israel to contain the dictator and his foreign supporters.

They’ve concluded their only real option is to hold their noses and try to use diplomatic, political and commercial leverage — was well as aid in helping Syria rebuild its shattered infrastructure — to regain influence in where that country is going.

As usual, the UAE — a small power unburdened by regional and global leadership roles — acted first. This opened the door for Saudi Arabia, a much more important country with regional Arab and global Islamic leadership aspirations, and much more complex domestic politics. (This same pattern applied to recent Gulf Arab rapprochements with Iran.) They have been joined by a set of countries including Algeria, Egypt, Oman and others that never really turned their back on the Assad regime no matter how bloody things got in Syria.

Qatar wants to sit this out because it feels it can rely on Turkey to pursue their common interests, and it wishes to avoid annoying the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups with which it is aligned. But that changes practically nothing.

Washington clearly isn’t happy, but it didn’t provide the Arab League with any practical alternatives to ensure its interests. Hence the rather attenuated US protests. Assad leads a regime soaked in blood. Sadly, the balance of power on the ground in Syria, combined with always-heated regional politics, made this distasteful reintegration inescapable.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/2023/05/05/civic-virtue-expected-of-those-in-high-office-goes-missing-all-too-often/

There is one standard for ordinary Americans, another for the wealthy, yet another for the politically powerful.

Many Americans, on the left and right, are profoundly alienated from a political system they regard as deeply corrupt. This cynicism even primes some to believe former US president Donald Trump and failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake that US elections are shams. Mr Trump even declared that Senator Bernie Sanders was cheated in Democratic primaries – a claim Mr Sanders dismissed.

There is no evidence of any rigged elections, but both parties and all three branches of federal government have helped create an atmosphere of sleaze.

Most Americans are willing to accept a degree of social inequality. For example, the more money one brings to a criminal trial, the better the likely outcome. Battalions of lawyers with diverse specialisations, forensic scientists and accountants, private investigators, psychologists, psychiatrists, former police officers and so on provide a much more formidable hurdle for prosecutors than overworked public defenders.

Prosecutors, for instance, won’t seriously consider pursuing the death penalty, where it exists, against defendants of means. Execution is therefore in effect reserved for non-wealthy individuals, especially when the defendant is a black man and/or the victim was a white woman.

Late 18th century assumptions that shaped the way the US system deals with power and accountability have proven defective. The framers of the constitution expected everyone to operate in their self-interest. But they assumed that the social and political elite would largely indulge in a somewhat attenuated form of bias.

All systems, they understood, ultimately rely on civic virtue. The more prestige and power individuals or factions accumulate, the more members of that elite need to exercise a higher form of “self-governance” – not merely repudiating corruption but embracing self-regulation in the national interest.

This is an intended feature (alas a bug) of the American system to not just informally (as with wealth influencing the quality of legal protection) but often formally granting unusual degrees of unregulated autonomy and exemption to those dominating the national political hierarchy. With civic virtue playing an increasing role, they presumed, such elites would conceptualise their self-interest more in terms of institutional than personal prerogatives and privileges.

Congresspersons would naturally fight to preserve legislative authority and powers, while presidents and the courts would stick up for the executive and judiciary, respectively. Within a few years of the Constitution’s ratification, however, it became clear that the emergence of formalised political parties produced a huge and largely unanticipated partiality that greatly impeded the functioning of political checks and balances. Parties instinctively protect their own, across institutional lines.

Some of the most important guardrails established at the Constitution’s founding were greatly weakened as bad actors found significant protection within the party system. Whether real or perceived corruption has gotten worse over time or not is immaterial. As a practical matter, the system is shot through with impunity that only increases with greater authority – the opposite of the arguably intuitive notion that greater power requires stronger restraints.

The (reportedly) relatively robust restraints over who can order the firing of US nuclear weapons illustrates that such a system of limitations can work if real checks and an honest, equitable outcome were the goal. But it doesn’t appear to be. It is possible to give someone the authority to say “no,” as when it comes to national survival. But there is nothing similar regarding many truly egregious forms of corruption.

Examples are everywhere. Hardly a week goes by without a new revelation about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and/or his wife behaving improperly, unlawfully failing to report or disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts from interested parties, and other improper financial relationships with vested interests on the extreme right.

Mr Thomas’s behavior is beyond outrageous. But because the Supreme Court has no ethical code and prefers not to police itself, thank you very much, he remains completely unaccountable.

Congress and the Democrats are no saints. During the first two years of President Joe Biden’s term, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was implored by countless patriotic groups and individuals to restrain stock market trading by members of Congress, which can obviously and easily become a form of insider trading. At first, she said she simply wouldn’t consider the matter, and then she admitted it was important but ultimately and predictably did nothing.

As for the White House, Mr Trump, his cabinet and, especially, his family (his administration gave itself permission to ignore laws against nepotism) seemed to have set to work as soon as he was inaugurated milking the system in what often seemed simply a for-profit venture. The US system never saw anything like it before. We may never know how deep the rot went.

But what we certainly do know is that, as long as he was in office, he was immune from prosecution and, in many cases, even investigation. He may face the music now for some of his more egregious, scandalous misdeeds, but as long as he was president, he was untouchable.

The Biden White House has been a lot less tainted, to say the very least. But the President’s son, Hunter, although he’s never been a government official, does seem to have tried to profit by his last name. The Justice Department has been taking an inexplicably long time to decide whether he should face criminal charges on a tax matter. Once again, the impression is terrible.

Meanwhile, revolving doors between the government and private sector, and processes of bidding on contracts and outsourcing – particularly when it comes to military expenditure (the biggest chunk of discretionary, and often even non-discretionary, national spending) means that there is a huge federal trough by those who can find a way to get their snout in it. This pervasive, fundamental set of mechanisms driving the US system often may not be unlawful, but it’s another big factor reasonably informing public cynicism.

The bottom line is that, with very rare exceptions, there is one standard for ordinary people, another for the wealthy, yet another for the somewhat politically powerful, and near-total immunity and impunity for those at the very top such as Supreme Court justices and sitting presidents. Some of them even seem to enjoy flouting the rules.

No wonder so many Americans are disposed to dismiss the entire process, including perfectly legitimate elections, as a sham and a scam. The stench of corruption hangs heavy over the Washington swampland and poor old civic virtue all-too-often seems to have been quietly abandoned.