https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/09/26/biden-stares-at-a-possible-us-government-shutdown-but-he-neednt-worry/

The Republican Party has been responsible for recent shutdowns, but this time it’s blindingly obvious to the public.

Yet another federal government shutdown is looming in Washington, with the public and hundreds of thousands of civil servants bracing for the impact, including a complete suspension of nutrition, vaccination and other services for impoverished mothers and children.

Such government shutdowns are nothing new, having occurred more than 20 times since 1976. But the instances are becoming more frequent and disruptive over time, with the current impasse breaking new ground in two alarming ways.

First, the current dispute is not between Republicans and Democrats, or even the House of Representatives and the Senate. Instead, it has developed entirely within an increasingly dysfunctional Republican Party that is being held hostage by about 20 or so radical lawmakers in the House at odds with about 200 of their fellow Republicans.

So, it’s going to be almost impossible for Republicans, no matter how hard they try, to blame President Joe Biden or the Democrats for a dispute that is happening within their own ranks and the legislative body under their narrow control.

Ever since then House speaker Newt Gingrich pioneered the use of a deliberately engineered federal government shutdown as a political and policy weapon, following protracted battles over spending with president Bill Clinton, for a few weeks at the end of 1995 and the beginning of 1996, most shutdowns have been instigated by House Republicans. But they always left themselves some kind of plausible argument for why Democrats were truly responsible by forcing their hand in some manner.

That didn’t work for Mr Gingrich in the 90s, with Republicans taking most of the blame for his novel manoeuvre. As a result, it didn’t take long for him to lose his leadership role and political prominence, and the fiasco may have helped save Mr Clinton’s presidency.

Now, however, though House Republicans on both sides will strenuously try to point the finger at Mr Biden, the current dispute has nothing to do with partisan divisions.

The overwhelming bulk of Senate Republicans are also uninvolved and seem dismayed at the behaviour of the radical minority of their colleagues in the House who are forcing the crisis. While the House extremists claim to be on a principled crusade against what they see as irresponsible overspending by the Biden administration, in fact they are at odds with a 10-to-one majority of their own colleagues.

And this reveals the second key distinction between the current impending emergency and previous deliberately instigated government shutdowns over spending and other policy disputes: the current imbroglio isn’t in pursuit of any real policy goals.

At least Mr Gingrich and his successors who copied his tactic were able to broadly articulate what they wanted, or didn’t want. Not so with the current group of destructive reactionaries. Instead, they seem determined to simply say ”no”, not to congressional Democrats or the Biden administration, but to their own leader, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and the vast bulk of their colleagues.

There is a strong scent of anarchism about the so-called ”wrecking ball crew” that is forcing the government to its knees. This crew of radicals casts virtually all other Republicans as being in cahoots with the Democrats in a de facto single party representing wealthy donors and other ”elites” against the interests of ordinary Americans, and therefore appear almost as gleeful when going after Mr McCarthy as Mr Biden.

Moreover, they embody the anti-government sentiment that has long been a feature of the American far right taken to its logical conclusion.

These extremists no longer recognise any exception for the once sacrosanct military forces, which they denounce as “woke”, corrupted and weak, especially in comparison with the Russian military, which several of them inexplicably seem to revere. And they are even more hostile to what they cast as a “weaponised” federal law enforcement system, especially the FBI, which some have advocated decapitating, defunding and even disbanding altogether (particularly after their investigations and indictments of former president Donald Trump).

These lawmakers are so extreme that they forcefully dismiss the usefulness of almost everything the federal government, and even Congress itself, does as irrelevant, and even harmful, to the American people. Such rhetoric justifies rejecting virtually any proposed spending or other significant legislation and even rationalises disinterest about the potential impact on national security or law enforcement. It’s a nihilistic political perspective.

It’s hard to gauge how sincerely held these views might be, because these representatives all come from very right-wing and secure districts in which incumbency is a virtual guarantee of re-election, and because otherwise obscure Congresspersons can parlay this kind of populist anti-government demagoguery and pandering into valuable time on right-wing TV networks.

This is basically the same small group of marginal Republicans who tormented Mr McCarthy through an unprecedented 15 failed votes for the Speaker position and have been obviously chomping at the bit for another chance to take him on and, if he defies them, bring him down. He recently acceded to demands that he open a baseless – and likely to prove embarrassing for Republicans – impeachment inquiry into Mr Biden.

But the Speaker is aware that he, his party and institution will undoubtedly bear the blame for a shutdown. So, Mr McCarthy has been working on a last-ditch effort to pass a stopgap spending bill, although there is no indication it will succeed. More significantly, senators from both parties are working on a different stopgap spending measure that could keep the government afloat for four to six more weeks by gaining the support of all Democrats and enough Republicans in the House before the Saturday night deadline.

Reportedly, the main issue of contention in the Senate’s potential so-called “continuing resolution” is $25 million in new aid to Ukraine, which could meet with stiff resistance and disruptive outrage from pro-Russia Republican right-wingers in the House, including Mr McCarthy’s close ally, Marjorie Taylor Greene. Republican senators are divided between those determined to support Kyiv versus those who are even more determined not to create additional headaches for Mr McCarthy, who would probably face a protracted campaign by the radicals to oust him if aid to Ukraine is increased.

With Mr Trump urging a shutdown unless Republican extremists “get everything” they are demanding, with Mr McCarthy unable to control the House or even his own caucus, and with Republicans seemingly resolutely determined to prove incapable of the most basic functions of governance, Mr Biden is surely the most serene president ever to face a looming federal government shutdown.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/09/20/even-with-an-impeachment-trial-and-an-indicted-son-biden-will-still-come-out-on-top/

The obstacles facing the US President are probably not yet enough to cost him his job in next year’s election.

US President Joe Biden was last week hit with a nasty double whammy: the launch of an impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives and the indictment of his son, Hunter. The impeachment inquiry may ultimately prove less of a headache. This is hardly the first such probe, but it is the only instance in which the House has launched one on the basis of no evidence.

No break-ins and erased tapes. No blue dress. No shaking down of foreign leaders. No assault on Congress. Nothing.

After House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he had unilaterally created the inquiry – after months of vowing never to do so without a vote of the full House – Republicans struggled mightily to explain its rationale. Representative Nancy Mace, in particular, gave numerous TV interviews in which she insisted that there was ample evidence of bribery or corruption associated with Mr Biden, but was unable to point to anything in particular. Asked by CNN’s Kaitlin Collins if such an inquiry didn’t need to be based on evidence, Ms Mace gave the game away by replying, “Well, that’s what the inquiry is for. It’s to get more evidence.”

Representative Michael McCaul insisted: “We don’t have the evidence now, but we may find it later.” That’s highly reminiscent of Donald Trump’s attorney Rudolph Giuliani saying to an Arizona official about his own overwrought allegations of fraud in the 2020 election: “We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have the evidence.”

The impeachment push against Mr Biden is so weak that Mr McCarthy had to be forced to launch it by Republican right-wing extremists. Both the Speaker and many GOP representatives from centrist districts will surely be hoping that whatever hearings and other measures are undertaken, they drag on indefinitely and without much fanfare. Otherwise, there’s every danger of a significant public backlash if the country gets the sense that this is baseless, frivolous and partisan, and worse – in part because it’s true – that it’s simple automatic payback on behalf of the twice-impeached Mr Trump.

Republicans have been diligently digging around Mr Biden and his son since last year’s midterms and have discovered absolutely nothing directly connecting the president with the financial dealings of his formerly drug-addicted adult child. It’s largely been a campaign of innuendo, elaborating unproven criminal or unethical dealings, apart from the younger Mr Biden’s evident and unsavoury, but sadly typical, willingness to try to profit from his last name.

Right-wingers then suggest that the President must have also been involved in dealings that were not merely unsavoury or even unethical but downright illegal. Based on this chain of groundless implications, they have made a fetish out of the preposterous phrase “the Biden crime family”, as if the whole clan is corrupted and constitutes the equivalent of a Mafia gang. This creates a huge contradiction in Republican messaging: Mr Biden cannot simultaneously be the mastermind controlling a multinational criminal enterprise and a doddering, senile old fool.

Their inquiries thus far have not only failed to uncover evidence of any of this, they frequently left Republican congressional leaders looking desperate and foolish. So, unless Mr Biden actually has something to hide, which seems very improbable, he likely has little to fear politically from this impeachment agenda, which is liable to deliver some significant self-inflicted wounds to his Republican adversaries or fade into the background.

That’s much less true of the indictment and likely upcoming trial of Hunter. The president’s son is accused of purchasing and possessing a gun while using outlawed narcotics and lying on a gun purchase form about his use of these controlled substances. He had reached a plea deal with a Trump-appointed prosecutor that probably would have allowed him to avoid incarceration, but that was thrown out as insufficient by a judge. Because he and his lawyers continued to insist that the plea deal was binding, he has been indicted.

In a rational world, being patiently faithful and forgiving of the foibles of a wayward and drug-addicted child wouldn’t be considered a stain on any parent’s character. Hunter Biden, after all, has never run for or held office, or occupied any government position, and even Republicans don’t suggest Mr Biden was responsible for his son’s drug use or alleged gun violations. Indeed, the strident protection of gun ownership with few restrictions by the ultra-conservative present Supreme Court may provide Hunter’s legal team with their most potent arguments.

But politics is rarely rational. Mr Trump and his followers claim the gun charges were brought precisely because the president is obviously not involved in them while implying more serious charges were avoided because they could have implicated Mr Biden. None of that is based on any evidence either.

Still, many Americans may gather over the next 14 months before the 2024 election that Mr Trump is on trial for something or other, and so is Mr Biden’s son, and therefore there is some kind of equivalency. The fact that the charges brought against Mr Trump and Hunter Biden are essentially on opposite ends of the spectrum of nonviolent criminal offences – with the former president facing some of the most serious imaginable accusations and the incumbent’s son accused of minor technical violations of the law – may be lost on a great many people, even those who don’t depend on Fox News for current events consumption.

Some anxious Democrats are renewing their appeals to Mr Biden not to run for re-election, citing his age and the fact that he is currently running neck and neck with Mr Trump in polls. His supporters retort that Mr Trump is nearly as old, and frequently makes rather less sense when speaking in public, and that virtually every first-term president is in relative polling parity against hypothetical opponents a year out from re-election.

Yet the indictment of his son is a genuine headache as well as heartache for the President. It will deprive Republicans of plausible claims that Hunter is receiving preferential treatment from the Justice Department, but it sets up a potential, albeit entirely invalid, offset to Mr Trump’s own coming trials.

Still, with inflation down and GDP up, plus an impressive string of domestic legislative and foreign policy successes, Mr Biden still seems on course to win a second term, although most Americans, including most Democrats, would prefer someone younger. He certainly wouldn’t want to change political, let alone legal, positions with Mr Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/opinion/israel-saudi-arabia-us.html

The Biden administration is working overtime to consolidate what is arguably Washington’s most significant advantage over its great power rivals, especially China. That advantage lies in the Middle East.

More specifically, the United States has been pushing hard to forge a deal in which Washington would give formal security guarantees to Saudi Arabia and, in return, the Saudis would establish diplomatic ties with Israel, with Israeli concessions to the Palestinians. At the Group of 20 gathering in New Delhi, President Joe Biden and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia exchanged a warm handshake. Last week, a high-level U.S. delegation visited Riyadh to pursue the potential agreement, following two separate trips this summer by the national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

It’s easy to see what the Saudis and Israelis, facing security threats in the region, particularly from Iran, would gain. Saudi Arabia would win reliable American protection, among other potential benefits. For Israel, establishing formal ties with Saudi Arabia would bolster its position against Iran. It could also be Israel’s greatest diplomatic breakthrough since its 1979 peace treaty with Egypt, and would give other Sunni Muslim-majority states incentive to follow suit.

Yet neither Saudi Arabia nor Israel appears to be showing much urgency in getting the deal done, while the Biden administration has made it a clear priority. So, beyond a diplomatic victory, what’s in it for Washington?

The main advantage the triangular deal offers the United States is a tightened grip over three vitally important waterways around the Arabian Peninsula: the Strait of Hormuz, the Suez Canal and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Those arteries are critical links for China, a focus of American concern.

The Strait of Hormuz, which links the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea and more widely the Indian Ocean, is arguably the most important maritime choke point in the world. About one-third of seaborne petroleum, and a slightly lower percentage of liquid natural gas, passes through it each year. The overwhelming majority of this energy goes to Asia, including over 45 percent of China’s annual oil imports.

The Suez Canal, which links the Red and Mediterranean Seas and connects Asia, Africa and Europe, is just as significant. Approximately 12 percent of global trade passes through it annually, and China is its biggest user. Chinese ships account for 10 percent of those passing through the canal. Those ships carry, for example, over 60 percent of the goods China sends to Europe.

At the other end of the Red Sea, a third key passageway, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, controls the entrance into the Red Sea leading to the Suez Canal and is similarly significant to global trade. It’s no accident that the only overseas Chinese military base is in Djibouti, just 68 miles from Bab el-Mandeb, or that Beijing invested billions of dollars in that country.

As part of a more aggressive effort to expand its presence along its trade and resource routes, China has attempted to woo both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to gain a strategic foothold in the Persian Gulf, and has been constructing a relatively modest port facility near Abu Dhabi that Washington has warned could serve military purposes.

For now, China doesn’t have much room to maneuver. The United States and its partners dominate the three o waterways surrounding the Arabian Peninsula. A deal with Israel and Saudi Arabia could secure that advantage for decades to come. It would bring the two main U.S. military partners in the Middle East together in open cooperation, and effectively create an interlocking regional chain consisting of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Israel, Egypt and Jordan, all longstanding friends of Washington, nearly encircling the Arabian Peninsula.

Moreover, U.S. security guarantees for Riyadh would undoubtedly ensure that Saudi Arabia’s increasing flirtation with China never leads to a significant strategic foothold for Beijing in the kingdom, a line the Saudis have thus far carefully avoided crossing.

If this reinforced network of waterway control were to come to pass, it could allow the United States to finally realize its longstanding goal of reducing some of its huge military bases in the Gulf region, including Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, that are effectively remnants of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Smaller bases, with the probable exception of the one in Bahrain, which is home to Naval Forces Central Command and the Fifth Fleet, could be reconfigured for rapid responses to local threats in coordination with regional partners.

The Biden administration has been energetically pursuing this triangular deal because it would secure an invaluable global competitive advantage. What remains unclear is whether Washington has sufficient leverage over the Israeli government, which appears allergic to the concessions toward the Palestinians that Saudi Arabia reportedly seeks, or whether there is enough time before the president’s re-election bid to hammer out such a complex arrangement.

It seems that Washington and Riyadh might be ready to overcome their bilateral differences. But without Israeli participation and Saudi-Israeli normalization, a simpler bilateral agreement won’t give Washington what it needs: a potent network of friendly states based on a rapprochement between the United States’ two key strategic partners in the Middle East.

The triangular nature of this initiative makes it particularly difficult to achieve. But the vast potential strategic benefits readily explain why the administration is taking on this huge task now, with potentially enough time before the election and the seeming receptiveness by the Saudis. Both Israel and Saudi Arabia would benefit in important and obvious ways, but the United States would be the biggest winner.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/09/04/if-trump-returns-he-might-replace-thousands-of-federal-staff-with-his-supporters/

Purging thousands, much less tens of thousands, of qualified civil servants though on ideological grounds isn’t all that simple.

Public opinions regarding former US president Donald Trump by now are virtually set in stone. Yet he has consistently proven still capable of shocking, if not surprising. The January 6 insurrection and his broader failed efforts to overturn the 2020 election are an obvious example. Another is his apparent purloining and retaining of classified government documents.

This element of surprise is also reflected in radical advance planning by the Trump campaign and allied groups for a second term, including an unprecedented ideological purge of the federal workforce. Few Americans have heard about this extraordinary agenda, which bears all the hallmarks of what political extremists typically attempt when seizing power. Supporters and critics agree that Mr Trump and camp were simply unprepared after his surprise 2016 victory and are determined to attempt a sweeping reconstruction of the American state from day one of any second chance.

A recent Associated Press-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research poll found that the two words Americans most associate with Mr Biden are “old” and “confused”, and with Mr Trump “corrupt” and “dishonest”. It would appear the former president’s criminal indictments have been taking their toll.

Mr Biden is indeed showing his age more than Mr Trump, who’s only three years his junior, and has at times appeared confused or said inexplicable things – although I know two people who are in no way connected to the administration, the Democratic Party or the political process, and have had lengthy meetings with him, in both cases in excess of one hour, discussing highly complex policy questions, and both highly credible sources insist he is well-informed, alert and sharp.

The negative views of Mr Trump among most Americans would hardly be enhanced by a detailed understanding of what his camp is planning. Not that he’s making a secret of his intentions. On the contrary, Mr Trump has been regaling audiences with the vows that “I am your retribution”, and “your justice”. There’s little doubt whom he intends to target with such vengeance.

While Trump’s base, yearning for ‘retribution,’ might applaud a political purge, the rest of the country would react with shock and horror

The Republican fixation on condemning Mr Biden’s supposed “weaponisation” of the federal government and justice system to attack his presumed enemies is not only a fact-free defence of Mr Trump from federal indictments, but also a rather obvious and crude, although effective, characteristic piece of political projection. In the Trump era, Republicans have perfected the art of accusing their opponents of precisely what they are doing or intend to do.

Mr Trump has promised to investigate and prosecute the “Biden crime family”, alleging that Mr Biden and his son made millions overseas by leveraging government roles (which his son has never had). There is no evidence Mr Biden did this despite intensive investigations by House Republicans, though his son evidently and disgracefully did try to profit from the family name. And, of course, Mr Trump and his immediate family – all of whom had official government positions despite nominal and ineffective rules against such nepotism – made that a virtual art form.

Moreover, hardline House Republicans appear to be making significant progress in coercing Speaker Kevin McCarthy to open impeachment hearings against Mr Biden, although potential charges have never been specified and are hard to imagine.

While all of that could be dismissed as simply politics, although not by any means as usual, plans by Trump-aligned groups such as the Heritage Foundation envision a huge purge of the federal workforce, dishonestly billed as “dismantling the deep state” (which does not exist in the US). It’s also likely to be sold as a libertarian effort to “shrink the size of government”, although the up to 50,000 civil servants facing ouster aren’t going to be rendered redundant but instead replaced by sympathetic, and possibly often unqualified, ideologues from around the country.

The almost 1,000-page “Project 2025” campaign blueprint calls for an “army” of Trump-supporting hardliners from around the country to, as one of its architects, Paul Dans, puts it, “flood the zone [of the federal workforce] with conservatives”. Following the example of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has mobilised the power of his state’s government to attack secondary and higher education and major corporations such as Disney, this agenda is about taking over and, indeed, weaponising, the federal government and its vast administrative authority rather than shrinking it.

Nothing like this has ever been attempted or contemplated. Franklin Roosevelt, the 32nd US president, hugely expanded the size of the federal government to combat the depression and fight the Second World War, and he recruited mainly liberals to the new positions. And every president routinely replaces about 4,000 senior officials. But none has planned or attempted to purge tens of thousands of civil servants on ideological grounds.

This would be accomplished by attempting to revive Mr Trump’s last-ditch 2020 executive order that created a new “Schedule F” category for federal workers, which Mr Biden immediately rescinded. It would allow any civil servant with even the most tenuous connection to policy formation and implementation to effectively be subject to instantaneous dismissal without cause.

The plans also range from the legally dubious such as deploying the military to suppress crime and dissent, to forcing politically correct and ideologically purified “patriotic education” on public schools and universities, and even an absurd proposal to create 10 new major “freedom cities” by government fiat. Mr Trump has even made it clear that he wants to use federal authority to insist on certain architectural styles in existing cities and ensure that schools and streets are named “not after communists but patriots”. So much for smaller government.

Even a vast government is, of course, incapable of magically creating 10 large new American cities, and there are significant obstacles facing many of these alarming ideas. Even if “Schedule F” is implemented and legally upheld, a re-elected Mr Trump might find getting rid of thousands, much less tens of thousands, of qualified civil servants on ideological grounds isn’t all that simple.

While his base, yearning for “retribution”, might applaud a political purge, the rest of the country would surely react with shock and horror. Mr Trump isn’t giving the swing voters who decide national elections any reason to come back to him after a decisive break in 2020 and, more dramatically, the 2022 midterms. The less most Americans hear about “Project 2025”, the better it will be for its authors, not to mention Mr Trump.