The Credulity Olympics
Plus: Thinking through Biden’s death-row commutations.
Some bookkeeping at the top: Morning Shots is taking some time off for the holidays. So this is probably—barring news insane enough to yank us back to our keyboards—our last newsletter until January 2.
If you’re not sure where you’ll go for your daily dose of stomach-turning political content without us, you’re in luck: The House Ethics Committee is releasing its Matt Gaetz report sometime Monday, which—according to an early copy nabbed this morning by CBS News—centers on more than $90,000 in payments to twelve different women that Gaetz made “likely in connection with sexual activity and/or drug use.”
The report concludes: “The Committee determined there is substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, impermissible gifts, special favors or privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”
Parcel it out in daily 2,000-word chunks to help get you through our absence, and we’ll see you in the New Year. Happy Holidays.
John Fetterman Wants You to Stop Freaking Out
by Andrew Egger
Kash Patel may have spent the last few years routinely saying Donald Trump’s political enemies should be prosecuted. Trump, who has often said the same thing, may have picked him as his next FBI director expressly for that purpose. Steve Bannon may be out there telling anyone who cares to listen that Patel is extremely serious about doing all this. “We’re trying to make these people famous,” Bannon told Tim Miller this weekend. “First of all, it has to happen. Number two, it’s going to happen.”
But don’t worry, folks—Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) met with Patel this weekend, and based on that conversation, he’s sure all that “going after Trump’s enemies” stuff is overblown.
“All of these interviews were all off the record,” Fetterman told ABC News’s Jon Karl yesterday. “So I’m not going to go into detail, but he absolutely—you know, that’s never going to happen.”
Many senators these days are participating in what you might call the Credulity Olympics, going through the motions of carefully scrutinizing Trump’s cabinet picks while leaving their brains on their office shelves during their one-on-one meetings. Last week, it was Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) expressing his Pollyannish belief that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a man who has spent years writing about, talking about, and making films about the dangers of vaccines—is actually reassuringly comfortable with vaccines. Earlier this month, it was Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) suggesting that Pete Hegseth had promised he would give up drinking if confirmed as secretary of defense.
But at least most of the participants are Republicans, behaving in exactly the craven ways you’d expect today’s Republicans to behave.1 With MAGA media standing by to go nuclear on even the smallest transgressions, you can understand why they’re all extra eager to keep their heads down and avoid kicking up a primary challenger. What’s in it for a Democrat like Fetterman?
In fact, this is turning into a bit of a pattern for Pennsylvania’s soon-to-be senior senator. In recent weeks, Fetterman has regularly struck the same rhetorical posture: What’s coming may be bad, but I’m pretty sure it’s not quite as bad as other Democrats say. Other Democrats, including Sen. Brian Schatz (R-Hawaii), have urged Democrats not to freak out over every Trump controversy. But Fetterman is urging not just calm, but cooperation. “There have been solid picks, and then there’s obvious trolls of others,” he told me last month of Trump’s cabinet selections. “I’m not gonna be that guy that’s gonna freak out or have to clutch the pearls harder after these things.”
And hey, there’s nothing wrong with declining to clutch your pearls! But sometimes this nonchalance can be its own sort of knee-jerk response. After Fetterman praised Elon Musk earlier this month and expressed his eagerness to work with his inchoate Department of Government Efficiency, I asked him whether he had any concerns with Musk and Trump’s suggestion they would refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress in the name of savings—a dramatic assertion of executive power that could provoke a mini-constitutional crisis. Fetterman scoffed it off: “I promise you that isn’t one of the things that I’ve been thinking about lately. I’m thinking about, am I gonna have time to get Christmas presents for the kids . . . I haven’t spent any time freaking out because the election went the way it was.”
It’s one thing to assess that Democrats are over-fretting about this or that Trump controversy. It’s another thing to make not paying attention to any individual controversy a point of contrarian pride.
It’s easy to roll our eyes at this, but it speaks to the challenge Trump’s critics will face going forward. There’s going to be lots of bad news, and we’re going to have to be straightforward about the bad news.
But that’s also going to create a boutique market for these sorts of contrarian takes—come on, it might be bad, but it’s not hair-on-fire bad. Which in turn makes persuading people about Trump’s dangers still more difficult: Even some Democrats can see it’s not as bad as you say!
For now, Fetterman is cornering this market among the Democrats. We’ll see how long that lasts.
On Biden and the Death Penalty
by William Kristol
I woke up this morning to the news that President Biden had commuted the death sentences of 37 inmates in federal prison to life sentences without parole, while leaving three death sentences intact.
I’m inclined to think he did the right thing.
I say this as someone who’s never been sure what to think about the death penalty.
As a young conservative, to the limited degree I engaged with the issue, I was inclined to be a defender of the death penalty. I was wary of the arguments and agitation against it, which seemed to me to be marked by liberal sentimentality, by a worldview too soft to defend civilization against its enemies.
Still, I was uneasy. I remember reading the late Walter Berns’s book, For Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death Penalty, when it appeared in 1979. I had then and have now the highest regard for Berns. But I remember thinking that I wasn’t quite convinced.
And I also knew that two other writers whom I admired—Albert Camus and Arthur Koestler—had written powerful essays against the death penalty in the mid-1950s. I’d read Camus’s Reflections on the Guillotine; I don’t think I ever read Koestler’s Reflections on Hanging. What I knew was that neither Camus nor Koestler was a soft-headed progressive or a sentimental leftist. This helped keep my anti-anti-death penalty instincts in check.
In any case, I’m not sure what I would have said last week if you’d asked me about the death penalty. I remained uncertain. But for what it’s worth, my strong instinct this morning, surprisingly strong to me, was that Biden did the right thing. My reaction to Biden’s decision was that the death penalty is today neither a necessary nor a desirable feature of a civilized society.
This sense was reinforced when I did go back this morning to re-read Camus’s essay, and found it convincing. I won’t try to summarize it, but here’s a little bit from near the beginning to give you a sense:
I believe the death penalty is not only useless but profoundly harmful . . . I stand as far as possible from that position of spineless pity in which our humanitarians take such pride, in which values and responsibilities change places, all crimes become equal, and innocence ultimately forfeits all rights. . . .[But] for years I have not been able to regard the death penalty as anything but a punishment intolerable to the imagination; a public sin of sloth which my reason utterly condemns. . . . Today I share Arthur Koeslter’s conclusion without qualification: capital punishment is a disgrace to our society which its partisans cannot reasonably justify.
One striking aspect of Camus’s essay is his emphasis on the damage capital punishment does to all of us who sanction it or approve it or witness it—or avert our eyes from it. It makes us complicit in a death that is neither necessary for the well-being of society nor desirable for its effect on its citizens.
But if I find myself supportive of Biden’s action this morning, I also have to grapple with the obvious question: Shouldn’t he have commuted all the sentences?
Biden left on death row Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people in the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018; Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013.
I don’t know that I could defend the refusal to pardon these three with strict logical consistency. After all, if the death penalty is wrong, isn’t it wrong in these cases as well?
But I’ve got to say that somehow I think not commuting the three mass murders was also the right thing to do. On that, I’ll just say that life is complicated, with competing considerations and principles. Somehow, Biden’s mixed verdict seems to me to do justice to the different principles at stake—to society’s need to be as civilized as possible but also ultimately to enforce the conditions and boundaries of civilization on occasion.
This may all be a bit unsatisfying, but perhaps it’s emblematic of a political order that’s not a model of pure logic—one that does try, while recognizing the complexity of competing considerations, to move in the right direction.
Which is perhaps the best we can do.
Quick Hits
VANCE DOES NAZI A PROBLEM: Elon Musk’s unexpected endorsement of Alternative fur Deutschland—the fringe German party cobbled together from Nazi sympathizers and other hard-right goons—drew widespread condemnations after he tossed off a tweet calling them Germany’s “only hope” Friday morning.
One person who came to Musk’s defense: Vice President-elect JD Vance. When Ivana Stradner of the neoconservative nonprofit Foundation for Defense of Democracies called Musk’s embrace of AfD “so dangerous,” Vance jumped in to mock her: “It’s so dangerous for people to control their borders. So so dangerous. The dangerous level is off the charts.” He went on to ponder: “I wonder how much money this person’s employer gets from the American taxpayer?”
Ignore, for a second, a self-proclaimed champion of free speech issuing threats to people and institutions who offer the most gentle of pushback against him. What’s particularly interesting here is how the incoming vice president feels compelled to respond to an inane controversy kicked up by this random gazillionaire who’s taken to hanging around Mar-a-Lago constantly. Isn’t the guy who’s supposed to drive these loyalty-test news cycles Donald Trump? Maybe there’s something to that President Musk business after all.
THE MONROE MORON DOCTRINE: No one imagined that Donald Trump would adhere to the adage that we only have one president at a time and that, accordingly, he should lie low on foreign policy grounds until he actually assumes office. But few could have predicted he’d pick fights with this many countries before finding his way back to the Oval. The latest targets: Panama and Greenland. Trump, over the weekend, directly threatened to take full control of the Panama Canal after the country’s president insisted that it would remain under Panamanian sovereignty. We aren’t quite sure what prompted Trump to issue these threats. There wasn’t a Fox & Friends segment on the history of the canal (at least that we’re aware of). As for Greenland, Trump has previously mused about buying the autonomous territory from Denmark. And he did so again, calling it an “absolute necessity” for national security, while announcing Ken Howery, co-founder of PayPal, as his pick to be ambassador to Denmark.
You do need to give at least a participation award to outgoing Sen. Joe Manchin, who told CBS News yesterday that he thinks Senate Republicans won’t let Donald Trump destroy regular order and upend the system: “I have total confidence and faith in my Republican Senate colleagues that are institutionalists that will not let that happen.”
For the Credulity Olympics (great title, by the way), I suggest the winner receive the prestigious Senator Susan Collins LEARNED HIS LESSON award.
Fetterman appears to be more interested in keeping his title than anything. Whoever he was, he doesn’t appear to be that guy anymore. He’s going to be a Republican before Trump leaves office.