The Impeachment Case We Should All Be Paying Attention To
Newsletter 25: House Democrats still have not overcome their fear of power
2020 (and Potentially 2021)
While we didn’t get any executive branch-focused questions in the last debate, candidates are slowly starting to talk a bit more about how they would wield executive power. Usefully, a Vox feature this week asked candidates to elaborate their positions in seven key areas of technology policy. Among the notable commitments:
Senator Bernie Sanders repeated his promise to “reinvigorate the FTC and appoint an Attorney General who will aggressively investigate and break up these tech giants and other conglomerates that have monopolized nearly every sector of our economy.”
Mayor Pete Buttigieg said that his Department of Justice would prioritize antitrust enforcement and engage in post-merger reviews on a regular basis.
Senator Elizabeth Warren pointed back to her plan for Big Tech, which includes a vow to “appoint regulators committed to reversing illegal and anti-competitive tech mergers.”
Citing the Equifax data breach, Sanders promised to create a “public, secure credit registry,” a move that, according to the American Prospect’s Day One Agenda, would be possible under the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s existing authority.
Sanders and Warren also reiterated their past commitments to holding tech executives criminally liable for negligence and wrongdoing. (Each has made similar statements with regards to pharmaceutical and oil and gas executives.) In contrast, Buttigieg, who has disproportionately been the beneficiary of tech executives’ largesse, made no such promises.
Sadly, only five candidates — Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Steyer, and Bennet — submitted answers, leaving us to guess at other candidates’ positions on at least some of these issues. A handful of those candidates left us some clues. Michael Bloomberg, for example, announced last week that his campaign had brought on Facebook’s former Chief Marketing Officer, Gary Briggs, as its Digital Director (a role that will arguably be even more essential than usual given Bloomberg’s unconventional, almost entirely advertising-dependent campaign strategy).
Meanwhile, Joe Biden staked out the surprising position that executive orders represent an abuse of power, somewhat contradicting his stance that everything Obama ever did was good and right. More importantly, the next president needs to think creatively about how to use executive power, including in some cases executive orders, to advance the greater good. It’s concerning to see Biden seemingly closing that avenue for action now. One could defend Biden and note that he believes that Republicans will legislate with him in good faith, unlike when he was Obama’s Vice President (“why” is left to the listener’s imagination)... but even bipartisan legislation generally requires executive action to implement successfully.
Finally, it turns out that that Barclays analysis we wrote about last month was not a one-off, but part of a series assessing the potential impact of a Warren presidency. Read more about fears that Warren could undermine shady Swiss bank practices here.
PS: There are many reasons to mourn the sudden end of Kamala Harris’ candidacy even as a billionaire and a private equity executive make noisy entrances, but there’s one particular angle we wish to highlight. With the cessation of Harris’ campaign, there are now zero candidates with traditional fundraising operations (e.g., Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar) revealing their bundlers.
Congressional Oversight of the Executive Branch
Impeachment continues to progress apace. The House Intelligence Committee released its impeachment report yesterday. Hearings begin in the Judiciary committee this morning. And far from spelling the political ruin that many centrist Democrats predicted, overall support for the process continues to inch upwards.
But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t still room for improvement. While a majority of Americans support impeaching the president (and, according to some polls, removing him from office), it remains unlikely that the current level of support will be enough to force Senate Republicans’ hands.
As you consider what could make the difference, we encourage you to read Alex Pareene’s recent piece in The New Republic, “Making Impeachment Matter.” Many political commentators have leaned heavily on Watergate and Clinton’s impeachment to understand our contemporary political moment, but Pareene reaches back to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, drawing from Brenda Wineapple’s book The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation.
As Pareene highlights, there are many connections to be drawn between our current president and Andrew Johnson, but the more interesting point of comparison is actually between the 116th Congress and the 40th. Basically, while the former fears power, the latter enthusiastically employed it to achieve transformative ends. When it came to impeachment, that meant unapologetically pursuing a recalcitrant president. Most importantly, as Pareene puts it, “the Radicals had a clear understanding of what they were fighting for — Johnson had to be stopped, not for the sake of restoring a comfortable status quo, but in order to allow the Radicals to remake the country itself.” That is to say the Radicals’ knowledge that they were fighting for democracy emboldened them despite the assurance that Johnson’s racist “base” would never turn on Johnson for illegally undermining Reconstruction.
No such clear objective exists in the present impeachment inquiry. But it is still not too late to change that. To do so, the House leadership must have a clear sense of what they are fighting for. As we have argued previously, we believe this is best achieved by investigating Trump’s extensive and egregious crimes against regular people. From healthcare to employment, education to water quality, Trump’s often unlawful actions not only benefit him and his allies, illegally, they have put millions at risk. In pursuing him for these actions, lawmakers can simultaneously make clear that they are fighting for something better.
Hall of Shame:
The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, is set to release his much-anticipated report on the Russia investigation next week. And Attorney General William Barr is already going on the defensive to protect Trump. He has made clear that he does not agree with Horowitz’s conclusion that the FBI had sufficient basis to open an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. This is hardly surprising, Barr has shown himself to be an unfailing Trump loyalist. It does, however, beg the question: why haven’t House lawmakers yet opened an impeachment inquiry for Barr, as we recommended two months ago?
Spotlight:
We reiterate our recommendation that you read Pareene’s piece on Andrew Johnson and impeachment.
This Week in Tech
It’s a high-profile week for US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer for reasons that have nothing to do with the USMCA. On Monday, his office released a verdict finding France’s controversial digital services tax unfairly discriminates against Silicon Valley tech firms, which came out just as French Junior Digital Minister Cedric O touched down to meet with Washington’s tech policy community. The Trump administration threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on up to $2.4 billion worth of tariffs on French goods in retaliation.
By now, we know not to treat Trump’s threats too literally, especially when they involve tariffs and large dollar figures. But it’s sure to further alienate a longtime ally, and does show that as much as Trump may claim he detests Amazon, Facebook and others, lowering corporate taxes is always the bedrock of Republican (and plenty of Democratic) policy. We’d certainly like to see something like the French 3 percent tax on digital revenues at home, but even more important is reinvigorating the IRS’ capacity to actually collect the taxes we have on the books.
As far as international trade and the tech sector go, we wish the press would pay as much attention to the industry’s longstanding efforts at locking in worldwide deregulation, including on individual’s data rights and algorithmic bias, through provisions in trade agreements and the WTO. Our CEPR colleague Deborah James and the “Our World Is Not For Sale” coalition have been out front on this for a long time.
Independent Agencies
It will surprise none of you to know that things are still not right in the realm of independent agency personnel. As we highlight in our November Update, 78 of the 182 positions we track are either vacant (46 seats) or expired (32 seats). Yet, Trump has put forward nominations for fewer than one-third of those seats. Furthermore, severe partisan imbalances remain. 50 percent of total Democratic seats are vacant, versus 39 percent of total Republican seats. And pending nominations continue to be unevenly distributed (5 nominations for Democratic seats versus 15 for Republican ones), ensuring that this will be the status quo for the foreseeable future.
When it comes to what the vast majority of sitting commissioners are doing with their power, things do not look much better. That is especially true for financial regulatory agencies, most of which are busy bending to corporate America’s deregulatory will. And, as a new issue brief from the Center for American Progress makes clear, beyond merely padding corporate profits, these regulators are exacerbating the risk of climate change-related financial collapse.
In some cases, this takes the form of a simple abdication of responsibility. The Chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, has claimed that the climate is not relevant to his agency’s mandate, despite the well-documented threat that climate change poses to financial stability. Others, like the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), have begun to analyze climate risk, but with the help of a whole slate of oil, chemical, and banking executives. If the CFTC’s solutions are palatable to that roster, they are sure to be useless.
We have all come to expect this sort of thing from Trump’s administration, but we cannot accept it in the next one. We are running out of time to avert climate disaster and to prepare for those changes that are at this point inevitable. Furthermore, it is doubly important that we remain attentive to this aspect of financial regulators’ mandate because most are unlikely to think to assess potential appointees on the basis of their climate policy plans.
Want more?
Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last couple of weeks:
Bloomberg News’s Curious Interpretation of Editorial Independence
Buttigieg’s ‘big tent’ appeal rises in Silicon Valley
Why Virginia Democrats’ Refusal To Repeal ‘Right-To-Work’ Law Matters
Trump Stocks His Cabinet Increasingly With Business Lobbyists
AOC Raised More for Reelection Campaign Last Quarter Than All Other House Dems, Including Pelosi
November Update on the State of Independent Federal Agencies