Washington Wednesday: Power plays in Washington

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 10th of September.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Time now for Washington Wednesday.

Joining us now is Hunter Baker, political analyst and WORLD Opinions Contributor.

Hunter, good morning!

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

EICHER: In addition to spending, the Senate is gridlocked over President Trump’s nominees for the courts and executive branch.

Senate Democrats have slowed confirmations to a crawl—blocking even noncontroversial nominees and leaving more than 300 appointees in limbo. The Wall Street Journal notes that’s left many agencies run by “acting” officials, with Democrats still holding key posts like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the National Labor Relations Board.

Republican leaders on Monday supported a rule change to allow votes on lower-level nominees en bloc—an idea Democrats once floated when Biden faced similar delays. Here’s Majority Leader John Thune.

THUNE This historic obstruction ends now. Democrats have destroyed Senate precedent, and we're going to fix it.

Hunter, what’s driving this standoff over confirmations—and how does it affect the administration’s ability to govern?

BAKER: Yeah. Well, I think it's pretty clear that what has happened is, is that there's a feeling that one side has to deny legitimacy in governing to the other side, and that that is a that is a feeling that has grown over the past 20 years. If we were to go back to the Obama administration, I think about 90% of those confirmations would occur by a simple voice vote and be be very routine and simple. By the time you get to the Biden administration that preceded this one, it was down to 57% being confirmed in that way. But this term, which we're now, you know, about eight or nine months into it, that number is 0% so basically, you're having to have full process over every single one of these nominees, every single deputy assistant, so and so, up for office and so. A, it takes a lot of time. It makes it harder to actually do the work of legislation. But B, it holds up the administration in its need to carry out the work of these offices.

EICHER: Hunter, you said that they have to deny legitimacy. Of course, I know you don't mean they have to, but I think you mean that politically because it is the continuation of some other war, right? Is that the idea?

BAKER: Yeah, they feel. What I'm trying to say is that they feel they have to deny legitimacy to the other side that there is a if you think back, Chuck Schumer worked with this administration early on to prevent a government shutdown, and he was rewarded with tremendous pushback when he did that. And I think that the lesson the Democrats have taken is is that the thing that is going to go over with our voters is to say we do not comply, right? We are going to push back at every opportunity.

MAST: President Trump’s emergency order on crime in DC expires today. But DC Mayor Muriel Bowser wants to extend aspects of it … ordering city officials to continue coordinating with federal law enforcement indefinitely.

Federal officials say they’ve made over 1,000 arrests, and the mayor herself acknowledged the drop in crime—although she balanced that with some mild criticism.

Why would Mayor Bowser—despite her criticism—decide to extend coordination with Trump’s law enforcement push, even after his formal takeover ends?

BAKER: Well, because ultimately, what people want from local government is not ideological satisfaction, but they want crime to be controlled. They want fires to be put out. They want the garbage to be picked up. And I think that she recognizes that chaos is not going to go over well with that political community, and it's better to cooperate with the President and to continue to see crime controlled. And this is not, this is not a new thing. I think that the control of crime kind of goes out of fashion and then comes roaring back in I think about President Clinton in the 1990s though, a Democrat, he said, I'm going to hire a, you know, I'm going to make sure that we can hire 100,000 additional policeman you know is going to fight the crack epidemic and things like that. And so this is the core work of government. People forget that the core work of government is not welfare payments or medical insurance. The core work of government is the control of crime and danger and chaos.

MAST: Yeah. Well, on a related note, this week, we heard about the stabbing of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska [eye-REE-nuh Zah-ROOT-skuh] on a Charlotte light rail train. A local politician said this, this was horrifying, but also a prime example of soft on crime policies, and President Trump has picked up that theme. It appears Charlotte's mayor has said nothing publicly, other than issuing a written statement. So far, Democrat leaders in cities like Chicago and elsewhere haven't budged in their refusal of aid from federal law enforcement. Do you think stories like zarutskas provide will provoke Do you think stories like Zarutska’s will provoke some cooperation?

BAKER: I don't know if it will provoke cooperation, but it will provoke voters. Anybody who has seen that that photograph, or little bit of that video where her attacker is looming over her with that knife about to strike, it's incredibly visceral. I think that any politician who responds to that by saying that, look, I understand that this is the work that government has to do. And there are, there are theories of crime and punishment, you know, deterrence or retribution. One of those theories is incapacitation. In other words, we remove the criminal from society to make it impossible for them to commit another harm. This is an individual who was arrested 14 times and allowed to re offend and re offend. People are going to think that it has to stop you.

EICHER: President Trump has ordered the Pentagon to revert to its original name: the Department of War.

The U.S. first used that name in 1789, but it was changed after World War II to the Department of Defense. Supporters say the old name is more honest about the Pentagon’s role; critics say it signals militarism.

Hunter, what do you see is the significance of changing the Pentagon’s name back to the Department of War—and what’s behind the sharp reaction from everybody?

BAKER: Yeah, well, it's pure Trump, isn't it? I mean, we, we go, we've renamed the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America. In this case, we're renaming the Department of Defense, the Department of War. But I think that the reason that was renamed in the first place was because of the cold war. We entered into a very dangerous nuclear age, and people didn't want to think about war as aggression. They wanted to think about defense, right? You know that we are preparing for something that we hope will never happen, so that has kind of carried the day for a long time. And sometimes you would even have a Democrat. I remember Dennis Kucinich when he ran for president. He said, We should rename it the Department of peace. This is a turn right. You know Donald Trump, he has earned his reputation by being blunt and forceful, and so he wants to send a message with a new name.

EICHER: I mean, just to be fair to President Trump, isn't this just sort of his way of saying what Ronald Reagan always said, which is peace through strength, and Trump just says it a little differently.

BAKER: Oh, no question. I mean, I've always thought that that Putin waited until Trump was out of office to invade Ukraine because he didn't know what Donald Trump would do right now, it's a fait accompli, but that's one of the things about Trump, is that is that foreign leaders can never exactly know where he's going to do or where he's going to go, or what he's going to do, and I think that this is just part and parcel of that same philosophy.

MAST: So do you think this is just part of his imaging then Hunter? Because it's a name change that likely won't stick once he's out of office.

BAKER: I wonder if it will stick, because if you change it, you will pay a little bit of a price, right? You know, you'll look like you're backing off. You'll look like you're becoming more passive. I guess it depends on how the country reacts to this overall. I guess it's going to depend on what the Trump legacy is, if he goes out as a popular president, and if his successor gets into office, then this is something that may be with us for a while.

MAST: Well, one more story today. A new report from Wired exposed a secretive effort on the left to shape political messaging online. It's called the chorus creator incubator program. It paid progressive influencers to amplify democratic talking points while signing contracts that restricted what they. Say, even forbidding them from disclosing their participation, the program is backed by the liberal dark money group, 1630 fund, often compared to the Koch network on the right, that's k, O, C, H, what does this tell us about how Democrats are trying to build their own online influencer infrastructure, and why has it stirred such controversy on the left?

BAKER: Well, this really goes back a long way in American politics. I can recall the former Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin, writing a famous article about what he called pseudo events in American politics, in order things that were not genuine, but were manufactured as a kind of political theater. And so this is the same sort of thing adapted to the Internet age and to the social media age. I can recall, you know, about 2007, 2008 there was a controversy over the JournoList when it was discovered that some 400 left wing academics and journalists were all together on an email list and kind of talking about how to drive the narrative and how to propagate certain stories. This is the same thing translated to social media. The part that's new is that there's some serious money involved. I think that the story related that there were people making eight and $9,000 a month by participating in this and sort of leveraging their social media audience, what I see is is that we are becoming ever better at Manufacturing Consent. And what this calls for is for voters, especially Christian voters, to really become more discerning about what they see and what they read.

EICHER: Hunter Baker is Provost of North Greenville University and a regular contributor to World Opinions. Hunter, thanks so much!

BAKER: Thank you.

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