The story of Tolstoy and his wife
The subject of the Tolstoy marriage came up in this thread, in the context of a discussion about Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina. In that book, Tolstoy presents a thinly-disguised more idealized version of his own marriage to his wife Sonya, told through the story of the relationship between the characters Levin and Kitty.
I read that book in high school, and I remember quite a bit of Levin and Kitty’s story. Much later I became extremely interested in the real-life tale of the Tolstoy marriage, an intense relationship that careened from love to hate and back again with some regularity, and featured the interaction of two complex and gifted individuals blessed with extraordinary energy and the ability to drive each other nearly mad.
It’s a story that’s not only fascinated me, but several authors. There are three major books on the subject, two of which I’ve read, and a movie I’ve seen that I don’t much like but that was highly praised. The two books I’ve read are titled Married to Tolstoy and Lev and Sonya, and the one I haven’t read is a tome by none other than William Schirer and is entitled Love and Hatred: The Tormented Marriage of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy.
That last title is no exaggeration.
It’s hard to summarize what was going on there, but I’ll just say that the Tolstoy marriage was not only one of the most intense (in every sense of the word) on record, but it was also one of the most amply documented. Both parties kept voluminous no-holds-barred diaries which they regularly left for each other to read.
The Tolstoys had thirteen living children – only eight of whom survived childhood – and if memory serves me, Sonya had several more pregnancies that ended in miscarriages. Meanwhile, Tolstoy later in life developed a moral or religious aversion to sex even in marriage, although he continued to engage in sexual relations with his wife quite regularly. He even wrote a long short story on the subject (“The Kreutzer Sonata”), and Sonya wrote a rebuttal. Just to get a little flavor of that story of Leo Tolstoy’s, here’s a description:
The work is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage. The main character, Pozdnyshev, relates the events leading up to his killing of his wife: in his analysis, the root causes for the deed were the “animal excesses” and “swinish connection” governing the relation between the sexes.
As for Sonya’s reaction, here’s what happened:
It was fair to say Sofiya was humiliated and incensed when [The Kreutzer Sonata] was published and her marriage to The Great Man became suspect, subject to nationwide speculation. (And yet such was her devotion she made a special plea to the Czar to allow its publication after Orthodox Church objections banned it)…
For a long time, it had been thought Sofiya kept her dismay to her private diary. But…it turns out she wrote an entire novella of her own that has languished unpublished and untranslated in the depths of the archives of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow for more than a century.
…Just published for the first time in English in a translation by the scholar Michael R. Katz, it appears in a Yale University Press edition that includes not only Tolstoy’s original Kreutzer, not only Sofiya’s “answer novel,” not only a response document from Tolstoy’s son and from his daughter, but much more. The volume is called The Kreutzer Sonata Variations.
Here’s Sonya’s book, which I haven’t read, so I don’t know whether I would agree or disagree with the Slate author’s description:
Specifically, Sofiya pulls off a remarkable structural feat in mirroring Kreutzer’s wife-murder plot from the point of view of the murdered wife. And she does it with prose that (in English at least) comes across as graceful, emotionally intuitive, and heartbreaking.
Thematically, she counters her husband’s rage against sex and love with what is, cumulatively, a deeply affecting defense of love. A portrait of love from a woman’s point of view unlike any you can find (or I have found) in Tolstoy.
Meanwhile, in real life Sonya ran the large estate – with help, but it still required enormous work and energy – dealt with a bunch of eccentric Tolstoy-admiring hangers-on, fought her husband’s efforts to deprive their children of education and their inheritance, and copied out his manuscripts in longhand as a tireless secretary. I believe she copied out War and Peace something like eight or so times as it was being written and rewritten, deciphering Tolstoy’s handwriting and revisions, staying up long hours at night to do it. Over the years she is reported to have become more difficult and more emotionally distraught, and although it’s pretty easy to see why that may have happened, it couldn’t have been easy for Tolstoy either.
Commenter “Zaphod” mentions a famous incident: “Shouldn’t have shown his newlywed wife his diary.” You better believe it. Tolstoy was 34 when he married, almost twice the age of his 18-year-old fiancee, and he had lived a very dissolute life as opposed to her innocence at the time. Here’s how Wiki describes the incident, plus the literary reference in Anna Karenina:
On 17 September 1862 the couple became formally engaged after Tolstoy gave Sophia a written proposal of marriage, marrying a week later in Moscow. At the time of their marriage, Leo Tolstoy was well known as a novelist after the publication of The Cossacks. On the eve of their marriage, Tolstoy gave Sophia his diaries that detailed his sexual relations with female serfs. In Anna Karenina, 34-year-old Konstantin Levin, a semi-autobiographical character behaves similarly, asking his 19-year-old fiancée Kitty to read his diaries and learn of his past transgressions. The diary included the fact that Tolstoy had fathered a child by a woman who remained on the Yasnaya Polyana estate. In Anne Edwards’ Sonya: The Life of Countess Tolstoy, she describes Sophia as having a deep fear that Tolstoy would re-enter a relationship with the other woman.
Anne Edwards doesn’t just describe that fear; it features prominently in Sonya’s diaries over the years, and she could not avoid seeing the woman now and then on the estate where she still lived. Why did Tolstoy decide to have Sonya read his account? He wanted to unburden himself of a guilty conscience and decided full disclosure was necessary, but I believe he was putting his own needs way before those of his bride and ignoring how terribly it would affect her. The man who could write so eloquently about Kitty’s feelings wasn’t nearly as thoughtful about those of the real-life Sonya. At any rate, the decision to have her read the diary backfired, as did so many of the things they did to each other.
The 2009 movie about the last years of the Tolstoy marriage was called “The Last Station.” I saw it, but by then I was somewhat of an expert on the Tolstoy marriage, and although it starred Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren (two good actors) I found many things wrong with it, although perhaps I was being nitpicky. At any rate, the last chapter in their marriage – which did occur at a railway station, where Tolstoy died very shortly after leaving Sonya when he was 82 years old – is especially tragic.
For anyone interested – and not everyone will be, I’m pretty sure – I recommend any of this material. I also offer what I believe is the last picture ever taken of the couple together (just a few weeks before his “escape” and death), which I think expresses Sonya’s pain and desperate need to hold on, and Tolstoy’s resentment and resolute need to go:
In younger days, around the time they were married:
And if you’re interested in learning what drew these two together in the first place, Tolstoy explains in Anna Karenina in a scene that occurs between Levin and Kitty. I can’t remember where I read it (maybe in one of their diaries?), but I distinctly recall learning that this is based on something that actually happened:
A silence followed. [Kitty] was still drawing with the chalk on the table. Her eyes were shining with a soft light. Under the influence of her mood he felt in all his being a continually growing tension of happiness.
‘Ah! I’ve scribbled all over the table!’ she said, and, laying down the chalk, she made a movement as though to get up.
‘What! shall I be left alone—without her?’ he thought with horror, and he took the chalk. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, sitting down to the table. ‘I’ve long wanted to ask you one thing.’
He looked straight into her caressing, though frightened eyes.
‘Please, ask it.’
‘Here,’ he said; and he wrote the initial letters, w, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t. These letters meant, ‘When you told me it could never be, did that mean never or then?’ There seemed no likelihood that she could make out this complicated sentence; but he looked at her as though his life depended on her understanding the words. She glanced at him seriously, then leaned her puckered brow on her hands and began to read. Once or twice she stole a look at him, as though asking him, ‘Is it what I think?’
‘I understand,’ she said, flushing a little.
‘What is this word?’ he said pointing to the n that stood for never.
‘It means never,’ she said; ‘but that’s not true!’
He quickly rubbed out what he had written, gave her the chalk, and stood up. She wrote, t, i, c, n, a, d.
…He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It meant, ‘Then I could not answer differently.’
He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.
‘Only then?’
‘Yes,’ her smile answered.
‘And n … and now?’ he asked.
‘Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like—should like so much!’ She wrote the initial letters, i, y, c, f, a, f, w, h. This meant, ‘If you could forget and forgive what happened.’
He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and, breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, ‘I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.’
She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.
[NOTE: Sonya was an excellent early amateur photographer – in her copious free time? – when photography required a lot of technical know-how and patience. Here’s a book of many of her photographs; it includes some diary excerpts.]
Another day with good intentions gone awry
I’ve been researching a bunch of seemingly pressing topics today, mostly having to do with the Biden administration’s current campaign against the right and in particular about the new sedition charges against eleven participants in January 6th.
It turns out I’ll need more time.
That happens now and then. Some of these topics practically require taking a mini-course in a certain area of law, and reading long indictments or other material. For example, here’s the document for the Oathkeeper Elmer Rhodes and it’s 48 pages long. But without taking a good look at it, I can’t tell exactly what he’s actually alleged to have done, and whether I think it fits the charge of seditious conspiracy.
Luckily, it’s really really really cold here today. Luckily? Well, I mean that I didn’t miss doing something outside on a day when I could have spent much time out there. I did try; I suited up with down jacket, scarf, hat, and very warm mittens. But although it was sunny it just wasn’t pleasant to be outside for more than a few minutes.
So after three minutes I came back, none the worse for wear. It’s nice and cozy inside.
Seditious conspiracy: the charges against the eleven Oathkeepers who participated in January 6th
When I was in law school many many years ago, I studied Criminal Law my first year, as did virtually all law students at the time. As part of that course, there were three criminal doctrines I found disturbing – they probably weren’t the only troubling ones, but they were by far the most memorable. These three were felony murder, conspiracy, and the possibility of entrapment by government agents in connection with conspiracy. These doctrines seemed either overinclusive (felony murder), perilously vague and close to thoughtcrime (conspiracy), and difficult to defend against because they cut into the defendant’s presumption of innocence and arguably allowed the government to plant the idea and even the execution of the crime (entrapment).
This was my impression and the cause of my concern back then and it still is now, although back then I was a Democrat and now I’m not. At the time, many Democrats would have agreed with me, because – particularly with conspiracy charges – the left were often the targets. Nowadays, however, the left has taken charge of many legal agencies of the government, and seems eager to employ these tools to imprison people they consider the enemy. This is the case even if those people have done very little or even nothing to harm anyone. At the very least, even if they’re not convicted, the goal is to put them through such misery that it scares and dissuades anyone else.
Which brings us to “seditious conspiracy” – the charges against eleven Oathkeepers present in the vicinity of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That is a doubly vague and flexible charge that consists not of violent activities carried out, but of thoughts and speech and plans and preparations, containing two flexible terms (sedition and conspiracy). That makes it useful for employment against political enemies.
Here’s the definition of seditious conspiracy:
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.
So the whole thing hinges on two elements. The first is the idea that when two people plan something it’s worse than when one does. That is sometimes the case, but not necessarily. The second element is the definition of “conspire.” In common usage it simply means to make secret plans to commit a harmful or unlawful. act. How far do the plans have to go? How detailed, and what sort of actions need be taken, before the charge can stick? I don’t know enough about the details of those things, but there’s no question that no violence has to actually occur for the crime to have occurred.
So far the charge has rarely has been used against anyone in this country. But it’s being used against eleven of the January 6th defendants. Here’s some recent history about such charges:
Sedition has rarely been charged in the U.S., and carries a longer prison sentence than simple conspiracy. If convicted of seditious conspiracy, defendants face up to 20 years in prison.
Per the Associated Press, the last time U.S. prosecutors brought a seditious conspiracy case was in 2010, when nine members of the Hutaree militia in Michigan were charged with inciting an uprising against the government. They were acquitted on the sedition conspiracy charges at a 2012 trial. (Three pleaded guilty to weapons-related charges.)
I had no recollection of the Hutaree case, but it’s an interesting one that occurred during the Obama administration. The group seems to have been Christian survivalists, and the circumstances were these:
From March 28 to March 30, 2010, nine people thought to be Hutaree members were arrested in police raids in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana (in Hammond), for their alleged involvement in a plot to kill various police officers and possibly civilians using illegal explosives and/or firearms. An undercover [FBI] agent played a role in the investigation that led to indictments.
Only one undercover agent? And what was that role? Was it on the up and up, or did this person’s actions border on entrapment? With groups like this, infiltration and surveillance by agents and/or informants is often necessary to get the goods, and agents have to at least seem eager to participate within the group, in order to not arouse suspicion. But they must not become leaders. They can’t be instrumental in the planning or lead the group to actions it would not otherwise undertake. And yet we know that sometimes, perhaps even often, they either do just that or something perilously close to that.
Here’s more about the charges in the Hutaree case [emphasis mine]:
The United States Attorney’s Office stated that the Hutaree allegedly planned “to kill an unidentified member of local law enforcement and then attack the law enforcement officers who gather in Michigan for the funeral”. The press release further stated that nine had been indicted by a federal grand jury in Detroit on charges of seditious conspiracy, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, teaching the use of explosive materials, and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence. The indictment said that the Hutaree planned to attack unspecified law enforcement vehicles during the funeral procession for an unspecified officer or officers they planned to kill on an unspecified occasion, using unspecified explosively formed penetrator improvised explosive devices…
Some articles suggested the Hutaree had not yet determined whom they would kill in law enforcement, or even that they wished to kill a law enforcement officer to begin a war with law enforcement, while not having any specific target. The FBI was aided in its investigation by members of another militia group.
This was the defense, in a nutshell:
Defense attorneys argued that statements made by Hutaree were constitutionally protected free speech and not plans for an attack.
They were acquitted by the judge, with a few pleading guilty to possessing illegal weapons.
Prior to that there was an actual conviction for the charge – in 1954, in connection with an attack that was carried out and which wounded five members of the House. That was the Capitol shooting by Puerto Rican separatists that I wrote about in this post and also in a post I wrote a few days after January 6th, comparing and contrasting it with that latter event. In the 1954 incident, there was no question that the perpetrators did not merely conspire to do something; the shooting actually took place.
The accused were found guilty, but they were pardoned by Jimmy Carter in 1979 and and returned home to Puerto Rico to a heroes’ welcome.
[NOTE: I plan to write more on the charges against the eleven January 6th defendants, but this post is already long enough, and so I’ll do it separately.]
Open thread 1/15/22
RIP Terry Teachout
Another person connected with the arts has died. This time it’s WSJ drama critic and playwright Terry Teachout, who died unexpectedly at the age of sixty-five. Teachout wasn’t just a drama critic and playwright, either; he was “an acclaimed author, a jazz connoisseur, [and] a dance scholar.” He wrote biographies of H.L. Mencken, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and George Balanchine:
Nate Chinen, who writes about jazz for NPR, says he was dazzled by Teachout’s breadth. “So many critics are specialists, and that’s where they get their authority,” he told NPR. “[Teachout] was able to write with authority, insight and perceptiveness about so many art styles, forms and disciplines. And he did so with a real clarity of opinion.”
“There was nobody around who also covered jazz, rock, pop, classical music, dance, ballet, film, books and any other medium that came along the way Terry did,” Washington Post music critic Tim Page added in an email to NPR. “His tastes tended conservative but he could often be convinced and nobody was more cheerful about changing his mind. Above all, he was the sort of friend with whom you could have an argument that remained always within the bounds of love.”
“His tastes tended conservative” – unusual in the circles in which he moved.
When I did a search of my blog for Teachout’s name I was surprised to discover that I’ve never written about him before. That doesn’t mean I never read anything he wrote, though; I did, although not all that often.
The piece of his I remember best was his review of the abominable 2012 “re-imagining” of the opera “Porgy and Bess.” I saw the production and detested it, and therefore I really appreciated his deft and witty panning of it (in contrast, I found that whenever I tried to write about that “Porgy and Bess” on this blog it turned into an incredibly lengthy and heated rant). Here’s how Teachout saw it:
It ought to be good news that “Porgy and Bess” is back on Broadway for the first time in 35 years. Sad to say, the new version, which is billed by express order of the Gershwin brothers’ estates as “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” is a sanitized, heavily cut rewrite that strips away the show’s essence so as to render it suitable for consumption by 21st-century prigs. If you’ve never seen or heard “Porgy,” you might well find this version blandly pleasing. Otherwise, you’ll be appalled.
I am very familiar with the opera “Porgy and Bess” – I know almost every word – and I was so appalled I spent some of my audience time there with my face in my hands, unable to look although definitely listening with dread.
More from Teachout:
Among other ludicrously euphemistic touches, the grievously crippled Porgy, who in the opera must ride around on a goat-drawn cart, now walks on his own with what Ms. Parks calls “a modest cane,” suggesting that there’s nothing wrong with the poor fellow that couldn’t be fixed up by a visit to his friendly neighborhood chiropractor. Diedre L. Murray has done comparable damage to the score, tarting up some numbers, “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin'” (pardon me, “I Got Plenty of Nothing”) in particular, almost beyond recognition. Her musical tampering is tasteless, condescending and, above all, unnecessary: Anyone who thinks that George Gershwin’s great score needs to be “modernized” in order to make it palatable to Broadway audiences is by definition unqualified to touch a note of it.
There’s more at the link, which wasn’t behind a paywall.
RIP Terry Teachout, who seems to have lived a rich, full life.
On whether or not Schumer’s new attempt to pass HR1 is subject to the filibuster
There was so much discussion and disagreement in the comments to the previous thread today about the new Democratic ploy to pass HR1 that I thought I’d tackle giving a response in a new post.
The question is whether this new effort can be passed by a simple majority of 50 votes, or whether it will be subject to the filibuster rule and will either need 60 votes to invoke cloture or a majority to eliminate the filibuster at least for this one bill. That distinction is an important one, for obvious reasons.
Sinema is on record for supporting the bill itself while not supporting the end of the filibuster. So if it could be passed by a simple majority vote without ending the filibuster, it seems that would satisfy her. Manchin seems to be against both, or at least against HR1 as it stands at present, although he might support it with some revisions.
Politicians being politicians, they could change their minds. But so far they haven’t and let’s assume they haven’t, because they’ve made fairly strong statements on these things (see my previous post for some links on that) and they’ve remained consistent so far.
Here’s a comment from “mkent” saying that the filibuster won’t apply, because the bill is one that has been stripped and refurbished:
My understanding of the parliamentary procedure is that because the “bill” in question already passed the Senate, it is not subject to a filibuster. That the “bill” now no longer contains a single word of the original bill does not matter.
From https://spacenews.com/nasa-leasing-bill-transformed-into-voting-rights-legislation/
“The Democratic leadership of the House, in an unusual move, then took the Senate-amended bill and stripped out the NASA provisions, replacing it with the text of two voting rights bills and now called the ‘Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act.’ They did so because H.R. 5746 had already passed the House and Senate, so the amended version could go directly to the Senate floor without the threat of a filibuster from Senate Republicans, who oppose the voting rights legislation.”
…The whole point of co-opting the NASA EUL bill [the bill-stripping] is to avoid the filibuster. If the filibuster is still in play, they didn’t need to do that, just consider HR-1.
I have read quite a few articles on this latest move by Schumer, and all of them say that the filibuster – and the 60-vote threshold – will ultimately come into play unless they vote to end it. The most detailed article on the subject can be found here. I suggest that everyone interested in the question read it. Here’s a small excerpt:
“Taking advantage of this existing exception to the Senate’s supermajority requirements will allow us to end the Republicans’ ability to block debate on voting rights legislation,” Schumer said in the memo to Senate Democrats.
“The Senate will finally debate voting rights legislation, and then every Senator will be faced with a choice of whether or not to pass the legislation to protect our democracy.”
“Of course, to ultimately end debate and pass the voting rights legislation, we will need 10 Republicans to join us — which we know from past experience will not happen — or we will need to change the Senate rules as has been done many times before.”
Note that last paragraph in the quote, wherein Schumer himself indicates, in his memo to Democrats, that the 60-vote threshold will come into play.
I don’t know for certain, but I think that perhaps the confusion is about the difference between the vote to debate a bill on the floor, and the vote to pass the bill. Because of the bill-stripping, the debate (which hadn’t occurred earlier because the GOP blocked it) can go forward. The debate doesn’t need to cross a 60-vote threshold anymore to take place. But the actual vote on the actual bill can still be blocked by 41 votes.
It’s one of those complicated things, but that’s my understanding from what I’ve read so far.
HR1, Obamacare, the filibuster, and political power
Regarding yesterday’s news about Sinema and her speech to retain the filibuster, commenter “Frederick” wrote:
The rules are not the rules. The only rule is does a majority of both Houses want something. All else is distraction. Let’s learn the lesson so we can make effective changes.
I don’t think that’s something most of us didn’t already know. It seems to me that it’s acknowledged that a majority can change the rules if it so desires.
The issues right now – and perhaps always – are whether such changes will be made, when, by whom, in what manner, to what purpose, and what the result will be.
For many years the 60-vote Senate threshold rule remained intact, despite the fact that a majority could have changed it. Some of the reasons for this:
(1) each party recognized, when it was in power, that it might need to respect the 60-vote majority rule because soon it might be out of power (2) both parties wanted some sort of bipartisanship on major transformative legislation, or at least the approval of a strong majority of the public. Of course, if that party already held over 60 Senate seats and therefore was filibuster-proof as long as all its members voted to end cloture, then it was understood that a large majority of the public was already on their side.
What it really boiled down to was that both parties felt vulnerable to voters’ opinions for the next election, and therefore didn’t want to rile too many voters with extremely partisan transformative legislation and risk their seats next time. There are other factors, too – for example, the parties really used to be at least somewhat less polarized in their goals.
However, at present HR1 is the entire ball of wax for the Democrats, who have moved much further to the left than ever before in my lifetime and perhaps in American history. That’s what makes it different and that’s what makes them more even more determined than usual (and they usually are very determined indeed) to pass this legislation, because they believe it will give them permanent power. Permanent power includes the power to do more things that will solidify that power, including making new states out of DC and Puerto Rico. Then they would never have to worry about the likes of Sinema and Manchin. To be blunt, HR1 gives them a much greater opportunity to win elections through fraud, and if so then they also would never have to worry about the pesky voters’ rejection, either.
Whether anything will stop them is anyone’s guess. But they will not stop trying to pass this bill any way they can (and that includes some sort of executive action if the legislative action fails, and lawfare as well).
That’s why the latest approach to passing HR1 surprises me not in the least, and it should surprise no one:
Democrats have figured out a way to sneak their “voting reform” bill into the House and then on to the Senate. It involves hollowing out a bill that has to do with NASA, and replacing the text with the text of their voting bill…
…Politico reports:
“‘The Senate will finally debate voting rights legislation, and then every senator will be faced with a choice of whether or not to pass the legislation to protect our democracy,’ Schumer wrote in a memo, obtained by POLITICO, to Senate Democrats.
That “hollowing out a bill” approach rang a bell, and that bell was Obamacare. I’m not keen on relating all the Byzantine details of the passage of that legislation, but the main relevant points are the following:
(a) The United States Constitution requires all revenue-related bills to originate in the House. To formally comply with this requirement, the Senate repurposed H.R. 3590, a bill regarding housing tax changes for service members. It had been passed by the House as a revenue-related modification to the Internal Revenue Code. The bill became the Senate’s vehicle for its healthcare reform proposal, discarding the bill’s original content.
(b) The House passed it with only a narrow margin (220-215). Only one Republican voted for it, and 35 Democrats voted against it. Therefore, except for that one vote, support was not bipartisan but opposition was.
(c) The Senate passed its own bill with a 60-vote margin. You may remember some of the hurdles that were overcome to get to that magic number of 60:
At the start of the 111th Congress, Democrats had 58 votes. The Minnesota Senate election was ultimately won by Democrat Al Franken, making 59. Arlen Specter switched to the Democratic party in April 2009, giving them 60 seats, enough to end a filibuster.
The vote to end cloture was passed by 60 votes, as was the bill itself. No Republicans voted for it and all Democrats plus two Independents voted for it, thus making it a completely partisan affair. But at least it was a partisan affair passed by a strong majority rather than a very narrow one.
(d) The next step was to unite the House bill with the Senate bill and pass a single bill. This is where the election of Republican Scott Brown of Massachusetts (to replace the deceased Ted Kennedy) came in. That election let the Democrats know how opposed the public was to the passage of this bill – if even liberal Massachusetts seemed to want to stop it – but they didn’t care. It was thought that Brown could stop the Democrats from getting 60 votes to invoke cloture on the new bill that would unify the two previous ones, but the Democrats got around that little problem by having the House merely approve the previous Senate bill as written (with a few budgetary changes), which meant Democrats did not face a new cloture vote at all and the bill could now be passed in the Senate by a simple majority.
From that Wiki page:
Since any bill that emerged from conference that differed from the Senate bill would have to pass the Senate over another Republican filibuster, most House Democrats agreed to pass the Senate bill on condition that it be amended by a subsequent bill. They drafted the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, which could be passed by the reconciliation process.
Per the Congressional Budget Act of 1974, reconciliation cannot be subject to a filibuster. But reconciliation is limited to budget changes, which is why the procedure was not used to pass ACA in the first place; the bill had inherently non-budgetary regulations. Although the already-passed Senate bill could not have been passed by reconciliation, most of House Democrats’ demands were budgetary…
The House passed the Senate bill with a 219–212 vote on March 21, 2010, with 34 Democrats and all 178 Republicans voting against it. It passed the second bill, by 220–211, the same day (with the Senate passing this bill via reconciliation by 56-43 a few days later).
Note again the bipartisan nature of the opposition rather than of the support.
Coming back to HR1, the approach has some similarities and some differences. The hollowed-out bill is the same approach, but that wouldn’t be of concern if HR1 itself had strong bipartisan support. Not only does it not have that support, but the Democrats now don’t have the kind of majority they did back when Obamacare was passed. There is no way they could reach that 60-vote threshold that was initially reached for the Senate to pass Obamacare. That’s why there’s all this talk about ending the filibuster. It’s because the Democrats have only the slimmest of margins, and even that margin is iffy (Sinema has indicated she would vote for HR1 but not to end the filibuster, and I’m not sure what Manchin’s position is right now on the bill, but in the past he opposed it).
Obamacare was very important to the Democrats, but its importance pales in comparison to the importance of HR1. As I’ve stated many times, HR1 is the entire ballgame to them, their entree into permanent power. That’s not only the reason they are so grimly determined to pass it no matter what, but it’s also the reason it is a profoundly dangerous and pernicious bill. With its Orwellian “For the People” title, it purports to secure voting “rights.” In actuality, it provides the mechanism to subvert them.
Open thread 1/14/22
If you’re ever out in the woods and feel the need for a toothbrush:
COVID and Fauci: what did he know and when did he know it?
I’ve been meaning to write a long post on the subject of what now appears to have been the efforts of “scientists” such as Dr. Fauci to quash talk of the possible evidence for the Chinese lab genesis of COVID, which they knew early on was in fact a valid and even likely hypothesis. I may still write that longer post, but at the moment I’ll just deal with it by providing links, and by adding that their actions undermine the last vestiges of faith we might have in scientific objectivity, particularly among bureaucrats such as Fauci.
Here are three links: this, this, and this.
And here’s a summary video from Viva Frei:
A YouTube comment for that video: “I gotta say, I’m getting sick of being right.”
Sinema…
…couldn’t care less what names Joe Biden calls her.
The filibuster stands – for now. Here are some quotes from Sinema’s speech on the subject:
What is the legislative filibuster other than a tool that requires new federal policy to be broadly supported by senators representing a broader cross section of Americans, a guardrail inevitably viewed as an obstacle by whoever holds the Senate majority?
Demands to eliminate this threshold (from whichever party holds the fleeting majority) amount to a group of people separated on two sides of a canyon, shouting to their colleagues that the solution to their shared challenges is to make that rift both wider and deeper.
Consider this: in recent years, nearly every party-line response to the problems we face in this body, every partisan action taken to protect a cherished value, has led us to more division, not less.
Sinema makes it clear in her speech that she supports much of the Democrats’ agenda – including the very bill they are so eager to end the filibuster to pass, HR1. But she will not support ending the filibuster to pass it. That’s unusual, and I certainly never expected this of Sinema back when she was first elected.
And Tom Cotton reminds everyone (everyone listening, that is) that Chuck Schumer used to be vociferously pro-filibuster – when Schumer was in the minority in the Senate, that is.
SCOTUS rules on vaccine mandates
6-3 against OSHA mandate, with liberals dissenting. 5-4 in favor of CMS mandate, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Barrett, dissenting. (In other words, Roberts and Kavanaugh voted with the liberal bloc on CMS.).
The OSHA mandate is the one for large employers, and the CMS mandate is the one for healthcare workers.
Here are some quotes from the decision on OSHA:
OSHA has never before imposed such a mandate. Nor has Congress. Indeed, although Congress has enacted significant legislation addressing the COVID–19 pandemic, it has declined to enact any measure similar to what OSHA has promulgated here…
Applicants [for blocking the mandate] are likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the Secretary lacked authority to impose the mandate. Administrative agencies are creatures of statute. They accordingly possess only the authority that Congress has provided. The Secretary has ordered 84 million Americans to either obtain a COVID–19 vaccine or undergo weekly medical testing at their own expense. This is no “everyday exercise of federal power.”
Of course. It’s really quite obvious, and the decision should have been unanimous but of course it’s not because the Court’s liberals would approve virtually anything this administration does.
The decision in favor of the mandate for health care workers is based on the fact that, according to the majority, the government has the right to do it:
Congress has authorized the Secretary to impose conditions on the receipt of Medicaid and Medicare funds that “the Secretary finds necessary in the interest of the health and safety of individuals who are furnished services.” 42 U. S. C. §1395x(e)(9).* COVID–19 is a highly contagious, dangerous, and—especially for Medicare and Medicaid patients—deadly disease. The Secretary of Health and Human Services determined that a COVID–19 vaccine mandate will substantially reduce the likelihood that healthcare workers will contract the virus and transmit it to their patients.
But with Omicron, will a vaccine “substantially reduce the likelihood that healthcare workers will contract the virus and transmit it to their patients”? The evidence mounts that this may not be so, although it appears to be so for earlier variants. I’d like to know when the Secretary of Health and Human Services issued that statement – was it before Omicron came around? And do the SCOTUS justices even know the difference between Omicron and the other variants (Sotomayor seems to know almost next to nothing about COVID, based on her performance during oral arguments, but I’m talking about the others)?
No surprise that Roberts voted with the liberals on that one. Is Kavanaugh a surprise? He’s been a less-than-stalwart conservative, so his vote is not all that much of a surprise either. Both did vote correctly on the first question, however, which was the more egregious overreach by the administration.
The dissent by the four remaining justices on that second question was based on this (note that Amy Coney Barrett sided here with the conservatives):
…[O]ur decision turns primarily on whether the Government can make a “strong showing” that it is likely to succeed on the merits. Nken v. Holder, 556 U. S. 418, 426 (2009). In my view, the Government has not made such a showing here.