What’s the GOP’s Real Game Plan?

Two Regulatory Heroes

Amidst all the drama of the impeachment hearings and Democratic debates, two regulatory heroes—one in Canada and one in the United States—quietly did something extraordinary. They wrote e-mails expressing long-overdue skepticism regarding software that can kill lots of people. Their subject was Boeing’s “Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System,” or MCAS. Already it has contributed to the deaths of 346 air travelers in two separate “total fatality” crashes of Boeing’s now-grounded 737 Max aircraft. The Canadian expert, Jim Marko, wrote that MCAS “has to go.” American regulator Linh Le expressed misgivings about Boeing’s proposed fixes. Why are these two men heroes? Because they are apparently the first people in positions of regulatory authority to understand and reveal the uniqueness of software. It doesn’t work like any of the mechanical, optical, hydraulic, airfoil, control-surface, or electrical/electronic systems that aircraft producers have been using and testing for decades. It’s nonlinear. A tiny error in programming, like a misplaced comma or parenthesis, or a miscalculation of a range of data storage, can cause the software not to work at all, or to produce bizarre and potentially fatal output. Software’s output can vary enormously, far out of proportion to changes in input, when the input crosses arbitrary digital boundaries. These sorts of errors are extremely hard to find and fix. Even skilled programmers who go over the code line by line and character by character, again and again, can fail to see them. Why? The human mind, like all conventional (non-software) aircraft systems, is linear, not to mention forgetful and inattentive. And nothing can be more boring than scanning through hundreds or thousands of lines of computer code and finding nothing that seems out of the ordinary. The only way to test a program like MCAS fully and reliably is to attach it to a flight simulator and program the simulator to methodically test every possible combination of variables (e.g., angle of attack, airspeed, wind speed and direction, and weather conditions) that might occur within the range of physical conditions that MCAS is supposed to address. That approach, analogous to what particle physicists call “Monte Carlo” testing, essentially runs the software through all permutations and combinations of conditions that it might possibly encounter in real life, or at least a carefully constructed statistical sample of them. Such “Monte Carlo” testing would probably take months to set up and program and at least a few days to run. Yet as far as I know, it’s the only conceivable way to thoroughly test software like MCAS, which depends on multiple real physical variables that can change unpredictably in practice, and which can kill people in numbers if the results it produces are wrong. Although I’ve followed public reports of the MCAS story, nothing I’ve read suggests that anyone at Boeing has suggested, let alone tried, this or any similar approach. Yet until this or something equally effective is done, no one can have complete confidence that MCAS will work as specified in all the conditions for which it was designed. The only safe alternative is to rely on pilots’ experience and skill as a backstop, train them to use MCAS on flight simulators, and put a big, red “kill switch” in easy reach, so they can turn off the software quickly if and when it acts up. What makes this point vitally important is not just the 346 innocent people who’ve already died. Issues like this will arise again and again as software and AI are used to control more and more of what lawyers call “hazardous instrumentalities,” e.g., planes, commuting trains, and self-driving cars and trucks. Software, its characteristics and control are unique in the history of science and engineering. Up to now, it has mostly produced, stored, manipulated and transmitted information, which can be analyzed and corrected after the fact without risk to human life. When seemingly “minor” programming errors have the potential to cause tragedy in real time, the design and testing of software require a whole new, unprecedented regime. If software for aircraft and self-driving vehicles suffers the same lack of care and perfection that Internet users discover and curse in websites every day, modern life will rapidly get a whole lot more dangerous. Messrs. Marko and Le are heroes for being, apparently, the first regulators to recognize and point out this unfortunate reality.

[For a quick read on Wednesday’s Atlanta debate, click here.]

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Faithful readers of this blog may have been wondering why I’ve posted nothing about impeachment until now. The reason is pretty simple: I thought, and I still think, that Trump’s own conduct and admissions are ample cause for impeachment and removal. There’s nothing much to say or do except get on with the process of dumping him.

To me, once an Articles Editor on the Harvard Law Review, it’s an open and shut case. Trump has committed—and continues to commit—impeachable offenses almost every day. He propagates falsehoods habitually, relentlessly and recklessly. Like a Mafia capo, he intimidates and bullies (outside of normal and legal channels) private individuals, members of his own Executive, and members of co-equal branches of government. He regularly makes decisions that have no visible rationale but financial benefit to him and his family personally. Isn’t that what we used to call “corruption”?

He neglects the duties of his office. He and his minions (especially Giuliani, who has no official or legitimate governmental role whatsoever) trample the Constitution with gusto. He relentlessly slanders our allies, our military leaders, our dedicated civil servants and our courts. And far beyond failing to faithfully execute our laws, he gives every indication of not even giving a damn what they are.

Trump’s Tweets and behavior make plain that, in his own mind, he is the law. He won an election by minority vote with the aid of our Electoral College’s malapportionment, so he’s become our first emperor. “L’etat c’est Trump!” All the rest of government and the people have to do is read his Tweets, believe and obey.

That’s the way he plays it. And that’s how Fox and the GOP play it, following, in goosestep, right into Trump’s empire, which exists mostly in his own mind but is becoming more real every day. Nearly eight years ago, when I wrote an essay re-analyzing Germany’s Nazi psychosis, I asked “Could it happen here?” I never imagined it would start to happen so soon.

Beyond that, there’s the nature of impeachment. I’m not an expert on the subject, but I’ve had a fine legal education and have read most of what the experts have published during the present contretemps. Despite the Constitution’s use of the words “crimes and misdemeanors” (modified by the adjective “high”), impeachment is not primarily a criminal matter. Some Founders worried about the process, in partisan times, giving the White House a revolving door. But there was general agreement that it should be a cure for corruption, abuse of power and gross neglect of duty, not just narrowly defined crimes.

In other words, our Founders intended impeachment to be the sole remedy, apart from infrequent elections, for a rogue president’s maladministration. If Trump is not a rogue president, who is? What more would he have to do?

Yet to understand what the GOP is doing and why, you need to think outside the box. You need to think about historical context. When you do, you come to the conclusion that focusing so intently on Trump’s attempt to extort Zelensky is a big, big mistake.

Today’s GOP has become a permanent nationwide popular-minority party making an extended last stand. It’s doing its damnedest to exploit the malapportionment of our Senate and Electoral College and the temporary (we hope) power that Trump’s demagoguery provides, while entrenching itself on our Supreme Court. The GOP and the oligarchs who back it are doing all they can to stay on top, before the stout brooms of history and demographics sweep them, the Old South and white supremacy into the dustbin where they belong.

Their prolonged last stand is, of course, probably doomed to failure, unless Trump and his followers succeed in converting our nation to empire. But however badly and quickly they fail—or worse, if they succeed—their last stand is likely to have immense world-historical consequences, as impactful as the Fall of Rome in its day. Among them could be the decimation or devastation of our species in runaway global warming or nuclear war. The fall of our nation to second or third rank, with China henceforth leading our species, is almost assured, and the consequence most likely to occur soonest.

But today’s so-called “Republicans,” like their leader, don’t care. Their thinkers have all fled, renounced the party or ducked into the shadows. All that’s left are temporizers who live for the moment. Keep the bosses, including oligarchs, whites and Christians, on top as long as you can. Hold back the tides of history as long as you can. Why else “normalize” an abysmal excuse for a leader and a man such as Trump?

Up until yesterday, the GOP’s public defense in Trump’s impeachment pretty much followed this “game plan,” if you can call it that. Say anything, no matter how illogical, patently false or outrageous, to create confusion and doubt and give Trump and Fox their fig leaves. The whole enterprise resembled a doomed World War II fighter spewing out chaff in a last-ditch effort to keep from being shot down. I didn’t (and couldn’t) comment because chaff does not lend itself to reasoned analysis.

But all that changed yesterday. Yesterday the GOP developed a strategy. It’s a strategy for “winning” the impeachment battle on the field of public opinion, which is all Republicans care about. For that limited purpose, it’s not a bad strategy.

Their goal is not to win the argument, or even to win the eventual trial in the Senate acting as “decider” on the question of Trump’s removal—at least not by any means resembling serious and honest democratic debate. Their goal is to use their raw majority power in the Senate to defeat the removal process, regardless of merit, but in a way that prevents serious diminution in Trump’s so-far solid 40% minority. If they can reach this goal, they can hope to eke out a second term for Trump by the same means as before: exploiting the Electoral College’s malapportionment.

The GOP’s new “impeachment-defense” strategy is simple to state and understand. But it’s not the point. It’s really a footnote, so I explain it in one below.

The main point is that the GOP has no intention of allowing Trump to be convicted and removed by the Senate as long as his 40% minority holds. So the fine points of the Constitution, law, Reason and justice are irrelevant. All that matters is whether the GOP and Fox can keep the Trumpets on Trump’s side until next November. That’s the game, and the GOP is wholly focused on winning it.

If this conclusion is correct, then the Dems’ strategy of seeking clarity by focusing narrowly on Trump’s apparent extortion of Zelensky is precisely the wrong one. For the Zelensky-extortion charge lends itself to a good defense in the court of public opinion. It won’t work for anyone who’s attended even the first year of law school, but most Trumpets have not.

The Dems’ best hope is a long shot at best. They have to peel some Senate Republicans (at least 20) off from the herd. The only chance of doing that is to get Trump’s poll numbers to dip sharply. They can’t do that with the Zelensky charge alone because the GOP now has a legally and logically faulty but facially plausible defense.

So the Dems have to throw everything they have at Trump. They have to reveal the staggering breadth and depth of Trump’s wrongdoing to a substantial number of people who now believe he can do no wrong, and who put their trust in Fox.

It’s a heavy lift, maybe an impossible one. But as hard as it may be, it’s easier than getting the GOP Senators to abandon the raw-power approach they’ve been taking for so long and treat the Zelensky affair seriously. They’ve been making a last-ditch stand at least since Trump won the 2016 election, and they’re not about to abandon it now, far less for the weak embrace of sweet Reason.

Footnote: the GOP Defense of the Zelensky-Extortion Charge. To see how the GOP hopes to defend the Zelensky extortion charge in the court of public opinion—which is the only court that matters to Republicans—you have listen to the rant of Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) toward the end of the hearings yesterday.

The defense is clear and simple enough for any Trumpet or Fox viewer to understand: no harm, no foul. Trump’s alleged extortion ultimately didn’t work. Neither Zelensky nor anyone in Ukraine ever investigated the Bidens. Ukraine got its security aid, including Javelin man-portable anti-tank weapons. The Russian incursion into Ukraine came to a grinding halt, albeit after causing much destruction and many casualties. Russia is back at the bargaining table and has even (according to Jordan) returned some of the marine hardware it stole by force from Ukraine.

As for motive, Ambassador Volker credibly testified that Trump’s motives were at worst mixed. Legitimate doubt about Ukraine’s new administration’s commitment to fighting corruption was a plausible alternative reason for withholding the security aid for 55 days. Jordan’s praise for Volker, a highly intelligent and skilled diplomat who was instrumental in getting the whole debacle to end well, helps obscure that fact that the main obstacle was Trump himself. But the praise rings true and is well deserved. Volker is a professional instrumentalist, not an ideologue, and he got what he wanted and our nation and Ukraine needed.

Anyone who’s attended the first year of law school knows that an attempt or conspiracy to commit a crime is also a crime, even if the underlying crime never happens. Conspiracy in particular requires only a single overt act in furtherance of the criminal agreement, like Trump’s firing Ambassador Yovanovich at Giuliani’s suggestion. So Trump could well be an unindicted co-conspirator guilty of conspiracy to extort, just like Nixon in Watergate—“unindicted” only because of the DOJ memo that purports to prohibit indicting a sitting president.

But all this legal nuance goes right over the heads of Trumpets and viewers of Fox. To dent their support for Trump, you need to give them a sense of the vast scope of his impeachable misconduct. You need to take them back to the days when pols relied on Reason, not raw partisan power, and American government resembled majority rule.

You can’t do that with the Zelensky matter. So the impeachment inquiry must broaden considerably in order to have any realistic chance of removing Trump. The rifle-shot approach never really had a chance, and now it seems even more likely to fail.

The Dems’ Atlanta Debate: Practice Makes Better

The motley crew is both learning the trade and becoming a team. That’s my main takeaway from the Dems’ debate in Atlanta Wednesday night.

It was a good debate. It advanced the goal of retiring Trump, while putting each candidate’s best foot forward. The moderation and technical support were excellent. I don’t yet know whether there was easy non-subscription access, but I’ll try to update this post on that point.

In my view, the top four candidates remain the same afterward as before: Biden, Warren, Sanders and Buttigieg, in that order. Each helped his or her cause, Buttigieg the most and Biden next.

Buttigieg maintained his flawless articulation, offered cogent ideas and memorable phrasing and cited some rarely mentioned facts about farmers’ struggles. He was particularly moving in describing, with reference to his understanding of other minorities, his struggles as an openly gay man.

Biden made strong and often moving statements about climate change (“an existential issue”), keeping the Justice Department independent, Saudi atrocities and responsibility, restoring alliances, and women’s rights as human rights. He appears to have moved on from endlessly citing his own experience, which few remember or care about, to telling voters what he would do. Yet he did make one small gaffe, calling a female African-American Senator among his supporters the only such when she was just the first.

Warren held her ground and maybe advanced a bit. But she did little remarkably moving besides mentioning her janitor father in her closing statement. She continued her clear articulation, cited appalling statistics justifying family leave, made ringing and cogent pleas for cutting corruption, and powerfully endorsed real change. She showed a lot of abstract concern for our many unfortunate, but she seems not to understand that plans are not empathy. Jumping that hurdle, I think, would jet-propel her candidacy.

Sanders remained about where he was. He adroitly justified his own bold ideas and refrained from mentioning socialism even once. With his alacrity and apparent failure to tire, he also allayed some doubt about his recent heart attack. So the race among the top four is, in my view, still wide open.

The most remarkable and positive thing about the debate was what appeared to be an underlying sense of cooperation. There were devastating potshots at Trump all around, especially on questions of values and decency. Few potshots were taken, at least early on, against the other candidates on the stage.

Several times, one candidate or another referred to everyone on the stage as having similar values, in gross contrast to Trump. In the heat of debate, not everyone may have realized how important that was, and will be, in bringing Democrats and some independents together and making them all comfortable with the eventual nominee. My fiancée and I independently remarked how we would like to see almost everyone on that stage in the next Cabinet, especially Yang, with his bold and fresh economic ideas, and Steyer, with his business experience and absolute commitment to slowing climate change.

Yet there were some rough spots. Klobuchar enhanced her “get along” credentials by making a gracious statement about Buttigieg (one of the few pols with executive experience) deserving to be on the stage. Later, she seemed to take that graciousness back by unnecessarily belittling his experience as compared to hers. Tulsi Gabbard was the worst in this respect, smugly hitting Buttigieg with an obscure “gotcha” about sending troops to Mexico, which he claimed was distorted, and later citing the “aloha spirit” of her state. That and Booker’s joke that Biden may have been “high” in proposing to decriminalize marijuana may have been the night’s most jarring moments.

Kudos are due to the four female moderators. They made the candidates the foci of attention, as good moderators should. They covered every important issue but gun control. Their questions were short and tailored gently to each candidate, without seeming unfair, abrasive or “inside baseball.” No “gotchas” for them! They followed up to make sure no question went by without a clear answer. They made the trains run on time.

If past debates were any measure of moderators’ general skill and impartiality, the Dems would be wise immediately to sign these four up for all their remaining debates. It wouldn’t hurt at all, before elections that female voters likely will decide, to recognize and reward these ladies’ patently superior performance.

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