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Reddit rolled out some changes this week as its continues its push for revenue and profitability jumpstarted by its API rule changes in July. Among the most controversial, the company will no longer allow users to opt out of ad personalization based on their Reddit activity and started a program that lets users exchange virtual rewards for their posts for real money.

On Wednesday, Reddit announced plans to "improve ad performance," including by preventing users from opting out of personalized ads except for in "select countries." Reddit didn't specify which countries are excluded, but the exceptions could include countries falling under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. Reddit spokesperson Sierra Gamelgaard declined to provide further clarification when reached by Ars Technica for comment.

Reddit's announcement, authored by Reddit's head of privacy, going by "snoo-tuh" on the platform (Reddit has refused to confirm the identity of admins representing Reddit on the site), said that its advertisers look at "what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals" to gauge your interests.

Snoo-tuh wrote:

For users who previously opted out of personalization based on Reddit activity, this change will not result in seeing more ads or sharing on-platform activity with advertisers. It does enable our models to better predict which ad may be most relevant to you.

Still, Reddit users have expressed concern over suddenly losing a privacy control they've long had. Meanwhile, Reddit's policy update aligns with its outspoken goals to become profitable and its plans to eventually go public. Reddit has already sacrificed other aspects of the user experience, as well as some community trust, in an effort to drive revenue. Reddit declined to provide comment regarding privacy concerns related to this latest update.

Other privacy policy changes announced Wednesday include allowing users to choose to see "fewer" ads regarding alcohol, dating, gambling, pregnancy and parenting, and weight loss. Reddit didn't commit to all ads being removed initially since its system of "manual tagging and machine learning to classify the ads" may not be totally accurate at first. Snoo-tuh said things should get more accurate "over time," though. Reddit’s Contributor Program

Also this week, Reddit announced its Contributor Program, launching in the US only for now. Reddit users with 100–4,999 karma can earn $0.90 per gold received. Users with over 5,000 karma can get $1 per gold received. Users can pay for gold to award to other users.

The scheme is reminiscent of the Creator Ads Revenue Sharing program by X, formerly Twitter, where premium subscription members can get a portion of ad revenue generated from their posts. Elon Musk announced the program in February, and it launched in July.

X's program has been criticized for potentially encouraging spam-y, bait-y posts and posts that are controversial and offensive, just for the sake of generating reactions and comments that will lead to the user making money. But that hasn't stopped Reddit from enacting a user payment scheme of its own (after all, Huffman has said Musk's X is an example for Reddit.)

However, clickbait and shock value posts are a strong deviation from what people tend to treasure most about Reddit: real human advice, discussions, and insight.

In an interview with BBC, social media analyst and consultant Matt Navarra noted that Reddit was incentivizing and providing opportunity for its top users but that it could also jeopardize Reddit's content quality.

Navarra told BBC:

[X's ad sharing program] incentives X users to post content that sparks the most replies, and the characteristics of content that typically generates the most replies is content that is divisive, polarizing, provocative, and controversial... exactly the sort of content that brands do not want to have their ads placed amongst. This has been problematic for Elon Musk, and it could become a new problem for Reddit's founders too.

When I reached out to Reddit about these concerns, spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt pointed me to Reddit's blog post about the program. It says that users have to be at least 18 years old and verified by Reddit to participate and that:

All monetizable contributions are subject to Reddit’s User Agreement and Content Policy. In addition, Reddit will take the same enforcement actions against contributions breaking Reddit’s rules and withhold any earnings on content that violates the Content Policy or the new Contributor Monetization Policy and Contributor Terms for the program.

A support page says Reddit's Contributor Program will avoid "fraud, spam, bad actors, and illegal activities" by putting users through Persona's Know Your Customer screening. It also points to "Reddit internal safety signals," "new monetization policies with enforcement and repercussions," "daily gold purchase limits," "automated detection and monitoring via Reddit’s safety tools and systems," "user reporting," and "admin auditing."

"Sometimes, it's who you most suspect." That's what a friend of mine texted to a group chat after the Sunday Times, the Times and Channel 4 Dispatches released a disturbing investigative report documenting rape and other sexual allegations against British comedian Russell Brand. The actor denies the allegations, but unsurprisingly, most of the public does not seem to believe his denials. In part, it's because the evidence against Brand is overwhelming: five separate accusers, digital documentation, and a litany of witnesses ready to corroborate how Brand's behavior was an "open secret in radio and TV production." In part, it's because being a skeeze was always central to Brand's persona. And in part, it's because there have been comments over the years, from celebrities like Katy Perry and Kristen Bell, about Brand's predatory behavior.

The Onion, as they often do, said it best, with the headline, "Nation Could Have Sworn Russell Brand Was Already Convicted Sex Offender."

And yet, like clockwork, the MAGA masses are rallying to Brand's side, treating these allegations like they are evidence that the "deep state" is trying to take Brand out for some vague reason.

As Joy Saha documented at Salon, the usual suspects — Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson — defended Brand this week and floated conspiracy theories to distract from the serious allegations. Elon Musk, of course, got involved, writing on the platform he rebranded X, "They don't like competition." Greg Gutfeld elevated the conspiracy theory to Fox News.

History shows the quickest way to be a hero to the MAGA crowd is to be credibly accused of rape, ideally by a large number of women.

Do any of these conspiracy theorists believe their own B.S.? I'm skeptical that any of these men actually mean a single word they say. They are, after all, arguing that Brand is such an all-powerful threat to the mysterious "They" that "They" organized a conspiracy of dozens of people — reporters, editors, fact-checkers, witnesses, and accusers — for the purpose of smearing an innocent man with allegations such as he "forced his penis down her throat" so hard she had to punch him to escape. That's a lot of work for the mighty "They" to take out one dude. Keeping that many conspirators quiet is nearly impossible. You'd think "They" would have simpler methods of dealing with people "They" want to get rid of.

Nah, the more likely explanation is that Brand's defenders believe he did it. They're just angry that anyone would deny a man his patriarchy-given right to rape as many high school girls as he pleases. After all, this is the same crowd that supports Donald Trump, a man whose history of sexual assault has been put beyond dispute both in a court of law and by his own infamous tape bragging about how he likes to "grab them by the pussy." History shows the quickest way to be a hero to the MAGA crowd is to be credibly accused of rape, ideally by a large number of women.

We see this in the same rally-round-the-pig response MAGA had to Andrew Tate, a man whose total worthlessness as a human being was evident long before he was arrested for rape and human trafficking in Romania. Tate, an "influencer" who preyed on school kids too young to know better, wasn't exactly coy about his misogyny or violent impulses before his arrest. He openly bragged about hitting women and trapping them in the house and even offered to teach his followers how to get into sex trafficking.

Despite — or really because — of all this, the MAGA reaction to Tate's arrest was to treat the guy like a hero. Tucker Carlson interviewed him for Twitter and Elon Musk heavily hyped the video. Needless to say, it wasn't a hard-hitting interview exploring the evils of sexual violence. It was a softball meant to portray Tate, who is accused of choking women so hard he broke blood vessels in their faces, as the real victim.

One could argue, I suppose, that this stampede of support for the worst possible men isn't meant as a celebration of rape per se. There's always the "just trolling" defense. In this case, the argument would be that it's just that MAGA types just really love to "trigger" the feminists. Throwing a pity party for an accused rapist is a virtual form of ponytail-pulling, in this rendering. But even if that were true, it's ultimately a distinction without difference. Once you're throwing ticker tape parades for sexual predators, it really stops mattering if it's just out of anti-feminist spite.

The new allegations against Rudy Giuliani are a grotesque reminder that, for much of MAGA, Trump's appeal was due in large part to the perception that he created an atmosphere where open predation towards women was acceptable. Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who has since spoken out about the coup plotting she witnessed under Trump, has a new book out. In it, she accuses Giuliani of groping her on January 6, 2021, seemingly because he was excited by the unspooling Capitol insurrection. To add insult to injury, she describes John Eastman, another coup plotter, as flashing a "leering grin" while Giuliani manhandled her.

Giuliani, for his part, is denying the allegations, and his denials are being greeted with a great deal of scoffing. After all, he's currently tied up in litigation with a former aide accusing him of bullying her into unwanted sexual intercourse. His accuser, Noelle Dunphy, has produced grotesque receipts, including a tape of Giuliani declaring, "Come here, big tits. Your tits belong to me."

Even without the Dunphy lawsuit, Hutchinson's claims were believable simply because she was working under Donald Trump. We've all heard the "Access Hollywood" tape in which Trump brags, at length, about how he enjoys sexually assaulting women. It makes perfect sense that he would attract compatriots who craved an environment where men can just grope whatever woman they wished. The least surprising thing in the world is if these men saw young and pretty aides like Hutchinson as party favors Trump was offering up to these co-conspirators.

There's a tendency in the mainstream press to talk about rape and sexual abuse as something "everybody" disapproves of. When a credibly accused assailant gets a surge of support, the assumption is these folks believe the accused is innocent. When it's impossible to imagine they believe that — no one can think Trump is innocent — then the assumption is that the sexual predation is a flaw that supporters are reluctantly accepting because they like other traits of the accused.

But there is a third possibility, one that this evidence shows is the likeliest one: sexual abuse as a vice signal.

Being seen as a sexual abuser makes a person more popular with some on the right, especially the extremely online MAGA set. It's a subculture of people who valorize bullying and hate women, especially women who they think are uppity. Sexual violence has been a primary outlet for that urge to humiliate women and put them "in their place." This isn't about a sincere belief that every accused rapist is a victim of a "deep state" conspiracy. It's just that MAGA's knee-jerk urge when they hear these allegations of sexual violence is to side with the perpetrator.

The Biden administration on Thursday announced plans to remove medical bills from Americans' credit reports in a push to end what it called coercive debt collection tactics that affect millions of consumers.

Proposals under consideration would help families financially recover from medical crises, stop debt collectors from coercing people into paying bills they may not even owe, and ensure that creditors are not relying on data that is often plagued with inaccuracies and mistakes, Vice President Kamala Harris and Rohit Chopra, the top consumer finance watchdog, announced.

Harris told reporters that more than 100 million Americans had unpaid medical debt.

"Many of the debts people have accrued are due to medical emergencies," she said. "We know credit scores determine whether a person can have economic health and wellbeing, much less the ability to grow their wealth."

Chopra's agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, reported last year that roughly 20% of Americans have medical debt, but CFPB said its data also showed medical billing data is a poor indicator of whether consumers' are likely to pay down traditional debts.

The Brookings Institution think tank also found big gaps in medical debt statistics, with some 80% of debt held by households with zero or negative net worth, and communities of color hit especially hard. For instance, 27% of Black households hold medical debt compared with 16.8% of non-Black households.

According to the CFPB, the Fair Credit Reporting Act restricts the use of medical information in credit decisions and credit reports. The agency on Thursday announced policy outlines that could give rise to new regulations.

Working as Donald Trump’s lawyer, or just being his lawyer’s lawyer, is a tough gig. The former president’s tight-fisted ways, not to mention his legal problems, are trickling down through Trumpworld’s legal ecosystem.

On Tuesday, Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, sued the former New York mayor for more than $1.3 million in allegedly unpaid legal fees dating back to 2019. That lawsuit, Costello says, is a consequence of Trump’s own refusal to pay Giuliani for years of work as Trump’s personal attorney.

Lawyers for Trump have landed in legal jeopardy due to his lies. They’ve been forced to testify against him, sanctioned, fined, stripped of law licenses, sued, and indicted. But none are in as much trouble as Rudy.

Giuliani has pleaded not guilty to 13 racketeering and conspiracy charges in Georgia for alleged interference in that state’s election. He was also found liable for defaming two Georgia election workers and will likely be ordered to pay them damages. He’s an unindicted co-conspirator in the US Justice Department’s criminal case against Trump related to January 6. His law license is suspended in New York, and he could be disbarred in DC. A former assistant says in a lawsuit that Giuliani raped her. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, in a new book, claims he groped her on January 6. An FBI agent says a bureau investigation found Giuliani “may have been compromised” by Russian intelligence while he assisted Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Giuliani denies any wrongdoing related to each of these allegations. A spokesperson for him called Hutchinson’s claims “a disgusting lie.”

Giuliani encountered many of those problems while he was working for Trump—apparently with a hope, but not an enforceable promise, of remuneration. The former president not only contributed to Giuliani’s fall from famed prosecutor to defendant, but has mostly declined to pay his legal fees. Costello’s suit against Giuliani—his former client—came after he personally accompanied Giuliani to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago headquarters in an attempt to get the president to pay up. Trump, who has previously used a PAC he controls to pay some of what he owes Giuliani, along with others, reportedly recently raised around $1 million at a fundraiser aimed at helping Giuliani.

It’s not clear if Giuliani has received any of that money. But he clearly has not paid Costello. Giuliani complained in a statement Tuesday that Costello’s bill “is way in excess to anything approaching legitimate fees.” Still, Costello said in an interview that the reason his former client hasn’t paid him is “because he hasn’t been paid by Donald Trump.”

Giuliani is the second high-profile client Costello has sued this year. The other is Steve Bannon. Costello’s firm, Davidoff, Hutcher & Citron, in February sued Bannon—who was convicted last year of contempt of Congress (he’s appealing) and indicted in New York for defrauding a nonprofit (he pleaded not guilty)—for more than $480,000 in unpaid fees. Costello also represented Bannon in 2020 following his federal indictment on similar fraud charges, prior to Trump pardoning Bannon. A federal judge in July ordered Bannon to pay up. So far Bannon has apparently not done so.

“We’ll get it, but not yet,” Costello said Tuesday.

Costello, whose biography touts his 40-plus year of litigation experience, told me Tuesday that Bannon was the first client “I’ve ever had to sue for fees.” Giuliani was the second.

Bannon and a Trump spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

Costello, like Giuliani, has participated in some of his client’ legally risky activities. In 2020, Costello received a copy of Hunter Biden’s hard drive from John Paul Mac Issac, the owner of a Delaware computer repair shop where Hunter reputedly left his laptop and failed to pick it up. Costello passed it on to Giuliani, who worked with Bannon to publicize much of the material. Hunter Biden, represented by high-powered lawyer Abbe Lowell, has threatened to sue Costello, along with others involved in revealing contents of the device. Lowell recently followed up on some of those threats, suing a former Trump aide involved in distributing laptop material. He also sued the IRS over two agents’ revelations about Hunter’s alleged nonpayment of taxes.

Costello said he is not concerned by the lawsuit threat. And he said he does not regret his work for Giuliani and Bannon, even though they stiffed him. He said he believed in that work, maintaining that his former clients are being persecuted for their politics.

“The whole idea here is to bleed people associated with Donald Trump dry financially,” he said. “That is a way to cancel them.”

Someone in the congressional office of Rep. Angie Craig is having fun with acronyms.

On Wednesday, the Minnesota Democrat unveiled a bill taking aim at House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as the federal government nears a shutdown at the end of the month. Party in-fighting has left the Republican leader struggling to pass a spending plan to fund government services.

Craig’s bill would block members of Congress from receiving their scheduled pay if the government shuts down and federal workers are furloughed. She is calling the legislation the My Constituents Cannot Afford Rebellious Tantrums, Handle Your Shutdown Act, or the MCCARTHY Shutdown Act for short.

The Democrat said her tribute to the House speaker, if passed, would make sure lawmakers experience the same lost paychecks as regular Americans.

“Speaker McCarthy and House Republicans are ready to shut down the federal government and put the livelihoods of working families at risk — while still collecting a paycheck,” Craig said in a statement. “[I]t’s ridiculous that we still get paid while folks like TSA workers are asked to work without a paycheck.”

According to the bill text, lawmakers’ pay during the shutdown period would be held in escrow until the final day of the session, when it would be released for payment so as not to violate the law prescribing congressional salaries.

Federal workers who are furloughed generally do not receive pay while the government is shut down. In the past, Congress has stepped in and passed legislation retroactively to make workers whole for the wages they lost, but the missing pay can lead to financial anxieties and hardships while the shutdown persists.

The last shutdown — dubbed a partial shutdown, since certain agencies remained open — was the longest in U.S. history, lasting 35 days from late 2018 into early 2019. The impasse stemmed from then-President Donald Trump’s demand for federal money to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

During that saga, more than 100 lawmakers pledged to refuse their paychecks since the shutdown was the fault of Congress and the White House. Such proposals stretch back to at least to 2013, when some members moved to cut off Congressional salaries during a spending impasse.

This time, right-wing lawmakers are trying to pressure McCarthy into demanding spending cuts that would run counter to an agreement he made with President Joe Biden. They have threatened to oust McCarthy as speak if he doesn’t follow through.

“[I]t’s ridiculous that we still get paid while folks like TSA workers are asked to work without a paycheck.”

• Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.)

Hardliners even managed to torpedo a bill to fund the Pentagon, which is typically among the easiest to get GOP members behind.

McCarthy can lose no more than four Republican votes to get legislation passed, and it would need to be something that can clear the Senate, where Democrats hold a threadbare majority.

“I want to make sure we don’t shut down,” McCarthy told Fox News over the weekend. “I don’t think that is a win for the American public and I definitely believe it’ll make our hand weaker if we shut down.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that both chambers were being pushed around by “a small band of hard-right Republicans.”

America is in the midst of the biggest surge in labor activity in a quarter-century.

The United Auto Workers (UAW), the Writers Guild of America, the actors’ union known as Sag-Aftra, Starbucks workers, Amazon workers, the Teamsters and UPS, flight attendants. The list goes on.

More than 4.1m workdays were lost to stoppages last month, according to the labor department. That’s the most since 2000. And this was before the UAW struck the big three.

Some worry about the effect of all this labor activism on the US economy, and view organized labor as a “special interest” demanding more than it deserves.

Rubbish. Labor activism is good for the economy in the long run. And organized labor isn’t a special interest. It’s the leading edge of the American workforce.

What accounts for this extraordinary moment of labor activity?

Not that workers enjoy striking. Even where unions have funds to help striking workers offset lost wages, they rarely make up even half of what’s forgone. Large corporations whose operations are hobbled by strikes often lay off other workers, as the big three and their suppliers are now threatening to do.

The reason workers go on strike is their expectation that the longer-term gains will be worth the sacrifices.

Today’s labor market continues to be tight, despite efforts by the Fed to slow the economy and make it harder for workers to get raises. So employers (like UPS) are more inclined to give ground to avoid a prolonged strike.

But something far more basic is going on here. As I travel around the country, I hear from average working people an anger and bitterness I haven’t heard for decades. It centers on several things.

The first is that wages have barely increased while corporate profits are in the stratosphere.

Average weekly non-supervisory wages, a measure of blue-collar earnings, were higher in 1969 (adjusted for inflation) than they are now.

The American dream of upward mobility has turned into a nightmare of falling behind. Whereas 90% of American adults born in the early 1940s were earning more than their parents by the time they reached their prime earning years, this has steadily declined. Only half of adults born in the mid-1980s are now earning more than their parents by their prime earning years.

Nearly one out of every five American workers is in a part-time job. Two-thirds are living paycheck to paycheck.

Meanwhile, executive compensation has gone through the roof. In 1965, CEOs of America’s largest corporations were paid, on average, 20 times the pay of average workers. Today, the ratio is over 398 to 1.

Not only has CEO pay exploded. So has the pay of top executives just below them. The share of corporate income devoted to compensating the five highest-paid executives of large corporations ballooned from an average of 5% in 1993 to more than 15% today.

Corporate apologists claim CEOs and other top executives are worth these staggering sums because their corporations have performed so well. They compare star CEOs to star baseball players or movie stars.

But most CEOs have simply ridden the stock market wave. Even if a company’s CEO had done nothing but play online solitaire, the company’s stock price would have soared.

Stock buybacks have also soared – a huge subsidy to investors that further tips the scales against working people. The richest 1% of Americans owns about half the value of all shares of stock. The richest 10%, over 90%.

Why don’t corporations devote more of their income to research and development, or to higher wages and benefits for average workers? In a word, greed.

Small wonder that unions are more popular than they’ve been in a generation. A Gallup poll published in August found that 67% of Americans approve of unions, the fifth straight year such support has exceeded the long-term polling average of 62%.

Joe Biden has pitched himself as the most pro-union president in recent history. More surprisingly, Republican politicians are trying to curry favor with union workers as well. Both parties know that much of the working class is up for grabs in 2024.

American workers still have little to no countervailing power relative to large American corporations. Unionized workers now comprise only 6% of private-sector workforce – down from over a third in the 1960s.

Which is why the activism of the UAW, the Writers Guild, Sag-Aftra, the Teamsters, flight attendants, Amazon warehouse workers and Starbucks workers is so important.

In a very real sense, these workers are representing all American workers. If they win, they’ll energize other workers, even those who are not unionized. They’ll mobilize some to form or join unions.

They’ll push non-union employers to raise wages and benefits out of a fear of becoming unionized if they don’t. They’ll galvanize other workers to stage wildcat strikes for better pay and working conditions.

For far too long, America’s top executives, Wall Street traders and biggest investors have siphoned off almost all the economic gains. This is unsustainable, economically and politically.

It’s not economically sustainable because the only way businesses can sell the goods and services American workers produce is if workers have enough money to buy them. If most gains continue to go to the top, the economy will become ever more susceptible to downdrafts and crashes.

Today’s mainstream media emphasize the feared negative effects of the current wave of strike on the US economy, forgetting that the wave of strikes in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s helped create the largest middle class the world had ever seen – the key to America’s postwar prosperity.

Stagnant wages and widening inequality are politically unsustainable because they foster anger and bitterness that’s easily channeled by demagogic politicians (re: Donald Trump and his enablers in the Republican party) into bigotry, paranoia, xenophobia and authoritarianism.

The current wave of strikes isn’t bad for America. It’s good for America.

Labor is not a “special interest”. It is, in a real sense, all of us.

It already didn’t look great for Lauren Boebert when she got kicked out of a Denver theater for being disruptive during a performance of the Beetlejuice musical — or when video emerged of the voluble Republican congresswoman being escorted out of the theater. But that was hardly the end of this saga. A second video showed Boebert vaping in front of a pregnant woman, who claimed that the lawmaker refused to stop doing so when asked. The story really went nuclear when a third surveillance video leaked, showing that Boebert and her date were getting awfully comfortable with each other during the show.

Unfortunately for Boebert’s campaign to rebrand as a normal lawmaker, more juicy details keep coming out. Boebert — who has condemned drag shows in the past — was co-groping at Beetlejuice with an Aspen bar owner whose establishment hosts drag shows and participates in an event called Aspen Gay Ski Week. “I learned to check party affiliations before you go on a date,” Boebert told TMZ, although the pair have been reportedly seeing each other for months now.

In an interview with OAN, Boebert, who has been arrested four times, said that she is “very known for having an animated personality.” But the private incident in public is having a big impact on her professional life, distracting from her effort to impeach President Biden. Days after the incident, she was removed from the list of speakers for the Texas Youth Summit later this month.

At least she has her defenders. In a long Facebook post published Monday, Boebert’s ex-husband, Jayson, said he shared the blame for the incident, claiming that his acts of cheating “broke her down.” While it’s odd to have your recent ex-husband come to your defense for getting handsy in public, Jayson Boebert is something of an expert in this realm, having once been arrested for exposing himself to a teenager at a bowling alley.

Senator Mitch McConnell is not well. Without going too deep into an armchair diagnosis of his recent spate of freezes and falls, it shouldn’t be controversial to say that an 81-year-old man who mysteriously stops talking and can’t start up again is likely suffering from some kind of significant health issue.

If he were a woman, the calls for him to retire would be deafening. If he were a Democrat, the calls would be coming from within his own party. If he were Joe Biden, The New York Times would run a three-part exposé on his nap times while CNN ran a “25th Amendment Tracker” keeping tabs on which cabinet officials had publicly agreed to remove him from power. But McConnell is a Republican man, which means nobody is going to pressure him into getting out of the way so somebody else can frost the glass of representative democracy.

McConnell, of course, shows no sign of being willing to retire. In private calls, he has allegedly assured Republicans that he is “fine,” and I guess everybody is supposed to take his word for it. The most simple reason for his intransigence is the pride that seems to afflict every octogenarian politician in this broken republic. For reasons I hope to live long enough to discover, old politicians seem to think they are indispensable and will continue to run for office and cling to power until the great Voter in the Sky escorts them to a farm upstate. McConnell may simply be doing what others in his generational cohort do: refuse to cede the floor to the future.

But that explanation risks treating McConnell as a normal person, and McConnell is far from normal. He is perhaps the most successful congressional operator since Henry Clay and a man who wouldn’t turn on a light switch unless it somehow helped Republicans win political power. Whether or not McConnell wants to retire is irrelevant; from his perspective, he probably can’t. That’s because his home state of Kentucky has a Democratic governor, and a law McConnell helped engineer to limit that governor’s choices on McConnell’s replacement is probably unconstitutional.

In 2019, Kentucky shocked the country by electing Andy Beshear, a Democrat, as its governor (yada, yada, all politics is local). This year, Beshear is up for reelection, and he’s running against McConnell ally Daniel Cameron, who was last seen refusing to indict the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor. Beshear leads Cameron by eight points, according to recent polling data.

Kentucky is one of 46 states that allow their governor to fill US Senate vacancies until a special election can be held and the voters can determine who will finish the senatorial term. (North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin are the only states that don’t allow these kinds of temporary gubernatorial appointments but instead go straight to special elections.) This means that if McConnell retires while Beshear is in office (which might be for a long time yet), Beshear gets to fill his seat temporarily.

But there’s a catch. In 2021, at the urging of McConnell, Kentucky became the 11th state to limit the governor’s choices for a replacement senator. The Kentucky law requires the governor to pick a senator from the same party as the retiring senator, and requires the governor to pick from a list of three candidates provided by the executive committee of the departing senator’s political party. The Kentucky legislature passed the law over Beshear’s veto.

If that scheme sounds odd to you, it should, because it almost certainly violates the 17th Amendment of the Constitution. The 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, provided for the direct election of senators by popular vote. The amendment also empowers the “executive authority of the state”—which means the governor—to fill Senate vacancies, as long as the legislature gives them authority to do so before a special election is held. Before the change, senators were chosen directly by state legislatures, which meant that party bosses were able to hand out Senate appointments as if they were a patronage position.

Kentucky’s replacement law is exactly the kind of thing the 17th Amendment was meant to stop. In his veto statement, Beshear explained the constitutional problems with the law as well as I can. The governor wrote: “The Seventeenth Amendment does not authorize legislatures to direct how the Governor makes an appointment to fill vacancies, and the legislature may not impose an additional qualification on who the Governor may appoint beyond the qualifications set for a United States Senator set forth in the Constitution.”

If McConnell retires, the most likely thing for Beshear to do would be to appoint whomever he wants, let the Kentucky legislature sue him, and take the case to the Supreme Court. Despite Republican control of the court, I think Kentucky’s law is likely to lose. Even conservative legal commentators have noted the potential constitutional weakness of the Kentucky replacement scheme.

Still, even if Kentucky’s legislature manages to overcome the 17th Amendment, there is yet another wrinkle: Who is going to tell Beshear’s replacement senator to go home? Remember, as of now, Democrats still control the Senate. Beshear would name a replacement; that replacement would present his credentials to the Democratic-controlled Senate; and that’s just about all it takes to make a new incumbent a senator. By the time the appeals made it to the Supreme Court, Kentucky would be at or near the special election anyway.

McConnell, of all people, understands how raw political power works, and he surely understands that Democrats have it right now, regardless of Kentucky’s constitutionally questionable law. Even if McConnell’s Senate seat flips to a Democrat for only a few months, those are a few months during which the Democratic majority would be freed from the clutches of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. A motivated party could push through a lot of federal judges in a few months.

Whether McConnell retires “gracefully” or orders his staff to Weekend at Bernie’s him until 2026 probably depends on whether Beshear wins reelection in Kentucky. McConnell may be unwell, but I doubt he’s forgotten “how to do politics.” Ironically, McConnell’s entire accursed career has probably done the most work to create the Senate conditions that require him to hang on until the bitter end. The Senate that McConnell created is one devoid of grace: It’s now just a raw exercise in obstruction, where even human frailty is exploited for partisan gain. Somewhere, I bet Ted Kennedy (whose death McConnell exploited to deny the inclusion of a public option in the Affordable Care Act) is watching McConnell’s travails with great interest.

McConnell’s legacy is partisanship, whatever the costs. That seething commitment to do only what is in the best interests of the Republican Party means that right now, McConnell is locked into his role as another Republican vote, at the cost of his dignity and health.

The Beltway press' longing for a stern-but-loving Republican daddy, who will bring our naughty nation in line, has always had an erotic tinge to it. In a widely shared Atlantic piece, drawn from his upcoming biography of Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, McKay Coppins allowed the subtext to edge alarmingly close to the text. "[O]ne can't help but become a little suspicious of his handsomeness," Coppins gushes. "The jowl-free jawline. The all-seasons tan. The just-so gray at the temples of that thick black coif."

It seems Georgia politician Stacey Abrams isn't the only one moonlighting as a steamy romance author. I rolled my eyes throughout Coppins' piece, except for the parts where Romney dropped the daddy act to share bitchy gossip about his fellow senators. But, as far as mainstream pundits are concerned, Romney can totally get it. Coppins' article was released simultaneously with Romney's announcement that he's retiring from the Senate, and the reception Romney got was fawning.

"Romney bows out, leaving a legacy that would make his father proud," read the Washington Post headline of a Karen Tumulty column. She went so far as to credit Romney with "paving the way for national health-care reform," ignoring the fact that Romney ran for president in 2012 on a promise to repeal Obamacare. Tumulty's take was typical, as the press drowned Romney in words like "noble," "principled," and "courageous." The hosannas on the "liberal" MSNBC grew to deafening levels.

All of this adulation is due mainly to the fact that Romney is the rare Republican holding elected office who is willing to state the obvious: That Donald Trump is a monster and a criminal who has no business in elected office.

But the problem with all of this Romney love is not that I personally feel sexually harassed by it. It's that it fails to account for how Romney and other "traditional" Republicans are responsible for the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement. And not just because Romney and his ilk were only too happy to play along with Trump, even as he was pushing the racist "birther" conspiracy theory during the 2012 election cycle. It's because they spent decades married to policy views that range from wildly unpopular to bat guano terrible, making it easy for a demagogue to come in with a platform of "who cares about policy, let's just be super-racist."

Romney obviously disagrees, praising himself for supposedly being the sober-minded policy guy:

But he won't acknowledge that the rampant policy failures of Republicans are why the party has no path forward, except to become a fascist cult focused on settling imaginary scores. So let's review some of the greatest hits of the pre-Trump era of traditional Republican "ideas."

All this adulation is due mainly to the fact that Romney is the rare Republican holding elected office who is willing to state the obvious: That Donald Trump is a monster and a criminal who has no business in elected office.

Cutting taxes for the rich: This has been the number one Republican priority for decades, even though the first George Bush admitted it was "voodoo economics." After decades of rising income inequality, no one believes the money will "trickle down" to everyone else. It has no real support outside of the wealthy people who benefit. Eight in 10 Americans disapprove of this policy. Even 43% of Republican voters don't like it.

"Family values." It's not just that most Americans now support abortion rights and same-sex marriage. People are souring on the religious right and even abandoning religion altogether in record numbers.

Invading Iraq: I won't belabor how terrible this was. I will just remind readers that it was the signature "achievement" of the last Republican president before Trump.

Health care: As far as I can tell, the GOP view of health care policy amounts to, "Have you considered just dying?" As with many issues, their own voters reject the party's views, and will routinely vote to give themselves Medicaid even as party leaders try to stop them.

Climate change denialism. Not talked about much in the press, but there's good reason to believe that decades of flat-out denying basic scientific facts did serious damage to the GOP in the eyes of younger voters. Trump may be a gold medal-level Olympian in the sport of lying, but he is building on a legacy of Republicans who would lie about the existence of gravity, if it pleases their corporate masters.

One could go on forever, but the bigger picture is this: On policy, Republicans simply have nothing to offer. They won't improve people's lives or fix existing problems. They only survived as long as they did because of gerrymandering and a tilted electoral map, backed by an unbelievable amount of money spent on right-wing propaganda like Fox News.

Trump understands the power of cynicism in politics all too well, and so was able to exploit this situation. He just sidestepped the policy issue altogether and instead offered something different: Naked hatred. Bigotry. Exciting conspiracy theories. And, crucially, a desire to destroy democracy altogether. After all, debating policy only matters if you're trying to persuade people. If your goal is to crush them under your boot, there is no need to worry overmuch if they like your policies or not.

Again, Trump wouldn't have gone this far without traditional Republicans like Romney laying the groundwork for decades. Republicans have long known that their policy views are unpopular and won't win them elections, and so they've increasingly looked for ways to get power through cheating. Mainly, that was by passing laws that restricted voting access for people of color and young people, who tend to lean more Democratic. Romney is one of the guilty parties in this, even going so far as to compare President Joe Biden's efforts to protect voting rights with Trump's lies about the 2020 election.

Romney whined that voting rights advocates accuse their opponents of having "racist inclinations." But what matters here is not what is in anyone's heart. It's totally possible, likely even, that many Republicans back voter suppression not because they hate Black people, but because they hate losing elections. But the effect of these laws and this rhetoric is the same: It implanted and reinforced the idea, with Republican voters, that there is something tawdry and illegitimate about Black people voting. Trump exploited that sensibility with his Big Lie, which rested on accusations that votes from racially diverse cities are necessarily "frauds."

There were many opportunities over the years for Republicans to forge another path. They could have moderated their views on social issues. They could have gone the route of Richard Nixon, conceding that environmental concerns should trump a mindless anti-regulatory stance. They could have raised taxes on the rich with the pro-capitalist argument that it increases business investment. Considering that they still got nearly half of the votes with their unpopular policies, they really didn't have to change much at all to be successful. Just be slightly less terrible on some issue, any issue.

But they didn't do that and increasingly had nothing positive to offer to voters. That opened the door for an authoritarian demagogue, who built his power not on policy ideas, but on a promise he would hurt all the folks that conservative white people don't like. Romney doesn't deserve an ounce of credit. He may be unhappy with what his own failure of imagination helped usher in, but ultimately, this is still largely the fault of him and other "traditional" Republicans.

On Tuesday morning, just as the House was returning from its generous late-summer recess, Speaker Kevin McCarthy kicked the fall session off by throwing a bone to conservatives: He was opening an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. This makes it more likely than not—to the extent it was ever unlikely—that House Republicans will impeach Biden, once they can put cobble together the votes and come up with a coherent reason for impeachment.

Why was McCarthy doing this? It’s unlikely that he earnestly believes Joe Biden must be removed from office for high crimes and misdemeanors. No, he was throwing a bone to the far right of his conference, who have been stubbornly threatening to vote against funding the government at the end of the month unless an unreasonable wish list is met. As one Senate Republican put it to the Hill, this was McCarthy “giving people their binkie” ahead of the spending deadline.

But this is not the binkie the hard-liners were looking for.

The Freedom Caucus held a press conference of its own upon returning to Washington on Tuesday afternoon to lay out what it will take to earn their votes for funding the government. Regrettably, for all parties involved, they chose to hold it outdoors in the stubbornly muggy Washington September weather. Press were interspersed with tourists, amateur photographers, and right-wing activists, including several people wearing shirts protesting the “MURDER” of slain Jan. 6 rioter Ashli Babbitt.

The outdoor setting did, however, provide a useful backdrop, as members could point to the Capitol dome to rail against what goes on in “there,” and how they intend to stop it.

The Freedom Caucus has McCarthy over a barrel. McCarthy has said he wants to pass a short-term government funding bill that keeps that lights on until early December to give the House and Senate more time to cut a full-year spending deal. The Freedom Caucus, though, says it won’t vote for a bill that maintains the current rate of overspending for any length of time, whether it’s until early December or for a week. The hard-liners also insist that any spending bill must include House Republicans’ full border security bill, address Department of Justice “weaponization,” and end “woke” Pentagon policies. This presents McCarthy with a choice: Put a “clean” short-term spending bill on the floor that passes with a bipartisan majority—which could (well, would) put McCarthy’s speakership in jeopardy—or join the Freedom Caucus in its display of chest-thumping and steer the government into a shutdown.

At their press conference, one speaker after another—and Lordy, do I mean one after another, when the sun was melting everyone into a puddle—laid out their demands, with no indication that the impeachment announcement had tempered their adamancy.

“Let me be very clear: I will not continue to fund a government at war with the American people,” Texas Rep. Chip Roy, the spicy policy chair of the Freedom Caucus, said.

And which government departments and agencies are the aggressors? It might be easier to ask Chip Roy which ones aren’t. He said the Defense Department is “turning our military into a social engineering experiment wrapped in a uniform.” The Food and Drug Administration is approving COVID boosters for children, “and we haven’t even had clinical trials.” The Inflation Reduction Act is handing out tax credits to “rich leftists” and the “Chinese Communist Party.” The Justice Department is “advancing a politicized form of justice,” targeting “President Trump” and “dads.” And then, of course, there’s the Southern border.

“How many girls have to get sold in the sex trafficking trade before this body”—he pointed at the Capitol—“will wake up and stop an out-of-control president? Enough! Why would we fund that?”

Fellow hard-liners like Freedom Caucus chairman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde, Virginia Rep. Bob Good—as well as two senators, Utah’s Mike Lee and Florida’s Rick Scott, and heads of various conservative outside groups like the Heritage Foundation, FreedomWorks, Numbers USA, Tea Party Patriots, and Judicial Watch—all drilled down on this: We do not like what the administration is doing, and they must not get the funds to continue doing so.

What I didn’t hear from a single speaker until the Q&A segment, except in a passing reference here or there, was that McCarthy’s escalation of the impeachment process might entice them to vote to keep the government open. Because it won’t. At all.

Don’t get the Freedom Caucus wrong: They think impeaching Biden would be extremely cool. But they view it as separate from the immediate fight to use the power of the purse to box the Biden administration in.

Scott Perry, in taking questions, said the impeachment inquiry has “nothing to do with the debt, the deficit, the outrageous spending, the inflation that’s crushing American families—those are two separate issues, and they should be dealt with separately.”

Bob Good, arguably the most unwavering of McCarthy’s antagonists, said the inquiry announcement had “zero” effect on their demands for the spending bill. North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop described the inquiry as “irrelevant” to the spending fight.

Is there a way that the two could, arguably, be linked? The specific lever McCarthy would have is to argue that if the government shuts down, so too do the committee impeachment investigations. He’s floated it already, telling Fox News in August that “if we shut down, all the government shuts it down—investigation and everything else.”

The Freedom Caucus doesn’t buy this—and reasonably so. The House won’t be going anywhere in a shutdown, and McCarthy can designate House committee staff as “essential personnel.”

“We’re going to be here, working,” Perry said. “If there’s going to be an impasse in spending, we’re going to be here working on that. So we can walk and chew gum at the same time … we can work on that while we work on the inquiry.” When a reporter asked about whether McCarthy would use the inquiry as leverage—presumably, by sending investigative staff home during a shutdown—Perry said he wasn’t so sure McCarthy would.

“If he’s going to use it as leverage, we’re going to let the American people know that’s the leverage, all right?” Perry said. “I don’t suspect he’s going to do that.”

Impeachment, in short, is not the One Neat Trick to Keep the Government Open. There is no binkie here. To fund the government—whether it’s before or after the shutdown deadline—McCarthy is going to have to put a bill on the floor that doesn’t pass muster with the Freedom Caucus, because it will need to pass a Democratic Senate and be signed by a Democratic president. And yes, that will likely prompt some of those openly threatening to put McCarthy’s speakership up to another vote to go through with it. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who gave a separate floor speech Tuesday putting McCarthy on notice, told reporters that he would move to vacate the chair if McCarthy puts any short-term spending bill on the floor, according to Bloomberg.

Perhaps McCarthy should get the inevitable ouster attempt out of the way. He’d have options—grinding down the Republican opposition again, as he did in January; turning to Democrats to bail him out (though the impeachment flailing may have restricted this path); retiring to a K Street sinecure and letting the next hapless schmo serve an eight-month speaker stint. If you’re at the point of launching an impeachment inquiry as a political decoy to (not) get through a short-term legislative problem, it might be time to force the bigger question.

When Gallup pollsters asked voters just before Labor Day which side of the dispute between the UAW and the Big Three they sympathized with, 75 percent said they were with the union. Just 19 percent lined up with the corporations. A Morning Consult survey conducted last week found 2-1 support for the UAW, and noted that even the union’s boldest proposals—such as the demand for a 32-hour workweek—attracted significantly more support than opposition.

That’s a big deal. It confirms data showing that the general popularity of unions is rising, and that the American people have come to believe that unions benefit both their members and those who aren’t in unions, that labor organizations improve the standing of unionized companies, and that strong unions are good for the US economy. Indeed, on that last measure, Gallup found: “A record-high 61 percent say unions help rather than hurt the U.S. economy, eclipsing the prior high from 1999 by six points.”

Importantly, these numbers also tell us that when unions make big demands, and when they aggressively advance those demands in order to counter corporate spin (as the UAW has done with a savvy social media campaign and unity-building op-eds written by Fain with allies such as US Representative Ro Khanna), the American people will recognize organized labor’s “asks” as fair and necessary.

That’s a point Senator Bernie Sanders made when he argued in a statement ahead of the UAW strike: “Despite what you might hear in the corporate media, what the UAW is fighting for is not radical. It is the reasonable demand that autoworkers, who have made enormous sacrifices over the past 40 years, finally receive a fair share of the enormous profits their labor has generated.”

Media outlets and politicians—not just anti-labor Republican zealots such as former Wisconsin governor Scott Walker but also new Democratic centrists who have sought to align their party more closely with Wall Street and corporate interests—have for years tried to tell us that unions are relics of the past. A 1991 Harvard Business Review article spelled out the pro-business line with an argument that knowing managers “believed that the rules of the economic game have changed.” The article continued:

Competition is global, technological innovation continuous, the work force increasingly professional. In such an economic environment, unions are ill-suited to meeting the needs of either workers or companies. At best, they are an irrelevance—a leftover from a previous industrial era. At worst, they are an obstacle to making companies and countries competitive. Little wonder, then, that unions are on the wane.

That sentiment took hold over the ensuing decades and infected media coverage of labor disputes, even as unions grew in popularity. So it comes as no surprise that during the current negotiations, Fain found it necessary to deconstruct media coverage, placing an emphasis on the fact that car prices have soared not because of workers’ pay demands but because of record profiteering by the auto companies. “You don’t hear the media wringing their hands over how Big 3 profits are driving up the cost of cars. You don’t see big splashy nightly-news segments on how consumers will be impacted by companies choosing to spend billions on executive salaries, stock buybacks and special dividends,” said Fain. “No, you only hear these concerns when the working class stands up and demands a fair share of the value we produce.”