The Monthly's Presidential Accomplishment Index on CNN

Also ... As GOP Splinters on Section 702, Dems Should Unite ... The White Rural Rage Controversy

The Monthly's Presidential Accomplishment Index on CNN

The Washington Monthly's April/May/June print issue, featuring our Presidential Accomplishment Index comparing the policy records of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, is injecting some desperately needed perspective into the media's coverage of the 2024 campaign.

Yesterday, Editor-in-Chief Paul Glastris talked to Jake Tapper on his show "The Lead with Jake Tapper" about our comprehensive analysis. You can check out the interview on CNN.com or Tapper's Instagram feed.

As GOP Splinters on Section 702, Dems Should Unite

I've written a few times for the Monthly about how the warrantless surveillance allowed under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is necessary and effective and does not trample on the privacy rights of Americans.

In March 2023, I made The Case for Keeping Enhanced Surveillance Authority. Last December, I noted If Conservatives Care About the Border So Much, They Shouldn't Wreck Section 702.

It used to be that left-wing members of Congress, with long memories of how civil rights and anti-war activists were targeted by the FBI's COINTELPRO program under J. Edgar Hoover, were the primary opponents of surveillance powers.

But Hoover is dead, and conspiracy theorizing on the right is very much alive. So now Donald Trump and his minions are the ones leading the fight to hamstring the FBI, whom they baselessly accuse of abusing its powers to oppose Trump.

Yesterday, 19 hypocritical, supposedly border-obsessed conservatives in the House sunk a procedural vote, preventing floor consideration of an extension of the program before authorization expires next Friday.

(As I write this, the Speaker Mike Johnson's office is telling congressional reporters that the House will take another procedural vote later today, after reducing the length of the Section 702 reauthorization bill from five years to two.)

With Republicans in disarray yet again, Democrats should unite to help get Section 702 reauthorized. Yet a few Democrats continue to partner with far-right Republican and push unwarranted paranoia of federal law enforcement agencies in the process.

Today in the Monthly, I explain why Democrats should defend Section 702 instead of validating far-right conspiracies.

The White Rural Rage Controversy

Back in February, the Monthly published an excerpt from the new book White Rural Rage by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman.

In the excerpt, the authors argued that rural voters largely vote for Republican politicians, even though Republican politicians do not return the favor with policies that benefit rural voters. Schaller and Waldman proposed creating "a new rural political movement" to better wield power and force the two major parties to court the rural vote.

Since then, the book became a national bestseller, but also attracted fierce criticism from rural scholars—most notably in The Atlantic and Politico—who claim the book caricatures rural whites as violent, authoritarian, and racist.

Today, Schaller and Waldman published a response to their critics in The New Republic.

Whatever your view on the book, I think you'll find if you read the excerpt, and all the subsequent exchanges, you're going to be more informed about the plight of rural America.

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Best,

Bill Scher, Washington Monthly politics editor