The Morning Dispatch: Republicans’ Retirement Problem

Happy Wednesday! One of your Morning Dispatchers put the finishing touches on this newsletter while eating a bunch of frozen mini corn dogs at 1:00 a.m. Can you tell?

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday approved a request from the U.S. Capitol Police for an extension of the National Guard’s deployment to the Capitol. About 2,300 service members—approximately half the current number—will continue to guard the complex through May 23.

• The House of Representatives passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act last night 225-206, with five Republicans voting in favor. The bill—which would beef up the National Labor Relations Board and make it easier for independent contractors to form and join unions—will not pass in the Senate as currently constructed.

• Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed into law a bill banning almost all abortions in the state, excluding instances when a pregnant woman’s life is endangered by carrying a child to term. The legislation—which does not include exceptions for pregnancy by rape or incest—will face immediate legal challenges, which pro-life advocates hope will rise to the Supreme Court.

• Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law a measure shortening the length of Election Day voting by an hour, invalidating absentee ballots that arrive after polls close, limiting who is allowed to handle or return a voter’s absentee ballot, and reducing the state’s early voting period from 29 days to 20 days.

• A sixth woman has come forward with allegations of sexual harassment against New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The woman, who the Albany Times Union did not identify by name, reported that the governor inappropriately touched her after inviting her to the governor’s mansion on official business.

• The United States confirmed 46,733 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 4.4 percent of the 1,059,867 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 1,893 deaths were attributed to the virus on Tuesday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 527,643. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 35,205 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19, and 1,602,746 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered yesterday, bringing the nationwide total to 93,692,598.

The Ship of Theseus Party

In most instances, “71-year-old man announces he will retire next year” would not be a news story—let alone a surprising one. But Sen. Roy Blunt stunned Washington Monday morning by releasing a two-minute video in which he revealed he “won’t be a candidate for reelection to the U.S. Senate” in 2022.

Blunt has been in Congress for a while—14 years in the House, and 10 in the Senate—and held leadership roles in both chambers. He’s long been one of Mitch McConnell’s closest allies, and was considered a potential successor to the minority leader by some. Not anymore.

“In every job Missourians have allowed me to have, I’ve tried to do my best,” Blunt said in the video, shot in front of his parents’ dairy farm. “In almost 12,000 votes in the Congress, I’m sure I wasn’t right every time. But you really make that decision based on the information you have at the time.”

Blunt has been a reliable conservative throughout his career in Congress, but very rarely a bomb thrower, as evidenced by the outpouring of support he’s received from his colleagues in recent days. McConnell labeled Blunt a “true leader” and “policy heavyweight,” while Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called him a “friend and respected colleague.” President Trump thanked Blunt for voting against last month’s “Impeachment Hoax,” and Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown expressed gratitude for the Missourian’s efforts on workforce development and expanding cancer treatment options.

“I’ll never forget a story I heard Roy Blunt tell,” Brown said. “He said that he and I had worked with each other for 30 years, and in that time we’ve agreed on about five things. And then he paused and said, ‘but you know, all five of those are now federal law.’ That’s how you get things done in the Senate—you work together where you can find common ground.”

Blunt is the most recent Senate Republican to hang up his spikes, but he’s far from alone. Sen. Richard Burr made clear back in 2016 he wouldn’t run for reelection, and Sen. Pat Toomey did the same last October. Sens. Rob Portman and Richard Shelby joined them in late January and early February, respectively. Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson are still deciding if they’ll try to stick around past 2022.

The five that have already made up their mind range from 59 to 86 years old, and represent states as different as Alabama and Pennsylvania. Two voted to convict Trump last month, three did not. But they are united in a more sober, policy-driven approach to politics that appears increasingly outdated in today’s GOP. As a group, they are more likely to have strong opinions about a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill than about the Seuss estate’s publishing decisions.

“Partisanship is the driving force in politics right now, but the Senate’s design is to curb partisanship by forcing deliberation,” a senior GOP aide told The Dispatch. “It’s not surprising that the guys who are retiring are the guys stuck between a right and left that are playing to the fringes.”

Portman essentially echoed this sentiment in an interview with The Dispatch a few weeks ago, just days after announcing his retirement. “The political system—and even our culture—pushes us to the extremes these days. So the rewards in politics have changed. The days of bipartisanship being viewed as a positive versus a negative have shifted,” he said. 

Democrats are hoping they can capitalize on the spate of retirements to expand their ever-so-thin Senate majority in 2022. “Republicans are certain to face another chaotic primary to replace Blunt, as Missouri now joins North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Alabama as the fifth GOP-held open Senate seat on the ballot next year,” reads a cheerful press release from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Christie Smith, the group’s executive director, claimed the vacancies show that “even Republican incumbents don’t like their chances in 2022.”

Politically speaking, incumbency is a real advantage—it’s why Sen. Rick Scott, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in January he was going to try and convince all the GOPers up in 2022 to run again. But the locations of these retirements are far more important than the vacancies themselves.

“We haven’t necessarily seen that retirements are a predictor of how a cycle is going to turn out,” said Jessica Taylor, senate editor at the Cook Political Report. Six GOP senators called it quits after President Obama’s election in 2008; Republicans netted six seats in 2010 regardless. Among those newcomers who replaced the retirees: Rob Portman and Roy Blunt.

The biggest difference between 2010 and 2022 is that the GOP’s polarizing ex-president is adamant on playing a large role in the midterms this time. That likely won’t matter in states like Alabama, Missouri, and Ohio—which Trump won in November by 25, 15, and 8 percentage points, respectively—but nominating a Trump acolyte could make things tricky for Republicans in Pennsylvania and North Carolina. McConnell has made clear he and his allies will wade into primary races in the coming months as necessary, saying the “only thing I care about is electability.”

Barring a Todd Akin situation, this cycle’s GOP retirements will end up having a much bigger impact on the party’s style and character than its electoral prospects. Liam Donovan, a former NRSC official, compared the situation to the “grandfather’s axe” paradox (or, for WandaVision fans, the Ship of Theseus): “A chamber and a party that’s similarly situated but otherwise unrecognizable as compared to even a few cycles ago.”

By the time the next Congress is sworn in in January 2023, at least 17 of the 52 GOP senators in office when Trump was inaugurated in 2017 will be gone.

In losing these five senators to retirement, Republicans are “shedding low-key, policy-centric establishmentarians with a knack for getting things done,” Donovan continued, “and tossing up a jump ball to a host of aspirants who differ sharply in their tone and their priorities, with the shadow of Trump looming large.”

Deepfakes Are Coming

A few weeks ago, the TikTok account @deeptomcruise took the internet by storm when it posted a deepfake video of a computer-generated Tom Cruise playing golf, laughing, and mimicking the actor’s mannerisms with remarkable accuracy. “If you like what you’re seeing, just wait ’til what’s coming next,” the computer generated Cruise tells the camera. The account’s three subsequent videos show “Cruise” falling down, performing magic tricks, and eating a lollipop, all while speaking in a voice eerily similar to the Hollywood actor’s.

The videos have amassed a collective 19 million views since Feb. 22, a stark reminder of how quickly deepfakes can spread online, particularly when the videos in question impersonate celebrities and politicians. Take, for example, this 2018 deepfake video depicting President Obama calling President Trump a “total and complete dips***,” or this distorted video of Nancy Pelosi from 2019, in which the House speaker appears to be drunkenly slurring her words. The former was a PSA warning of the dangers of the technology, but both have been viewed millions of times, and the latter was at one point shared by Rudy Giuliani on Twitter.

The most realistic deepfake videos are typically created with generative adversarial networks (GANs), a machine learning model in which two neural networks compete against one another to improve their own algorithms. Whereas a generative network creates doctored photos, audio samples, and videos, a discriminative network compares that synthetic data to a data set of authentic samples, working in turn to point out the former’s errors. The two networks use the competitive game to improve their functions over time: As the discriminative network spots fakes, the generative network gradually improves its algorithm to create the most authentic looking content possible, and vice versa.

The implications of deepfakes are, for lack of a better word, terrifying. Being “canceled” over something you said years ago is bad enough; imagine being canceled for something you didn’t say.

Deepfake technology hasn’t escaped the attention of Washington. In 2019, the House passed the Identifying Outputs of Generative Adversarial Networks Act, which would support research by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to better detect deepfakes. Also that year, the Senate passed the Deepfake Report Act, which seeks to increase the Science and Technology Directorate in the Department of Homeland Security’s surveillance of deepfakes without explicitly regulating online misinformation. 

Neither of those bills went far enough for Democrats, who prefer regulatory policy measures that would work to legally prohibit the spread of certain types of misinformation online. Last week, the House of Representatives voted along party lines to pass H.R. 1, a sweeping voting rights, campaign finance, and ethics bill (we wrote it up here). The bill includes a hefty section prohibiting the distribution of “materially deceptive media” of political candidates prior to an election, unless it includes a disclaimer clearly stating the media “has been manipulated.”

With a few exceptions, the bill holds that “a person, political committee, or other entity shall not, within 60 days of an election for Federal office at which a candidate for elective office will appear on the ballot, distribute, with actual malice, materially deceptive audio or visual media of the candidate with the intent to injure the candidate’s reputation or to deceive a voter into voting for or against the candidate.”

In the unlikely event the bill passes in the Senate, any person who knowingly and willfully violates this section of the bill would face up to five years in prison and/or a $100,000 fine.

Democrats argue that government regulation of online disinformation is justified under a consumer protection framework. “For too long we have deferred to a laissez-faire mindset that eschewed protecting consumers for fear of ‘chilling innovation,’” Democratic Sen. Mark Warner told The Dispatch. “It is long past time to rebalance that calculus, protecting consumers and vulnerable communities even if it means foregoing certain abusive, exploitable ‘innovations.’” 

In 2019, Warner and GOP Sen. Marco Rubio wrote a letter to 11 social media companies requesting improved industry standards for the spread of misinformation online. “As concerning as deepfakes and other multimedia manipulation techniques are for the subjects whose actions are falsely portrayed, deepfakes pose an especially grave threat to the public’s trust in the information it consumes,” they argued. “If the public can no longer trust recorded events or images, it will have a corrosive impact on our democracy.”

Even if outright regulation of deepfakes goes one step too far for congressional Republicans who are concerned about free speech, it’s safe to say that the spread of misinformation worries lawmakers of all political stripes. “As AI rapidly becomes an intrinsic part of our economy and society, AI-based threats, such as deepfakes, have become an increasing risk to our democracy,” Republican Sen. Rob Portman, who sponsored the Deepfake Report Act, told The Dispatch. “As deepfake concerns grow by the day, we must address this challenge and grapple with important questions related to civil liberties and privacy.”

For now, lawmakers are grappling with the fact that artificial intelligence may soon progress beyond the bounds of human detection. “Seeing has been believing for thousands of years, and now we’re calling that into question,” a GOP policy aide told The Dispatch, while maintaining that the proliferation of deepfakes is not a red or blue issue. 

“I think often we see people on the left say that Republicans are uniquely to blame, or Trump is uniquely to blame for misinformation—I think that’s completely inaccurate,” he said. “It’s really just a matter of, at what point does someone want to use the deepfake for some political gain?”

Worth Your Time

• When Pope Francis visited Iraq last week, he became the first pope in history to do so and one of only a few international leaders to have ventured into the country’s more war-torn areas. Amid the ruins of the former ISIS stronghold in Mosul, the pope delivered a powerful speech on the perseverance of Iraq’s religious minorities. But what and who was left out of his multi-day goodwill tour? Fr. Benedict Kiely covers some of the highlights and shortfalls of Francis’s trip in a piece for The American Conservative. “The fact that the pope came, in a time of pandemic and danger, is something all Iraqis, and certainly the indigenous Christian community, welcomed and appreciated with great joy,” Kiely writes. “Whether the visit will be remembered as a beautiful symbol, and not much else, remains to be seen.”

• In a brief history of former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s short-lived Commission of Unalienable Rights, Matthew Continetti chronicles for Commentary the partisan animus that took down an organization dedicated to promoting human rights worldwide. “The commission’s opponents targeted the makeup of the commission, saying it was stocked with members who ‘have focused their professional lives and scholarship on religious freedom’ and who ‘are overwhelmingly clergy or scholars known for extreme positions opposing LGBTQI and reproductive rights,’” Continetti writes. “The commission’s 11 members included Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists, and both Republicans and Democrats. It is true that these scholars and activists believe in religious freedom. But only in feverish minds is religious freedom the same as religious fanaticism.”

Presented Without Comment

Something to Think About

Toeing the Company Line

• Sarah and Chris Stirewalt divide and conquer in Tuesday’s edition of The Sweep. In an item about Sen. Roy Blunt’s retirement, Chris notes that challengers appealing to the Trumpist right are pushing some of the most balanced Republican voices in the upper chamber to bid their farewells. Meanwhile, Sarah tackles all things election law—breaking down H.R. 1, the Save Democracy Act, and the Carter/Baker Commission. 

• On the latest Remnant, Jonah calls in an expert—Manhattan Institute fellow, City College of New York professor, and Government Against Itself author Daniel DiSalvo—to evaluate his longstanding gripe against public-sector unions. Check it out for a discussion of how these organizations operate and effect change in big cities across the country.

• Haley tackles the details of the “stimulus behemoth”—the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan—in her latest Uphill newsletter. Among the provisions of the massive aid package are $1,400 stimulus checks, the extension of federal employment benefits, and funding for the COVID-19 response by way of testing and vaccines. As a bonus, she includes a comprehensive look at the future—or lack thereof—of the legislative filibuster. 

Let Us Know

What would be the worst thing some malefactor could make a deepfake video of you doing, besides saying “Go Packers?”

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Haley Byrd Wilt (@byrdinator), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).