David A. Graham:

Imagine, if you will, that there is a shadow government.

The actual government, the administration of Donald Trump, is coming off the worst week of his presidency, although there haven’t been any smooth weeks. Trump’s top legislative priority, repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, seems dead for the moment. (Tax reform? Forget it.) His administration has set a new standard for chaos and dysfunction, rolling through staffers the way other administrations run through, well, legislative initiatives. Trump’s foreign policy remains inchoate and ineffective. Meanwhile, a special counsel investigation looms over the entire administration, threatening both its legitimacy and legal jeopardy for some of its members.

Things are going considerably better for the shadow government. With the Trump administration’s chaos sucking up all the attention, it’s been able to move forward on a range of its priorities, which tend to be more focused on regulatory matters anyway. It is remaking the justice system, rewriting environmental rules, overhauling public-lands administration, and greenlighting major infrastructure projects. It is appointing figures who will guarantee the triumph of its ideological vision for decades to come.

The trick here is that the administration and this shadow government are one and the same. Even as the public government sputters, other elements of the Trump administration are quietly remaking the nation’s regulatory landscape, especially on the environment and criminal justice.

There is so much attention paid to the chaos in the executive branch that it’s easy to come to believe that Trump is getting nothing whatsoever accomplished. Even for people who don’t support the president’s agenda—especially for them, in fact—it is useful to step back occasionally and take stock of what this presidency is doing to work toward its goals.

Trump’s complaints that the press is ignoring his victories in favor of covering controversies ring hollow. You can’t very well go around setting things on fire and then asking why the press keeps covering the fires. But warnings that the Trump administration is doing X to distract from Y seem misguided for a couple of reasons—one being that they ascribe a greater organization that the White House evinces in any other sphere, and another being that the supposedly distracting stories are often just as catastrophic. But the large-scale disasters do keep attention focused away from what smaller agencies are doing, as Ben Carson acknowledged recently.

“Let me put it this way,” the secretary of housing and urban development told the Washington Examiner. “I’m glad that Trump is drawing all the fire so I can get stuff done.”

Meanwhile, Trump continues to make preposterous claims. His assertion, at the six-month mark of his presidency last month, that he’d signed more bills than any other president over that stretch earned a snarky rejoinder even from The New York Times. But that is small consolation for progressive environmentalists, public-lands advocates, LGBT activists, and criminal-justice reformers. The list of accomplishments fall short of what Trump promised, but many of them are still quite consequential, with effects to be felt for decades to come. That’s one reason this sort of devil’s advocate exercise is important, although when I tried it in January it was not well received (except by the White House). Still, in the spirit of EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who intends to establish a “red-team blue-team” exercise to investigate whether climate change is actually happening, let’s consider the Trump administration’s accomplishments. Spoiler alert: like climate change, they’re real.

One of the two biggest victories has come on border security, which was one of Trump’s top campaign priorities. Border crossings have already plummeted, suggesting that rhetoric making it clear to immigrants that they are not welcome is effective in its own right. Customs and Border Protections report that apprehensions of unauthorized people are down nearly 20 percent from the same time in 2016. (Trump continues to radically exaggerate these figures, though.) This decline has occurred despite Trump being foiled on his actual policy proposals at the border. Construction hasn’t begun on his border wall yet, and federal courts have repeatedly smacked down his Muslim travel ban.

That said, he did get one good result in courts—and that points to a second area of success. The Supreme Court allowed parts of the travel ban to go forward, in a victory that would not have happened without Neil Gorsuch on the court, filling a seat that under all previous customs would have been filled by Barack Obama’s appointee Merrick Garland. Given his legislative struggles, the most enduring Trump victories are likely to come in the judicial branch.

Trump may get to appoint several more justices to the high court. And in the meantime, he’s filling up lower courts with lifetime appointees. As the veteran Democratic official Ron Klain wrote recently, “A massive transformation is underway in how our fundamental rights are defined by the federal judiciary. For while President Trump is incompetent at countless aspects of his job, he is proving wildly successful in one respect: naming youthful conservative nominees to the federal bench in record-setting numbers.”

There are the quiet, far-reaching changes. Getting back to Pruitt, the environment is one of the places where the Trump administration has had its largest impact. The most prominent move was Trump’s June 1 announcement that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord. But the EPA is moving on other fronts as well. It’s working to dismantle Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a signature policy aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. In June, following a February executive order from Trump, the EPA began the process of rescinding the 2015 Waters of the United States rule, which aimed at protecting smaller bodies of water and streams in the same way that larger ones had been. In December, in the closing weeks of his administration, Obama banned drilling in the Arctic and parts of the Atlantic Ocean; the Trump administration promptly set about undoing that ban. (How interested oil companies will be remains to be seen.)

The New York Times found in June that Pruitt’s EPA “has moved to undo, delay or otherwise block more than 30 environmental rules, a regulatory rollback larger in scope than any other over so short a time in the agency’s 47-year history.” And it might have done more if not for constraints imposed by judges. EPA tried to abandon an Obama-era rule on methane emissions, but a court on Monday forced it to continue enforcing the rule.

Other agencies are also in on the environmental deregulation act. The State Department reversed an Obama-era decision, clearing the way for the Keystone XL pipeline to begin construction. The Interior Department is considering reversing a rule on fracking on public lands, and might also reverse some equipment regulations on offshore drilling equipment implemented after the 2010 Gulf oil spill. The department has rolled back a ban on coal mining on public lands.

Despite Trump’s recent, very public dissatisfaction with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the Justice Department has been particularly effective in changing the policy landscape. Sessions, a long-time conservative crusader for tough-on-crime policies, has moved to enforce them. Over the objections of libertarians and civil libertarians, and contrary to a bipartisan move toward criminal-justice reform over the last decade, he strengthened the federal government’s power of civil-asset forfeiture, a practice that allows police to seize cash and goods from people suspected (but not convicted) of crimes, and one that is often abused. Also contrary to recent trends, he has reversed Obama-era policy by encouraging prosecutors to pursue the harshest sentences for low-level drug offenses. Even if Sessions doesn’t last long in his job, those handed long prison terms will still be behind bars.

Although the Justice Department had staunchly opposed a Texas voting law that has repeatedly been smacked down by courts as discriminatory, Sessions switched the department’s position, and it has now told courts the law ought to be allowed to remain. The attorney general has also sought to cut off funding to so-called sanctuary cities, though his legal authority to do so is disputed.

Curiously, since he campaigned as an atypically LGBT-friendly Republican, Trump has also made a range of changes on gay issues. Last week alone, the Justice Department announced that sexual orientation was not covered by Section VII, and the president said that transgender people would not be allowed to serve in the military. The administration has also rejected Obama-era protections for transgender students.

Trump continues to boast about the economy, and in particular the booming stock market and a sinking unemployment rate, though both are the continuation of trends that started years ago, and presidents tend to have limited control over both. The administration has sought to loosen business regulations in several respects, however, attempting to peel back parts of the Dodd-Frank financial-regulation law and undermine the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau.

These less heralded, less noticed, and sometimes obscure changes to federal policy are more fragile than major legislation; just notice how many of them involve reversing Obama-era decisions that were implemented solely through the executive branch. But their effects are no less real, and in many cases they’re drastic.

There is some irony to Trump’s greatest victories coming through the executive branch, and it in turn reveals just how far the president’s efforts have fallen short of his ambitions so far. The White House bragged in July that it had withdrawn regulations and delayed another 391. But numbers like that are only mildly illuminating in aggregate, and when chief strategist Steve Bannon vowed to bring the “destruction of the administrative state,” this kind of bean-counting and bureaucratic tinkering around the edges can hardly be what he had in mind.

The world was preserved, according to one of my Facebook friends, with the defeat of Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore in Alabama Tuesday night.

Even if you don’t pay attention to the accusations of sexual misconduct on Moore’s part, you have to wonder why people would vote for someone with these views, as chronicled by The Hill:

Moore has argued on multiple occasions that America’s secular shift is responsible for many of its darkest moments, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks and recent “shootings and killings.” …

Days before Moore won first place in the August primary that set up Tuesday’s runoff, Moore spoke with The Guardian and appeared to sympathize with Russian criticism of the United States.

Moore noted that former President Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world” could be applied to America today, because “we promote a lot of bad things” like “same-sex marriage.”

When The Guardian’s reporter noted that current Russian President Vladimir Putin makes a similar argument, Moore replied, “Maybe he’s more akin to me than I know.” …

Moore was a leading proponent of the “birther” conspiracy theory, which posited, without evidence, that former President Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

Moore expressed doubts about Obama’s country of origin as recently as December. …

Moore took serious issue with Rep. Keith Ellison’s (D-Minn.) decision to take his oath of office with his hand on the Quran.

Ellison, who became the first Muslim in Congress upon his election in 2006, took the ceremonial oath of office using a Quran that had been owned by Thomas Jefferson.

But Moore criticized Ellison’s decision to use a Quran, airing his criticism in a 2006 post on WorldNetDaily.com.

“In 1943, we would never have allowed a member of Congress to take their oath on ‘Mein Kampf,’ or someone in the 1950s to swear allegiance to the ‘Communist Manifesto,’ ” he wrote.

“Congress has the authority and should act to prohibit Ellison from taking the congressional oath today!” …

Moore sparked still more controversy just days ago when he decried division among “reds and yellows” during a stump speech, when he compared the current political climate to the strife around the Civil War.

“We were torn apart in the Civil War — brother against brother, North against South, party against party. What changed?” Moore asked.

“Now we have blacks and whites fighting, reds and yellows fighting, Democrats and Republicans fighting, men and women fighting. What’s going to unite us? What’s going to bring us back together? A president? A Congress? No. It’s going to be God.”

After the quote provoked criticism, Moore’s campaign said that he was only paraphrasing the popular religious song “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” which contains similar references to “reds” and “yellows.”

Moore wouldn’t get 100 votes in Wisconsin.

If you want to believe the Chicago Tribune, you might wonder what all the fuss was about:

The odds of any Democrat capturing a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama are steep at best, but Doug Jones was uniquely suited to pull off an upset Tuesday over Republican Roy Moore.

Accusations that Moore sexually abused teenage girls played a big part, no doubt, in Jones’ improbable victory over the renowned religious right crusader.

Jones, 63, is a former U.S. attorney who cast himself as a law-and-order man. He is skilled at muting his liberal stands on such issues as abortion and gay rights — a necessity in one of the South’s most conservative states.

Jones also carries not a whiff of scandal, a major asset in Alabama after a spate of corruption scandals.

It didn’t hurt that Jones also supports gun rights.

“He turkey-hunts, he deer-hunts, and he believes strongly in the 2nd Amendment,” said Lowell Barron, a former Democratic leader in the state Senate.

Overwhelming support from African Americans was crucial for Jones, who is best known for prosecuting and convicting two Ku Klux Klansmen for the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, an attack that left four girls dead.

He also prosecuted Eric Rudolph for the 1998 bombing of a Birmingham abortion clinic, which killed an off-duty police officer and blinded a nurse.

Jones won the seat vacated by Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, the first Republican senator to break with his party’s establishment last year to endorse Donald Trump for president.

In 2020, when Jones will be up for reelection, he will probably be challenged by a Republican more viable than the politically wounded Moore, so he will face pressure in the Senate to resist his party’s most liberal impulses.

Jones has promised to seek common ground with Republicans.

“I would expect him to be a very conservative Democrat,” said Joseph Smith, chairman of the political science department at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Analysts expect Jones to fit the mold of Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, another Democrat who was elected to the Senate in a deep-red state and votes accordingly. …

As he ran for Senate, Jones avoided talking about abortion and other cultural issues that animated Moore’s campaign, focusing instead on jobs, healthcare and education.

He calls for more spending on schools, job training and renewable energy, and less on prisons. Jones supports an overhaul of criminal sentencing laws to reduce incarceration of nonviolent felons. Though he supports Obamacare, he does not back single-payer healthcare, which many liberals advocate.

Democratic pollster Zac McCrary of Montgomery, Ala., said he expects Jones to stay focused in Washington on practical measures to improve voters’ day-to-day lives.

“I think that is where his energy will be focused,” he said. “That would be his wheelhouse.”

Republicans who may have held their noses and voted for Moore in a Trump-like fashion claimed that Jones opposes any restrictions whatsoever on abortion. AL.com reported before the election:

Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee in the Dec. 12 Senate election, said he supports Alabama’s abortion laws as they are, saying that people are “fairly comfortable” with the current law.

In an interview this week with AL.com at his Huntsville campaign office, Jones said he wanted “to be clear” where he stood in the aftermath of a national interview with MSNBC that included abortion and led some political observers in the state to speculate he had damaged his campaign. …

“Those comments, everybody wants to attack you so they are going to make out on those comments what they want to their political advantage,” Jones said. “To be clear, I fully support a woman’s freedom to choose to what happens to her own body. That is an intensely, intensely personal decision that only she, in consultation with her god, her doctor, her partner or family, that’s her choice.

“Having said that, the law for decades has been that late-term procedures are generally restricted except in the case of medical necessity. That’s what I support. I don’t see any changes in that. It is a personal decision.”

In the Sept. 27 MSNBC interview, host Chuck Todd asked Jones about abortion.

Jones said he’s a “firm believer that a woman should have to freedom to choose what happens to her own body” and that he opposed a ban on abortions after the 20th week of gestation, which is a bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and now under consideration in the Senate.

Alabama law allows abortions to be performed as late as 22 weeks into a pregnancy.

“I’m not in favor of anything that is going to infringe on a woman’s right and her freedom to choose,” Jones said in the MSNBC interview. “That’s just the position that I’ve had for many years. It’s a position I continue to have. But I want to make sure people understand, that once a baby is born, I’m going to be there for that child. That’s where I become a right-to-lifer.”

Apparently Jones’ position on abortion didn’t bother the reported 22,000 registered Republicans who voted for Jones. His supposed non-liberalism remains to be seen. Alabama is not likely to have turned more liberal based on one election where a plurality of GOP voters nominated a horrible candidate even outside of the allegations of improper conduct with minors.

(The interesting thing about that last point is that Moore ran for the Alabama Supreme Court twice and for governor once, and in none of those cases did those allegations get to public light. Have things really changed that much since 2013, when Moore was last Supreme Court chief justice?)

To no one’s surprise, Democrats have been beclowning themselves since Tuesday night, as RightWisconsin notes:

Now Democrats in Wisconsin are at least feigning that the results are somehow meaningful in Wisconsin. “We just elected a Democrat in Alabama,” tweeted Randy Bryce, a Democrat challenging House Speaker Paul Ryan. “The most conservative state in the country. Next up, it’s Paul Ryan’s turn to face the voters.”

Democratic gubernatorial candidates state Rep. Dana Wachs (D-La Crosse) sent a fundraising email, “If Alabama can do it, so can we.”

“Scott Walker must know this momentum is not just in Alabama,” Wachs campaign said.

But unless Ryan or Walker have been pursuing dates in Wisconsin’s middle schools, what happened in Alabama doesn’t translate to here. If anyone else had gotten the GOP nomination there, the talking heads on cable news would be dismissing a GOP win with, “of course the Republican candidate won. It’s Alabama.”

On the other hand, candidates that fail to pay child support (Bryce) or voted for Rep. Gordon Hintz (D-Oshkosh) as the minority leader (Wachs) probably be less triumphal over an election where character was the dominant issue.

Hintz, you’ll recall, has that little matter of a conviction for sexual misconduct at an Appleton massage parlor, not to mention his informing Rep. Michelle Litjens (R–Oshkosh) “You are f—ing dead” for a vote on which they disagreed, both of which were followed by predictably insincere apologies from Hintz. And of course to people with morals the Democratic Party still has miles to go to atone for celebrating U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D–Massachusetts) for killing one of his female campaign workers and for the various acts of serial sex offender Bill Clinton and Hillary his chief enabler.

Meanwhile, proving the old saw that success has a thousand fathers while failure is an orphan, a circular firing squad has unsurprisingly formed over Moore’s defeat. George Neumayr takes one tack:

The Moore race had occasioned an orgy of opportunism masquerading as high virtue, a spectacle that it is only going to intensify, with the scummy GOP consultant class, whose members routinely work for checkered candidates, pontificating about the race in the most self-righteous terms. The insufferable Steve Schmidt tops this list. He presents himself as the great conscience of the GOP. Never mind that he was a consultant to serial groper Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, unlike Moore, survived a late hit from the press (in the form of an investigative article by the Los Angeles Times), thanks in large part to the rescue efforts of the very GOP establishment that pretended to be so appalled by Moore.

That crowd never wanted Moore to win in the first place and found the abuse charges a convenient added reason to sabotage his campaign. Under a typhoon of negative media coverage, Moore, whose previous wins had been squeakers, needed all the help he could get. But the stupid party was too divided and dysfunctional to lend a hand. The Dems form a defensive circle around vulnerable candidates; the Republicans shoot theirs.

At first, the establishment Republicans just wanted to hand the seat to the Democrats. So they called for Moore to withdraw. But then McConnell’s total opposition changed to ambivalence when he deemed the race a matter for “the people of Alabama to decide.” Yet even that ambivalence couldn’t hold. In the crucial final days of the race, the establishment continued to signal its wish for Moore’s defeat in ways both large and small, from Senator Shelby telling the press that he couldn’t vote for Moore to Republicans pushing the story that once Moore arrived the ethics committee was going to pounce on him. Perhaps if Moore had had a Trumpian level of charisma, he could have survived the onslaught. But he didn’t have it, and his decision to leave the state on the weekend before the election punctuated the shakiness of his campaign.

At the very moment he needed the party to pull him across the finish line, it was nowhere to be found, with the exception of a few comments and tweets from Trump. Jones wildly outspent Moore.

The GOP establishment assumes Moore’s defeat will improve its image and standing. But it won’t. it will only increase the disgust of the rank-and-file for a resentful GOP ruling class that operates like a front for the Democrats. If you are going to take Vienna, take Vienna, said Napoleon. The base is sick and tired of a GOP establishment that never fights to win in that spirit — a collection of Beltway colluders who would prefer a pat on the head from the media to policy wins. Most of the establishment strategists who appear on TV haven’t won a race in years — a fact they conspicuously avoid advertising. But here’s one loss for which they will proudly take credit. And they will use it to try and con their way into new positions from which they can lose again.

Well, that’s one opinion. Ed Rogers has another:

First, good for Alabama. When Alabamians had to stand up and do the right thing, they did. Special credit goes to Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), who channeled Atticus Finch. When a rabid threat had to be extinguished, he came to the rescue. With perfect timing and vivid clarity, Shelby spoke out against Moore despite having little obvious, self-serving reason to do so. Any number of things can make the difference between winning or losing in a close race, but I think nothing was as impactful as Shelby’s 11th-hour push. Good for him.

Second, as a proud Alabamian, I think the best thing about yesterday’s election is that Alabama will not have to endure or be associated with the poisonous presence of Roy Moore on the national stage in the U.S. Senate. Beyond just becoming the media’s favorite Republican, Moore would have been an indelible stain on Alabama.