Today, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) backed down from his obstructionism, agreeing to let the Democrats raise the debt ceiling by a simple majority rather than by the 60 votes they needed when the Republicans kept filibustering their bills.
A quick recap: the issue at stake was whether the United States would default on its debts, which it has never done before. The threat to default was purely a political ploy on the part of the Republicans to try to force the Democrats to abandon their very popular infrastructure measure.
Here’s the backstory: Congress actually originally intended the debt ceiling to enable the government to be flexible in its borrowing. In the era of World War I, when it needed to raise a lot of money fast, Congress stopped passing specific revenue measures and instead set a cap on how much money the government could borrow through all of the different instruments it used.
Now, though, the debt ceiling has become a political cudgel because if it is not raised when Congress spends more than it has the ability to repay, the country will default on its debts. The cap has been raised repeatedly since it was first imposed; indeed, the Republicans raised it three times under former president Donald Trump. Once again, it is too low, and by October 18, the Treasury will be unable to pay our debts.
To meet the nation’s obligations, Congress needs either to raise taxes, which Republicans passionately oppose, or to raise the debt ceiling so the Treasury can borrow more money. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has voted to raise or suspend the debt ceiling 32 times in his career, including the three times under Trump, refused to allow Republicans to vote to raise the debt ceiling.
Although the ceiling needed to be lifted because Trump added $7.8 trillion to the debt (which now stands at about $28 trillion), in part with the huge 2017 tax cuts that went overwhelmingly to the wealthy, McConnell tried to tie the need for more money to the Democrats’ infrastructure plan. This was false: the debt ceiling is not an appropriation; it simply permits the government to borrow money it needs to pay debts already incurred.
But McConnell and the Republicans want to dismantle an active government, not to build it. They hope to convince Americans that Democrats are racking up huge debts—even though it is the Republicans on the hook for today’s crisis—and that they should not be permitted to pass a bill that supports children and working parents and addresses climate change.
The Democrats insisted that the Republicans should join them in raising the ceiling, since they had been instrumental in making it necessary, but McConnell and his caucus refused. Finally, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warning that defaulting would crash the economy and with financial services firm Moody’s Analytics warning that a default would cost up to 6 million jobs, create an unemployment rate of nearly 9%, and wipe out $15 trillion in household wealth, the Democrats tried to pass a measure themselves.
Republicans wouldn’t let them. They filibustered it, trying to force the Democrats to save the country by raising the debt ceiling through a bill that can’t be filibustered, a process called reconciliation, which would make it harder for them to use reconciliation for their own infrastructure bill since Congress can pass only one of that type of reconciliation bill per year.
It was a remarkably cynical ploy, risking the financial health of the country and our standing in the world to make sure that a Republican minority could continue to hamstring what the Democratic majority considers a priority. Republicans have played chicken with government shutdowns since the 1980s, refusing to pass measures to fund the daily operations of the government and thereby stopping paychecks and government operations.
But defaulting on our obligations was a whole new game of brinksmanship. The greatest international asset the U.S. has right now is its financial system. To bring that to its knees to score political points would be interpreted, correctly, as a sign our country is so unstable it must be sidelined.
Midday today, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin highlighted this international doubt when he took the unusual step of weighing in on politics. He warned that a default would “undermine the economic strength on which our national security rests.” Paychecks for 1.4 million active duty military personnel and veterans’ benefits for 2.4 million veterans, as well as payments on military contracts, would stop. Equally dangerous, defaulting on loans would devastate the nation’s international reputation "as a reliable and trustworthy economic and national security partner."
Democrats said they could not guarantee the country would not default, and they were clearly starting to consider getting rid of the filibuster, at least for this particular issue, to enable them to pass a debt ceiling bill by a simple majority rather than by 60 votes.
Then McConnell blinked (although he didn’t cave). In a scorching statement that laid all the blame for the crisis on the Democrats, he offered to “allow” Democrats to use normal procedures—that is, the Republicans won’t filibuster them!—to extend the ceiling into December. Democrats indicate they will take that deal.
There is one major takeaway from this manufactured crisis: McConnell was willing to come right to the verge of burning the nation down to get his way. In the end, he stopped just before the sparks became an inferno, but it was much too close for comfort.
Still, he stopped. Trump and his supporters did not. The former president has been pushing Republicans to use the threat of default to get what they want, and he was not happy that McConnell had backed down. He issued a statement blaming McConnell for “folding” and added “He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand.”
Trump’s willingness to burn down the country is ramping up as the January 6 investigation gets closer to him. Tomorrow is the deadline for four of his aides to respond to subpoenas for documents and testimony from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol: former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, adviser Steve Bannon, and Defense Department aide Kash Patel. Meadows worked to overturn the 2020 election results and was in the thick of things on January 6, Scavino had met with Trump to plot to get congresspeople not to count the certified votes on January 6, Bannon strategized with other officials on January 5 to stop the count, and Patel was part of discussions about the strength of the Capitol Police.
The four are expected to defy the subpoenas at Trump’s insistence, a defiance that suggests they think he and his people are going to regain power. According to Glenn Kirschner, a former U.S. Army prosecutor, contempt of Congress earns a year of prison time; obstruction of Congress, five years; and obstruction of justice, 20 years.
The rest of the former president’s statements today were unhinged attacks on the committee.
A final note for October 6: U.S. District Judge Robert L. Pitman has temporarily blocked enforcement of Texas’s S.B. 8, the so-called “heartbeat” bill prohibiting abortions after six weeks, when most women don’t know they’re pregnant. The Justice Department had sued to stop enforcement of the law. Pitman stopped it on the grounds that it deprived “citizens of a significant and well-established constitutional right.”
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On this date five years ago, in the run-up to the 2016 election, the Washington Post broke the story of the so-called Access Hollywood tape, a video from 2005 in which Donald Trump told television host Billy Bush about his approach to women. "I don't even wait” to start kissing them, he said. “And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.... Grab 'em by the p***y. You can do anything."
Today’s events indicated that, as president, he took a similar approach to the Department of Justice.
This morning, the Democratic majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee released a draft report of its investigation into Trump’s attempt to use the Department of Justice to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The report found that Trump repeatedly tried to get the DOJ to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and to overturn its results, singling out nine specific attempts to change the outcome. Trump, the report says, “grossly abused the power of the presidency.”
The report points to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as a key player in the attempt to subvert the DOJ, and it singles out a number of other officials as participants in the pressure campaign. Those people include Jeffrey Bossert Clark from within the DOJ, whom Trump tried to install as acting attorney general to push his demands; Representative Scott Perry (R-PA); Doug Mastriano, a Republican state senator from Pennsylvania; and Cleta Mitchell, a legal adviser to the Trump campaign. The draft report also notes that under Attorney General William Barr, the DOJ “deviated from longstanding practice” when it began to investigate allegations of fraud before the votes were certified.
The report concludes that the efforts to subvert the DOJ were part of Trump’s attempt “to retain the presidency by any means necessary,” a process that “without a doubt” “created the disinformation ecosystem necessary for Trump to incite almost 1000 Americans to breach the Capitol in a violent attempt to subvert democracy by stopping the certification of a free and fair election.”
The minority of the Senate Judiciary Committee promptly published a rebuttal, defending the former president by saying that “President Trump listened to his advisors, including high-level DOJ officials and White House Counsel and followed their recommendations.”
The top Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee is Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who is running for reelection in 2022 and is facing a primary challenger from the right. Grassley will be speaking on Saturday at Trump’s “rally” in Iowa. As then–Senate president pro tempore and thus the next person in line to count the electoral votes if Vice President Mike Pence were absent, Grassley was not uninvolved in the events of January 6.
Indeed, on January 5, Roll Call reported Grassley’s statement that he and not Vice President Mike Pence would preside over the counting of the certified votes the following day. “[I]f the Vice President isn’t there, and we don’t expect him to be there, I will be presiding over the Senate,” Grassley said. His staff immediately walked the statement back, but it does suggest he might have been aware of some of the White House machinations to overturn the election.
On CNN, host Jake Tapper called Grassley’s response to the majority’s report “a very, very generous to the point of delusional reflection of what actually happened.”
Today was also the deadline for four of Trump’s closest allies to turn over documents to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol and to schedule testimony. Former chief of staff Mark Meadows, social media manager Dan Scavino, adviser Steve Bannon, and former Defense Department official Kash Patel have until midnight tonight to contact the committee.
Trump’s lawyers wrote a letter telling the four men not to cooperate with the congressional subpoena. The letter claims that Trump is planning to contest the subpoenas on the basis of executive privilege.
But even if this president does accept his assertion of executive privilege—and there are good reasons for any president to be nervous about depositions from a chief of staff—such an assertion would likely not cover Steve Bannon.
Meanwhile, the committee issued three new subpoenas today, this time for people or entities involved in rallies to protest the 2020 election results to testify. The committee subpoenaed Ali Abdul Akbar, known as Ali Alexander, and Nathan Martin, as well as Stop the Steal L.L.C., an organization affiliated with the January 6 protest in Washington.
After the election, Alexander called frequently for violence to overturn the results and claimed to be in contact with White House officials and Representatives Mo Brooks (R-AL), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and Andy Biggs (R-AZ) about January 6. In a now-deleted video, Alexander said: “We four schemed up… putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting… so that who we couldn’t lobby, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”
This evening the Senate managed to pass a measure to raise the debt ceiling until December, but it was not an easy sell. Trump continued to object to clearing the way for Democrats to keep the nation from tipping over the cliff into default despite the fact that the nation racked up $7.8 trillion in debt on his watch and raising the debt ceiling is necessary to cover that debt.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) promise that the Republicans would no longer block the Democrats from addressing the issue did not stop a number of Republican senators from continuing to object. Finally, 11 Republicans agreed to join the Democrats to break a Republican filibuster by a vote of 61–38. The Democrats then passed legislation to address the debt ceiling by a strict party vote of 50–48 and sent the measure to the House.
It took a filibuster-proof majority of the Senate not to pass a bill to protect the nation’s economic health and international standing, but simply to keep an angry minority at bay long enough to permit Democrats to pass that bill.
The news that the Senate had agreed to a deal made the Dow Jones Industrial Average jump 330 points.
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By midnight last night, four of former president Donald Trump’s closest allies were required to turn over documents to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The four are former chief of staff Mark Meadows, social media manager Dan Scavino, adviser Steve Bannon, and former Defense Department official Kash Patel.
Today, committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) released a statement saying that Meadows and Patel “are, so far, engaging” with the committee, but that “Bannon has indicated that he will try to hide behind vague references to privileges of the former President.”
Meanwhile, Bannon told his podcast audience that he will have 20,000 “shock troops” ready to take over the country. “We control this country,” he said. “We have to start acting like it.” Bannon is using Trump’s reliance on executive privilege to defy the congressional subpoenas. Legal observers say this is a stretch, since Bannon was not part of the executive branch after 2017.
The committee expects all the witnesses to cooperate. “[W]e will not allow any witness to defy a lawful subpoena or attempt to run out the clock, and we will swiftly consider advancing a criminal contempt of Congress referral,” they wrote.
It seems significant that Meadows and Patel are not, apparently, relying on the former president to protect them, while Bannon is. Scavino has been eluding the subpoena, but Rawstory reported tonight that he had finally been served.
Bannon and Patel are scheduled to testify before the committee on October 14, while Scavino and Meadows are scheduled for October 15. Their cooperation—or lack of it—will then become very clear.
Today, the pressure on the former president got higher when the White House declined to assert executive privilege over some of the documents requested by the January 6 committee. Former president Trump’s attorneys had requested that the Biden administration withhold documents about Trump’s actions on January 6. NBC News reported this afternoon that White House Counsel Dana Remus has sent a letter to the National Archives saying that “President Biden has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified as to any of the documents.”
“These are unique and extraordinary circumstances,” Remus added. “Congress is examining an assault on our Constitution and democratic institutions provoked and fanned by those sworn to protect them, and the conduct under investigation extends far beyond typical deliberations concerning the proper discharge of the President’s constitutional responsibilities. The constitutional protections of executive privilege should not be used to shield, from Congress or the public, information that reflects a clear and apparent effort to subvert the Constitution itself.”
According to MSNBC, those documents include Twitter messages, phone and visitor logs, videos and photos of Trump’s events, all documents and communications related to Vice President Mike Pence’s movements and security, the planning around the counting of the certified votes, and any other documents concerning either the rally at the Ellipse or the Capitol riot.
In other news, the Republican attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, asked a federal appeals court to reinstate S.B. 8, the so-called heartbeat bill banning abortion six weeks into a pregnancy, before most women know they’re pregnant. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit granted his request to suspend the order blocking the law. So S.B. 8 is back in force.
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The fight over raising the debt ceiling reveals that the Trump wing has taken control of the Republican Party.
Defaulting on our debt for the first time in our history would have crushed our economy and forfeited our international standing. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that a default would be “catastrophic,” creating “a permanently weaker nation.”
Financial analysts at Moody’s Analytics noted that when a problem with word-processing equipment at the Treasury led it inadvertently to miss payments on Treasury bills in 1979, the resulting jump in interest rates ultimately cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned that default would undermine our international reputation.
But when the House passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling, Senate Republicans killed the measure with the filibuster, the Senate rule that allows debate to continue without a vote until 60 members of the Senate vote to end debate—a rule that essentially means it takes 60 votes, rather than a simple majority, to pass any bill the minority wants to block.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) agreed that the ceiling must be raised. But then he insisted he would not allow Democrats to pass the bill with a simple majority. He told them they must pass a measure raising the debt ceiling in a reconciliation package, which cannot be filibustered but which would make it harder for Democrats to pass their popular infrastructure measures. Democrats noted that the Republicans ran up the debt and now should agree to pay it, and they refused to try to rush through a reconciliation package to shield the Republicans from their responsibility.
And then, as business leaders began to map out a pressure campaign to get McConnell to drop the filibuster, he backed down and agreed…not to allow a simple majority vote, but to find ten votes to break a filibuster.
As co-host of Pod Save America Dan Pfeiffer noted in his newsletter The Message Box, that approach suggested that McConnell has lost control of his caucus. Any senator can vote against allowing a simple majority, and it seems McConnell could not trust the other Republican senators to permit a vote and so had to try to force the Democrats to do things his way. But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called his bluff.
McConnell scrounged up the votes he needed but then wrote a scathing letter to President Joe Biden, announcing he would “not provide such assistance again if your all-Democrat government drifts into another avoidable crisis.” But the truth is that he is putting the best spin he can on the fact he can’t help even if he wanted to: he no longer controls the caucus.
Immediately, former president Trump issued a statement blaming McConnell for “folding to the Democrats, again. He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand. Don’t let them destroy our country!”
On September 22, Trump explained that to stop the Democrats, the Republicans might have to burn down the country: “The way I look at it,” he wrote, “what the Democrats are proposing, on so many different levels, will destroy our country. Therefore, Republicans have no choice but to do what they have to do, and the Democrats will have no choice but to concede all of the horror they are trying to inflict upon the future of the United States.”
Those who agree with Trump are now in charge of the Republican Party.
Today, on Fox News Sunday, the second-ranking Republican in the House, Steve Scalise (R-LA), refused repeatedly to say that Biden had won the 2020 election. Although then–attorney general and Trump loyalist Bill Barr said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud, and state election officials and judges have all agreed there were no irregularities that would have changed the outcome, Scalise backed Trump’s Big Lie that he actually won the 2020 election.
He did so by arguing that certain states had not followed the Constitution when state judges, governors, and election officials expanded mail-in voting during the pandemic. There is no indication that those adjustments changed the outcome of the election, but in summer 2020 Trump became fixated on the idea that mail-in voting hurt his reelection campaign.
As soon as Trump lost the election, he began to try to get officials to cheat to say he won, and then to replace officials who refused with those he thought would help him keep the presidency. On January 2, he tried to browbeat Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into “finding” 11,780 votes in Georgia—one more than Biden’s margin of victory. Then he fired the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, BJay Pak, because he would not produce evidence of fraud, replacing him with someone Trump hoped would.
Now, across Republican-dominated states, Trump Republicans are doing the same thing: attacking those Republican officials who refuse to say the 2020 election was stolen and replacing them with partisans who will. In Hood County, Texas, where Trump won 81% of the vote, his supporters are trying to get rid of the Republican elections official who is trying to preserve the security of elections by, for example, excluding from a private meeting a journalist from One America News.
At the local level, anti–mask mandate and anti-vaccine protesters are bullying school board members and town officials to demand that local leaders bow to their wishes, and they are threatening violence in a way that looks much like the rise of anti-socialist gangs in the 1930s that fed the rise of fascism.
Last week, Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who is currently defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol, told an audience that he would have 20,000 “shock troops” on hand to take over the government and deconstruct it as soon as Republicans again are in charge. “We control this country,” he said. “We have to start acting like it.”
Today, on the birthday of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by an officer as she tried to break through a barricaded door to stop the counting of the ballots that would make Biden president, Trump recorded a video for a family event saying: “There was no reason Ashli should have lost her life that day. We must all demand justice for Ashli and her family.”
Last night, in Iowa, Trump held a “rally.” Mainstream Republican officials, including Senator Chuck Grassley, Governor Kim Reynolds, and Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Ashley Hinson, attended. Right on cue, a Trump supporter told a reporter: “We’re just sick of it, you know, and we’re not going to take it any more. I see a civil war coming….”
Today’s split in the Republican Party mirrors the split in the Democrats in 1860. The leadership is made up of extremists who consider their opponents illegitimate, maintain they alone understand the Constitution, and are skewing the mechanics of our electoral system to keep themselves in power. In 1860, the Democratic Party split, its moderates joining with the fledgling Republicans to defend the United States of America.
Then, as now, the radicals calling for the destruction of the nation were a shrinking minority desperate to cling to power. Then they took up arms to divide the nation in two and keep power in their part of it; now they are launching a quieter war simply by rigging future elections to conquer the whole nation.
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Both the New York Times and the Washington Post today ran op-eds from Republicans or former Republicans urging members of their party who still value democracy to vote Democratic until the authoritarian faction that has taken over their party is bled out of it.
In the New York Times, Miles Taylor and Christine Todd Whitman wrote, “We are Republicans. There’s only one way to save our party from pro-Trump extremists.” Taylor served in the Department of Homeland Security and was the author of the 2018 New York Times piece by “Anonymous” criticizing former president Trump. Whitman was governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001, after which she headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush.
Taylor and Whitman note that “rational Republicans” had hoped after Trump’s defeat that they might take back the party, but it is clear now, they write, that they are losing the party’s “civil war.” But while they originally hoped to form a new party, they now agree that the only way to stop Trumpism “is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year—including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats.” To defend democracy, they write, “concerned conservatives must join forces with Democrats on the most essential near-term imperative: blocking Republican leaders from regaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives” and the Senate.
They call for Republicans to put country over party and back moderate Democrats, while also asking Democrats to concede that “there are certain races where progressives simply cannot win and acknowledg[e] that it makes more sense to throw their lot in with a center-right candidate who can take out a more radical conservative.”
At the Washington Post, Max Boot takes an even stronger stand: “I’m no Democrat—but I’m voting exclusively for Democrats to save our democracy.” Boot is a Russian-American specialist in foreign affairs who identifies as a conservative but no longer supports the Republican Party. He writes: “I’m a single-issue voter. My issue is the fate of democracy in the United States. Simply put, I have no faith that we will remain a democracy if Republicans win power. Thus, although I’m not a Democrat, I will continue to vote exclusively for Democrats—as I have done in every election since 2016—until the GOP ceases to pose an existential threat to our freedom.”
Boot singles out the dueling reports from the Senate Judiciary Committee about the nine ways in which Trump tried to pressure then–acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen to back his claims of election fraud. The Democrats on the committee established these efforts with an evidence-based report, only to have the Republicans on the committee, led by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), respond that the president was simply trying to promote confidence in the election results and that since he did not ultimately replace Rosen with another lawyer who promised to use the Justice Department to challenge the election—after the other leaders of the Justice Department threatened to resign in a mass protest—he did not actually abuse his office.
Boot writes, “It is mind-boggling that a defeated president won’t accept the election outcome…. What is even more alarming is that more than 60 percent of Republicans agree with his preposterous assertion that the election was stolen and want him to remain as the party’s leader.”
Taylor, Whitman, and Boot are hardly the first to be calling out the anti-democratic consolidation of the Republican Party. Yesterday, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, managed Trump’s first impeachment trial, and sits on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, gave an interview to CBS’s Face the Nation in which he called the Republican Party “an autocratic cult around Donald Trump” that is “not interested in governing” or “maintaining the solvency of the country.”
But what makes today’s op-eds stand out is that they are from former Republicans, that they are calling not for a separate party but for Republicans to shift their votes to the Democrats, and that their identification of the Republicans as an existential threat to our democracy is being published in major newspapers.
Mainstream television and newspapers have been slow to identify the radicalization of the Republican Party as a threat to democracy. The Eastman memo, uncovered by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa at the end of September in their new book Peril, flew largely under the radar screen, explained away as more of Trump being Trump even as it laid out, in writing, the steps to overturn the 2020 election and even as we knew that the former president tried to put that plan into place. A study by Media Matters showed that ABC, NBC, and CBS all chose not even to mention the memo; they reach more than 20 million Americans.
On Saturday, a monologue by comedian Bill Maher about the Eastman memo titled “Slow Moving Coup” laid out in 8 minutes how Trump tried to steal the 2020 election and how, when officials resisted him, he set out to solidify his power for 2024. Maher woke people up to the ongoing crisis in our democracy.
Maher’s monologue, along with the draft Senate Judiciary Committee report, which sets out in detail the efforts the former president made to bend the Department of Justice to his will, seems to have driven home to members of the press the fact that they cannot present today’s news as business as usual, especially after their presentation of the debt ceiling crisis as a political horse race when one side was trying to save the country and the other to destroy it. In the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday, journalist Will Bunch wrote: “The future of American democracy depends, frankly, on whether journalists stop burying their head in ‘the work’ of balanced-but-misleading reporting and admit that, yes, actually, we are at war.”
Bunch pointed out that on Friday, the Nobel Peace Prize went to two journalists, Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia. Both have braved political persecution and threats to hold the autocratic leaders of their countries—Rodrigo Duterte and Vladimir Putin—to account, battling against the online disinformation and attacks on the press that shore up their support.
"In a battle for facts, in a battle for truth, journalism is activism," Ressa said in 2020. Disinformation, she said, “is how you transform a democracy. This is death by a thousand cuts. The same thing is happening in the United States. I think the goal of influence operations or information operations is to seed it, repeat it, incite hate and...change the way real people think, and that impacts the real world. This is happening all around the world. That's what the research has shown us, that's what the data shows us.”
In 1854, the elite slaveholders who controlled the Democratic Party at the time pressured Congress to bow to their will and overturn the Missouri Compromise that had kept enslavement out of the western territories. Northern men, who disagreed among themselves on party allegiance, and immigration, and economic policies, and women’s rights, and Black rights, recognized that the acquisition of new western slave states would mean it was only a question of time until the enslavers took over the federal government and made their oligarchical system national.
Northern men recognized they must put their political differences aside until they saved democracy. Abraham Lincoln later remembered that men were “thunderstruck and stunned” by the passage of the law that overturned the Missouri Compromise, “and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver…. “‘[O]ur drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform,” Lincoln said, but “[w]hen the storm shall be past, [men] shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
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Tonight the House voted to raise the debt ceiling by $480 billion, which should keep the country afloat until December 3. The vote was 219 to 206, with all Republicans either voting no or refusing to vote.
Republican representative Andy Biggs from Arizona moved to adjourn Congress rather than take the vote at all. Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) said he would not vote to raise the debt ceiling because government spending funds “tyranny” over people’s lives. He complained about “a border that’s not secure,” “Critical Race Theory being taught to our children,” and a litany of other Republican talking points.
The debt ceiling needs to be raised not to pay for future spending, but for past spending, including the $7.8 trillion the Republicans put on the national tab during the four years of the Trump presidency.
Permitting the nation to default on its debts would crash the economy and destroy our international standing, likely for the foreseeable future. But Republicans are willing to do that if it means regaining power by playing to their base.
With Democrats in control of the national government, Republicans are retreating to the states to launch their bid to take back national power. Having cemented their control of Republican-dominated states with new election laws that suppress Democratic voting or give control of certifying elections to Republican boards, Republicans are much more concerned about challenges from the right than they are about having to moderate their stands.
This has made them increasingly radical. Today, on the day that CNN reported that official deaths from coronavirus have reached 715,000, Ohio Republican representative Jim Jordan tweeted that Ohio should end all vaccine mandates. That would include vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella, among other diseases.
Texas governor Greg Abbott went further. He signed an executive order prohibiting “any entity” from enforcing a vaccine mandate in Texas. This was not just a play to anti-vaxxers, but a declaration that his state is supreme over the federal government. Last month, President Joe Biden announced vaccine requirements for all federal workers and contractors, and today, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the Department of Labor announced a vaccine or testing requirement for any company with 100 or more employees.”
This is not the first time Abbott has made such a demonstration. In June, he and Arizona governor Doug Ducey sent a letter to the other 48 governors asking them to send reinforcements to the southern border to do the job the Biden administration was, they wrote, “unwilling or unable” to do.
Six Republican governors answered their call with support that was more symbolic than powerful. Florida governor Ron DeSantis sent 50 law enforcement officers; Ohio governor Michael DeWine sent 185; Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts sent 24. Iowa governor Kim Reynolds sent “up to 30” National Guard troops; Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson sent 40; and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem sent “up to 50,” allegedly funded by a private donation. She boasted of this deployment at the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) and on the Fox News Channel.
Those troops have been quietly brought home over the past few months, but their deployment demonstrated the states’ willingness to flex their muscles against the federal government and has forced the military into the center of the enforcement of right-wing ideology.
And, of course, the Texas anti-abortion law, S.B. 8, has offered a blueprint for other states to take away their citizens’ constitutional rights by turning over enforcement of the law to private individuals rather than the state. All constitutional rights—including all civil rights—could be overturned by vigilantes under this policy.
The Republicans’ resorting to cementing their power in the states echoes the path of southern Democrats in 1860. Aware they had lost control of the national government, they turned to radicalizing their states, then forced the states out of the Union quickly, before popular opposition could mobilize against secession.
When radicals took to the states to cement their power in 1860, the federal government had little power to stop them.
But in 1868, in the wake of the Civil War, Congress remedied that deficiency with the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment increased the power of the federal government over the states to protect civil rights. It declared, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That same amendment protected the sanctity of the national debt, declaring that “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
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President Joe Biden has tried to move the country beyond the partisanship of the current Republican Party by focusing on making government work so that people forget their differences and direct their attention to rebuilding the country. It is not an easy task, especially when the Republicans illustrate, as they did with their votes on raising the debt ceiling, that they would happily tank the country if it means regaining power.
But Biden’s push forward is bearing fruit.
Last Friday, October 8, 130 nations agreed to a minimum global tax of 15% on companies with an annual income higher than about $866 million, stopping what is called a “race to the bottom” as different countries try to attract businesses by cutting tax rates lower and lower. The deal should immediately raise about $150 billion around the world. It also requires companies to pay taxes in countries where their goods are sold, even if their plants are elsewhere, a requirement that should move about $125 billion around the world.
This agreement, hammered out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 38 high-income democracies, has been about six years in the making. Biden helped to revive the process when he took office, knowing that his own push to restore U.S. corporate taxes to a level closer to what they were when the Republicans under Trump cut them in 2017 depends on making sure that American companies won’t simply relocate to other countries.
But he was not alone in a desire to cut back on tax havens. In November 2020, a report from the OECD showed that countries were losing about $427 billion a year as corporations and wealthy individuals hid their money in tax havens. The U.S. alone is losing about $90 billion, although the losses hit poorer companies harder because they are losing a greater proportion of their revenue. Corporations are hiding about $1.38 trillion in profits, costing their home countries about $245 billion, while wealthy individuals using tax havens cost their home countries about $182 billion a year.
In December 2020, Congress rolled into a defense spending bill a law that requires shell companies to disclose their actual owners, cutting down on money laundering. “It is absurd that the U.S. allows criminals to launder their money here. We’re the only advanced country in the world that doesn’t already require disclosure” of company ownership,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), who sponsored the measure.
The Pandora Papers, an exposé published last week by the Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, explored who is using tax havens and how they are constructed. It revealed that some of them have sprung up here in the U.S., notably in South Dakota. Lawmakers of both parties say they want to pass a law requiring investigations of foreign clients moving money or assets into the U.S. financial system.
Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka have not joined the global minimum tax agreement.
Today, OECD sent the deal to the finance ministers of the Group of Twenty, commonly known as the G20, consisting of 19 countries and the European Union which together make up about 90% of the gross world product, about 75–80% of international trade, and about two thirds of the world’s population. Those finance leaders are meeting today in Washington, D.C.
At the end of the month, it will go before the G20 leaders, who are meeting then in Rome. “Today’s agreement will make our international tax arrangements fairer and work better,” OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said. “This is a major victory for effective and balanced multilateralism. It is a far-reaching agreement which ensures our international tax system is fit for purpose in a digitalized and globalized world economy.” If it is signed in 2022, it will take effect in 2023.
In the U.S., Republicans immediately opposed the deal and said they would stop it, but on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she expects the measure to be put into the so-called reconciliation bill currently being hashed out in Congress.
Biden also announced today a deal among a number of different players to try to relieve the supply chain slowdowns that have built up as people turned to online shopping during the pandemic. Those slowdowns threaten the delivery of packages for the holidays, and Biden has pulled together government officials, labor unions, and company ownership to solve the backup.
The Port of Los Angeles, which handles 40% of the container traffic coming into the U.S., has had container ships stuck offshore for weeks. In June, Biden put together a Supply Chain Disruption Task Force, which has hammered out a deal. The port is going to begin operating around the clock, seven days a week. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union has agreed to fill extra shifts. And major retailers, including Walmart, FedEx, UPS, Samsung, Home Depot, and Target, have agreed to move quickly to clear their goods out of the dock areas, speeding up operations to do it and committing to putting teams to work extra hours.
“The supply chain is essentially in the hands of the private sector,” a White House official told Donna Littlejohn of the Los Angeles Daily News, “so we need the private sector...to help solve these problems.” But Biden has brokered a deal among the different stakeholders to end what was becoming a crisis.
Finally, data reveals that for all the oxygen anti–vaccine mandate people are consuming, Biden’s vaccine mandates (which in many cases allow for frequent testing rather than the vaccine) work. Since last month, when requirements went into effect, vaccination rates have jumped by 20 percentage points, reaching more than 90% in many of the health care companies, schools, and other affected organizations. The rate for Americans aged 18 to 64 not covered by mandates is only 63%. The same period has seen the rate of unvaccinated Americans cut by one third. In late July, when the President announced the first vaccination requirement for the federal government, from 95 million eligible Americans to 67 million.
As the number of people getting a first shot has jumped to about a million a day, cases of infection are declining, and deaths have dropped to about 1,690 a day, still a shocking number but one that is finally moving in the right direction.
This afternoon, the Biden administration lifted the restrictions on travelers crossing the Canadian and Mexican borders, allowing vaccinated individuals into the country. The president and chief executive of the U.S. Travel Association, Roger Dow, told the New York Times: “After months of closure, the reopening of U.S. land borders to vaccinated visitors will bring a welcome surge in travel from our two top source markets of inbound travel, Canada and Mexico.”
Biden is trying to move the country past the partisan battles of the past several years. He is also trying to show Americans that the government is often not the problem, but rather a solution to one.
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Today Stephen K. Bannon, a one-time adviser to former president Trump, was supposed to testify before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Yesterday, Bannon’s lawyer sent a letter to committee chair Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) saying that Bannon would neither produce documents nor testify because “President Trump”—not former president Trump—“is exercising his executive privilege; therefore, he has directed Mr. Bannon not to produce documents until the issue of executive privilege is resolved.”
This is a weird argument. Bannon was not, in fact, employed by the White House at the time of the January 6 insurrection, there is no executive privilege for a former president, the events of January 6 were not part of the duties of the president, and the current president, Democrat Joe Biden, has waived executive privilege in this case.
Furthermore, although Trump has suggested he “plans to” challenge the subpoenas on the grounds of executive privilege, he has apparently not actually done so, and he is having trouble finding lawyers willing to work for him. He has a bad reputation when it comes to paying his bills and is perceived as toxic after January 6.
When Bannon didn’t show up, committee chair Thompson issued a statement saying that the committee would “move forward with proceedings to refer Mr. Bannon for criminal contempt.” House rules require a three-day notice for a meeting to refer Bannon, so the committee will vote next Tuesday on a contempt report. If approved, the report will go to the House, which can then vote to send it to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
The former president promptly issued a statement complaining that the committee was considering criminal contempt, but the statement felt weak and repetitive—rather as if he was just going through the motions—and, ominously for Bannon, didn’t mention his former friend by name.
Even aside from this interplay, the law loomed large today in national politics.
The January 6th committee is already hearing from some of the key players in the Trump administration around the time of the insurrection. Yesterday, former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, who stepped in to head the Department of Justice after William Barr resigned in December 2020, testified before the committee.
On Tuesday, the committee issued a subpoena for Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department attorney who tried to find a way to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump talked of replacing Rosen with Clark, only to face an all-out rebellion from within the DOJ when officials threatened to resign as a group if he went forward with the plan. Within hours of the subpoena, Clark’s current employer had scrubbed him from their website.
Today, a judge ruled that the former president has to appear for a videotaped deposition in a lawsuit in which Mexican protesters said they were attacked in 2015 outside Trump Tower in New York as they protested against his slurs against Mexican immigrants. “Donald J. Trump shall appear for a deposition October 18, 2021 at 10 a.m. ... or, in the event of illness or emergency, on another mutually agreed to date on or before October 31, 2021,” Judge Doris Gonzalez's order said.
Also today, Andrew McCabe, whom Trump fired from the FBI 26 hours before his retirement in 2018, settled a lawsuit with the Department of Justice. McCabe was the deputy director of the FBI when Trump fired FBI director James Comey, and McCabe continued to explore the ties between the Trump administration and Russian operatives after Comey’s firing. Trump continued to browbeat McCabe until he was fired, just before his pension went into effect. The settlement restored his pension, paid him back pay, and provided some of his attorney’s fees. McCabe called it a “complete vindication.”
For all the other legal news in the media today, the former president seemed to focus his wrath on news from Arizona. His spokesperson hammered on the idea—now thoroughly debunked—that the vote in that county was suspicious.
But on that front, too, judges had something to say. The Arizona Senate had argued that they had the right to withhold records with information about their “audit” of the votes in that county because those records involved deliberations about the process, but today the Superior Court of Maricopa County ruled that the public’s interest in transparency trumped any argument for secrecy and that they must produce the records.
Trump loyalists are suddenly focusing on the supply chain delays that they say will ruin Christmas. Ohio Representative Jim Jordan tweeted today that Christmas presents were never late when Trump was in charge, leading Princeton historian Kevin Kruse to accompany Jordan’s tweet with a post of a CBS headline from December 24 of last year, saying “More than one million packages will not reach their destinations this Christmas.” Journalist Aaron Rupar, who writes the newsletter Public Notice, pointed out today that Christmas has been mentioned at least 106 times on the Fox News Channel since yesterday morning, not including reruns.
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Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told his colleagues that on Monday evening he plans to bring up the Freedom to Vote Act and to try to get it through the Senate.
The Republicans are determined not to let Democrats level the electoral playing field. While Democrats in the House, where legislation can pass with a simple majority vote, have passed voting rights laws, Democrats in the Senate have to deal with the filibuster, which enables senators in the minority to block legislation unless the Democrats can muster 60 votes. Republicans are dead set against voting rights laws. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has called voting reform “a solution in search of a problem,” driven by “coordinated lies about commonsense election laws that various states have passed.”
Are the 33 election laws 19 states have passed to restrict the vote really “commonsense election laws”?
Today, Meridith McGraw at Politico reported that America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a think tank of former Trump officials, says the priority for a second Trump administration would be new election laws. The president of AFPI, Brooke Rollins, who was in the Trump White House, said election reform would be top priority. Trump argues, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen. But, Rollins said, Trump might not have to push voting restrictions because the states have passed them already.
In 1776, the Founders declared “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
There have always been fights over who should have a say in our society, and until 1870, most voters in the United States were white men. After the Civil War, in 1870, the Republicans then in charge of Congress expanded the pool of voters to enfranchise Black men attacked by white gangs and undermined by white legislators.
In that year, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution declared that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” That amendment also gave Congress power to enforce that amendment.
Almost immediately, white southerners determined to prevent their Black neighbors from affecting society through their votes began to keep Black Americans from the polls. By the early 1960s, fewer than 5% of eligible Black voters were registered in Mississippi, and when organizers tried to help them enforce their right to vote, white gangs and government officials harassed them, occasionally to the point of murder.
Appalled at the violence playing out on the streets and then again on the evening news, lawmakers in 1965 passed the Voting Rights Act. It required that states with a history of discrimination get preapproval from the Department of Justice to change state election laws. The measure passed on a bipartisan basis.
But the impulse to expand voting rights in America would face a backlash in 1986, when Reagan Republicans realized they were in danger of losing control of the government and thus losing the 1986 tax cuts. Republicans began to talk of cutting down black voting under a “ballot integrity” initiative in 1986, and new voter restrictions in Florida paid off in the 2000 election, when Republican George W. Bush won by a handful of votes there after many more votes had been suppressed.
When Democrats tried to shore up voting with an expansion of voter registration at certain state offices in 1993, with the so-called Motor Voter Law, Republicans exploded. A New York Times writer said Republicans saw the measures “as special efforts to enroll core Democratic constituencies in welfare and jobless-benefits offices.” As Democrats began to focus on expanding voting rights, Republicans focused on restricting the vote.
By 1994, losing Republican candidates were charging that Democrats won elections with “voter fraud.” In 1996, House and Senate Republicans each launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, helping to convince Americans that voter fraud was a serious issue and that Democrats were winning elections thanks to illegal, usually immigrant, voters.
When voters nonetheless reelected Democratic president Bill Clinton in 1996, Republicans did their best to undermine his presidency—and eventually impeached him—but the elevation of biracial Democrat Barack Obama to the White House in 2008 prompted a new level of attacks on the electoral system. The Supreme Court in the 2010 Citizens United decision permitted a flood of corporate money to flow into the electoral system, and then, in the 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision, it gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
With Justice Department preclearance out of the way, states promptly began to pass discriminatory election laws. In 2021, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court said such laws were not prohibited, thus greenlighting the new election laws passed by Republican-dominated states after voters choose Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.
And so, here we are. Republicans are trying to regain control of the government by making sure their opponents can’t vote, while Democrats are trying to level a badly tilted playing field. If the Democrats do not succeed in passing a voting rights law, we can expect America to become a one-party state that, at best, will look much like the American South did between 1876 and 1964. Our nation will no longer be a democracy.
There are currently three voting measures before Congress. The For the People Act is a sweeping measure that cuts back on voter suppression, ends partisan gerrymandering, curbs dark money in politics, and combats corruption. The House of Representatives passed this measure in early March 2021 and sent it to the Senate, where Republicans blocked it using a filibuster.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court gutted in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision. The House of Representatives passed this measure in late August 2021 and sent it to the Senate, where it sits under threat of a filibuster.
In the Senate, Joe Manchin (D-WV) expressed misgivings about the voting measures and vowed to hammer out a voting rights bill that could attract the votes of ten Republicans and thus break a filibuster. He and a number of Democratic colleagues announced the Freedom to Vote Act in mid-September 2021. If there are ten Republicans to support the measure, we have not yet seen them.
The Senate will vote on the Freedom to Vote Act on Wednesday.
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On October 8, the executive director of curriculum and instruction for the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, Texas, told a teacher to make sure to follow Texas’s new law requiring teachers to present opposing views on controversial subjects. The Carroll school board had recently reprimanded a fourth-grade teacher who had kept an anti-racism book in her classroom, and teachers wanted to know what books they could keep in their own classrooms.
“Just try to remember the concepts of [House Bill] 3979,” the curriculum director said. “And make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust,” the director continued, “that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.”
The Holocaust was Nazi Germany’s systematic murder of about two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population—about six million people—during World War II.
“How do you oppose the Holocaust?” one teacher said.
“Believe me,” the director said. “That’s come up.”
The Texas legislature passed another law that is going into effect in December. S.B. 3, known as the Critical Race Theory bill. It specifies what, exactly, social studies courses should teach to students. Those guidelines present a vision of how American citizens should perceive their nation.
They should have “an understanding of the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government; the history, qualities, traditions, and features of civic engagement in the United States; the structure, function, and processes of government institutions at the federal, state, and local levels.”
But they should get that information in a specific way: through the Declaration of Independence; the United States Constitution; the Federalist Papers, including Essays 10 and 51; excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America; the transcript of the first Lincoln-Douglas debate; and the writings of the founding fathers of the United States; the history and importance of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964; and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.
While they managed to add in de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—and I would be shocked if more than a handful of people have ever read that account of early America—there are some pointed omissions from this list. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees Black voting, didn’t make it, although the Nineteenth Amendment, which grants women the right to vote, did. Also missing is the Voting Rights Act of 1965, although the Civil Rights Act of the previous year is there. Topics explicitly eliminated from the teaching standard are also instructive. Those things cut from the standards include: “the history of Native Americans,” and “[founding] mothers and other founding persons.”
Under “commitment to free speech and civil discourse,” topics struck from the standards include “the writings of…George Washington; Ona Judge (a woman Washington enslaved and who ran away); Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings (the enslaved woman Jefferson took as a sexual companion after the death of his wife, her half-sister),” and “any other founding persons of the United States.”
The standards lost Frederick Douglass’s writings, the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that forced Indigenous Americans off their southeastern lands, and Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists defending the separation of church and state. The standards lost “historical documents related to the civic accomplishments of marginalized populations” including documents related to the Chicano movement, women’s suffrage and equal rights, the civil rights movement, Indigenous rights, and the American labor movement.
The standards also lost “the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong” and “the history and importance of the civil rights movement.” The legislature took three pages to outline all the things that teachers may not teach, including all the systemic biases the right associates with Critical Race Theory (although that legal theory is not taught in K–12 schools), and anything having to do with the 1619 Project.
Teachers cannot be forced to teach current events or controversial issues, but if they choose to do so, they must “strive to explore that topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.” Supporters of the measure said that teachers should teach facts and not “choose sides.”
The lawmakers who wrote the new standards said they had been crafted to eliminate redundancy. In 2019, the state wrote standards to teach character traits—courage, integrity and honesty—and instructions to include particular people or events could simply duplicate those concepts. “If you want to talk about courage, talk about George Washington crossing the Delaware, or William Barret Travis defending the Alamo,” a member of the state board of education said.
Editing from our history Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the National Farmworkers’ Association—she was eliminated by name—as well as Abigail Adams and Frederick Douglass and the 1924 Snyder Act (by which the nation recognized Indigenous citizenship) does more than whitewash our history. That editing warps what it means to be an American.
Our history is not about individual feats of courage or honesty in a vacuum. It is about the tireless efforts of people in this country from all backgrounds and all walks of life to determine their own fate and to elect a government that will support that ambition.
A curriculum that talks about individual courage and integrity while erasing the majority of us, as well as the rules that enable us to have a say in our government by voting, is deliberately untethered from national democratic principles.
It gives us a school that does not dare take a position on the Holocaust.
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Today, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol recommended that the House of Representatives find Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon in contempt of Congress. Bannon is refusing to cooperate with a subpoena for documents and testimony about the events surrounding the January 6 insurrection. Now the House will take up the question of contempt.
The committee report is a lot more interesting than that topline suggests (political historian here: although people tend to watch what happens before the TV cameras, committee reports are often where the action is).
The report starts by stating that the attempt of “a violent mob” to “halt the lawful counting of electoral votes and reverse the results of the 2020 election” was, according to “the words of many of those who participated in the violence, ...a direct response to false statements by then-President Donald J. Trump—beginning on election night 2020 and continuing through January 6, 2021—that the 2020 election had been stolen by corrupted voting machines, widespread fraud, and otherwise.”
The committee is laying the events of January 6 on Trump.
Congress established the committee, the report says, “to identify how the events of January 6th were planned, what actions and statements motivated and contributed to the attack on the Capitol, how the violent riot that day was coordinated with a political and public relations strategy to reverse the election outcome, and why Capitol security was insufficient to address what occurred.”
The committee is saying that the riot was coordinated ahead of time, and it appears to suggest that Capitol security was compromised.
Then the report explains why Bannon is an important witness. Its account of his actions in that crisis is an illuminating roundup of what we have seen in pieces in many other places. It concludes that Bannon knew specifically about the events of January 6 ahead of time.
On his January 5 podcasts, for example, he said:
“It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. OK, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. All I can say is, strap in. [. . .] You made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day. So strap in. Let’s get ready.”
“All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. [. . .] So many people said, ‘Man, if I was in a revolution, I would be in Washington.’ Well, this is your time in history.”
Bannon said that the country was facing a ‘‘constitutional crisis’’ and ‘‘that crisis is about to go up about five orders of magnitude tomorrow.’’
And: “It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow.”
So, the committee report suggests there was high-level planning for the January 6 insurrection. And it goes on:
The report says that it appears Bannon joined others eager to overturn the election “who gathered at the Willard Hotel, two blocks from the White House, on the days surrounding the January 6th attack…. The group that assembled at the Willard Hotel is reported to have included members of the Trump campaign’s legal team (including Rudolph Giuliani and John Eastman), several prominent proponents of false election fraud claims that had been promoted by Mr. Trump (e.g., Russell Ramsland, Jr. and Boris Epshteyn), as well as Roger Stone, who left the hotel with Oath Keeper bodyguards, and campaign spokesman Jason Miller.”
Then the report blows up the idea that Bannon had an excuse not to testify.
Bannon refused to honor the subpoena because he claimed that Trump was going to invoke executive privilege, but “Trump has had no communication with the Select Committee.” “This third-hand, non-specific assertion of privilege, without any description of the documents or testimony over which privilege is claimed, is insufficient to activate a claim of executive privilege,” it says. In any case, as a private citizen at the time of the events in question, Bannon would not be covered by executive privilege anyway.
This is a powerful document, laying out the direction the committee report is likely to go.
Today, former president Donald Trump did, in fact, invoke executive privilege…but not to cover Bannon.
He sued Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), the chair of the House Select Committee; the committee itself; the national archivist, David S. Ferriero; and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to try to prevent the National Archives from releasing records from the January 6 insurrection to the House committee investigating it.
The suit alleges that the investigation is a “fishing expedition” designed “to harass President Trump and senior members of his administration (among others) by sending an illegal, unfounded, and overbroad records request to the Archivist of the United States.” It relies on executive privilege and the argument that there is no legitimate legislative reason for Congress to have access to the records it wants to see.
There are some oddities in this lawsuit. First off, executive privilege covers current presidents, not past ones, and President Biden has waived the privilege for these documents, saying it would not be “in the best interests of the United States.” White House counsel Dana Remus wrote: “These are unique and extraordinary circumstances. Congress is examining an assault on our Constitution and democratic institutions provoked and fanned by those sworn to protect them, and the conduct under investigation extends far beyond typical deliberations concerning the proper discharge of the President's constitutional responsibilities.” So a former president is asking a court to overrule a current president.
Second, the lawsuit covers only the material at NARA and none of the other requests the committee has made. This is for the obvious reason that executive privilege can’t cover things outside the scope of official business—which is archived at NARA—but since there is almost certainly a great deal of overlap in the material requested from different parties, this lawsuit seems likely to be designed not to hide evidence so much as to gum up the works. If the committee can be held at bay until after the 2022 election, a Republican victory might end its investigation.
Third, the lawyer bringing the lawsuit is Jesse R. Binnall, a Trump loyalist associated with Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell, who is currently being sued for $1.3 billion by the voting technology company she accused of stealing the 2020 election. Binnall is not a top-of-the-line attorney.
In response to the lawsuit, committee chair Thompson and Vice Chair Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) issued a statement noting that “the former President’s clear objective”—Trump’s supporters never use the word “former” to refer to him—“is to stop the Select Committee from getting to the facts about January 6th and his lawsuit is nothing more than an attempt to delay and obstruct our probe…. It’s hard to imagine a more compelling public interest than trying to get answers about an attack on our democracy and an attempt to overturn the results of an election.”
“The Select Committee’s authority to seek these records is clear. We’ll fight the former President’s attempt to obstruct our investigation while we continue to push ahead successfully with our probe on a number of other fronts.”
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Always eager to stay in the news, former president Trump issued statements today insulting former secretary of state and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, who passed at 84 yesterday after suffering complications from Covid-19. Trump also complained about the removal of a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the New York City Council Chamber. Unfortunately, he undermined his claim to be defending American history when he misidentified Jefferson as “a principal writer of the Constitution of the United States.”
Jefferson was in France when the Framers were drafting the Constitution. Jefferson is the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.
The rest of the government was dealing with the real world today, and their actions were not frivolous.
Early this morning, the FBI raided the homes associated with Russian oligarch and aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska in New York City and Washington, D.C. Deripaska is closely associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin and worked with Paul Manafort, who directed Trump’s 2016 campaign. During that campaign, Manafort shared secret polling information with his associate Konstantin Kilimnik with the understanding that Kilimnick would give that information to Deripaska. In 2018, the U.S. government put sanctions on Deripaska, but maneuvering by then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) meant Congress lifted them in 2019. Just months later, Deripaska invested in an aluminum plant in Kentucky.
The FBI did not comment on the raids.
After yesterday’s report recommending that the House of Representatives hold Stephen K. Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress for his refusal to honor a congressional subpoena, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol tonight voted to hold Bannon in contempt.
Both committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and vice-chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) spoke before the vote. Thompson called out Bannon as the only witness who was stonewalling the committee, and he warned that the committee would not excuse anyone. “No one in this country, no matter how wealthy or how powerful, is above the law,” he said.
Republican Cheney was more pointed. She noted that Bannon appears to have had “substantial advance knowledge of the plans for January 6th and likely had an important role in formulating those plans.” She also suggested that the arguments Bannon and Trump were making “appear to reveal one thing: they suggest that President Trump was personally involved in the planning and execution of January 6th. And we will get to the bottom of that.”
Cheney went on to “add one further thought, principally for my Republican colleagues.” “You all know that there is no evidence of widespread election fraud sufficient to overturn the election; you all know that the Dominion voting machines were not corrupted by a foreign power. You know these claims are false. Yet former President Trump repeats them almost daily.”
She asked her colleagues to “consider the fundamental questions of right and wrong here. The American people must know what happened. They must know the truth. All of us who are elected officials must do our duty to prevent the dismantling of the rule of law, and to ensure nothing like that dark day in January ever happens again.”
The issue now moves to the House floor for a vote.
Cheney was not the only one admonishing the Republicans to put aside partisanship and stand up for the country. The Senate will vote tomorrow on whether to take up the Freedom to Vote Act, with Republicans threatening to filibuster that procedural vote. Senator Angus King (I-ME) established himself today as a key advocate of the measure, and as the Senate’s conscience.
He reminded his colleagues that in a world of absolute monarchs, the U.S. was founded on the radical idea “that the people… are the ultimate source of power and can govern themselves through their elected representatives.” That idea “was tested at Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, and the Wilderness. It was defended at Anzio, Iwo Jima, and Normandy, and was reaffirmed in 1965.”
But democracy is fragile, and it most often fails “from erosion from within.”
The senator warned that most failed democracies start with legitimate elections, but that leaders then manipulate the system to stay in power, just as they have done recently in Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, and Hungary. In the U.S., if the new laws suppressing the vote and permitting partisans to choose their own electors over the wishes of the voters are allowed to stand, “we will be left with a downward spiral toward a hollow shell of democracy, where only raw power prevails and its peaceful transfer becomes a distant memory.”
King noted the profoundly dangerous breakdown of trust in the electoral system and called out the Republicans’ “overtly partisan attempt” to use the loss of trust as a justification to skew elections in the future. He demolished the idea that our elections are corrupted by “voter fraud,” and suggested the new election laws going into effect in Republican-dominated states are “stone-cold partisan voter suppression.”
King urged his colleagues to change course, “to pull our country back from the brink, and to begin the work of restoring our democracy as we did in the Revolution, as we did in the Civil War, and as we did in the Civil Rights struggles: first, by simply telling the truth and then by enacting a set of basic protections of the sacred right to vote.” If they will not, he said, we will lose “our identity as a people,...the miracle of self-government, and…the idea of America.”
“We are the heirs and trustees…of a tradition that goes back to Lincoln, Madison, and, yes, our friend John McCain,” Senator King reminded his colleagues. “All of them were partisans… but all shared an overriding commitment to the idea that animates the American experiment, the idea that our government is of, by, and for the people…. Now is the moment that we’re called upon to reach beyond our region, our state, our party, ourselves to save and reinvigorate the sputtering flame of the American idea.”
“Indeed,” he said, “destiny has placed us here at one of history’s fateful moments. Our response to it will be our most important legacy…. I believe we all know our responsibility, and whether we like it or not, history will record whether we, each of us, meets that responsibility.”
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This afternoon, Senate Republicans blocked a discussion of the Freedom to Vote Act. The measure is the compromise bill put together by seven Democrats and one Independent after Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) said he could not support the more sweeping For the People Act passed by the House of Representatives. Manchin maintained that a carefully crafted bill could attract the ten Republican senators it needed to break a filibuster.
The Freedom to Vote Act would provide for automatic and same-day voter registration, and it would limit the culling of voters off voter rolls. It would provide for two weeks of early voting and allow anyone to vote by mail. It would make Election Day a holiday and make sure that there is a paper trail for ballots.
At the state level, it would start the process of rolling back the legislation passed by 19 Republican-dominated state legislatures to skew elections hard in their favor. It would prohibit partisan gerrymandering, require transparency in advertising, and protect election officials from the attacks they’ve endured since the 2020 presidential election. It would rebuild the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which oversees our election process but which was gutted under former president Trump.
These reforms are nonpartisan and are an attempt to push back against highly partisan state laws that voting rights experts say will essentially allow Republicans to declare their own outcomes for elections.
Today all Republicans voted no even to a discussion of the bill. All Democrats voted yes, but Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) switched his vote to a no so that, as a member of the majority, he could bring the measure back up later.
What is stopping the measure from coming to the floor for debate is the Senate filibuster rule. That rule is a holdover from the early days of Congress, when there was no way to stop a member from talking, so that anyone eager to make sure something could not pass could just talk until the other members of Congress gave up and moved to another piece of business. The House early on created a mechanism to move from debate to a vote, but the Senate did not.
The filibuster is essentially a refusal to stop talking, although a series of reforms have changed it a bit from its early days. During Woodrow Wilson’s term in the early twentieth century, the Senate adopted the cloture rule, which permitted two thirds of the Senate to vote to stop the debate—but not immediately—and to move on to a vote. That’s where we get the concept that it takes 60 senators to break a filibuster.
In the late twentieth century, the Senate also changed that idea of nonstop talking to a threat to talk, lowering the bar significantly for a minority to stop legislation it doesn’t like. Nowadays, they can just phone it in. It also exempted certain financial bills from the filibuster: those are the things that fall under “budget reconciliation” measures. In the early twenty-first century, the Senate exempted judicial nominations from the filibuster and then, under then–Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Supreme Court nominations. (That’s how Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett got confirmed to the Supreme Court.)
There is discussion now about removing voting rules from the filibuster as well, since we are in a bizarre situation where states that have heavily gerrymandered their districts to benefit Republicans are passing voting restrictions by simple majority votes while the federal government, charged with protecting voting rights, needs a supermajority of the Senate. Since the Republican Senate seats skew heavily toward rural areas, in this case, it is possible for 41 Republican senators, who represent just 21% of the population, to stop voting rights legislation backed by 70% of Americans.
If this is permitted to stand, more and more voters will be silenced, and the nation will fall under a system of minority rule much like that in the American South between about 1876 and 1964. The South always held elections…and the outcome was always preordained.
Meanwhile, the Republicans who are demanding control of our elections are also doubling down on their support for the former president, knowing that their most reliable voters are his loyalists.
Today the House Rules Committee passed a resolution to send the criminal referral for Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, who defied a congressional subpoena, to the House floor for a vote. That itself wasn’t much of a surprise—it was procedural—but more surprising was the loud fight Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) put up against the resolution.
Both men are fervent Trump supporters, and Jordan, at least, is himself likely to be a witness before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. While they conceded that Joe Biden is indeed president, they refused to agree that he won the 2020 election, and they maintained that the investigation into the attack on the counting of the certified ballots on January 6—an attack that came close to pulling down our government—is simply an effort to distract voters from what they consider to be the failures of the Biden administration.
When the Rules Committee took a vote on whether to advance the report to the House floor, all the Democrats voted yes, and the Republicans voted no. The vote was 9–4.
But there was a new feeling in the room. When Gaetz and Jordan started in with their usual attacks to create sound bites, the Democrats pushed back. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a professor of constitutional law, actually said to Gaetz: “You know what, that might work on Steve Bannon’s podcast, but that’s not gonna work in the Rules Committee of the United States House of Representatives.”
Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA), the committee’s chair, pressed Jordan about his own conversations with Trump that day. Jordan has repeatedly changed his story about what he remembers about talking with the former president that day but has admitted that they spoke more than once. “Of course I talked to the president,” Jordan told McGovern. “I talked to him that day. I’ve been clear about that. I don’t recall the number of times, but it’s not about me. I know you want to make it about that.”
Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the majority leader of the House of Representatives, says the House will vote on the committee's criminal contempt report for Steve Bannon tomorrow. Republican leaders are urging House Republicans to vote no.
A reminder: Bannon flat out refused to answer a congressional subpoena.
Perhaps the Democrats are pushing back on the bullying of the Trump loyalists in part because some who have previously escaped legal jeopardy are now in trouble. In Florida, Gaetz’s former friend Joel Greenberg, who has pleaded guilty to sex trafficking, got an extension on sentencing Monday because he is still providing information to investigators. Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Handberg told the court that Greenberg has made allegations that "take us to some places we did not anticipate."
There is a shorter timeline for Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), who was indicted yesterday for lying to the FBI about foreign campaign contributions (which are illegal under U.S. law). Fortenberry uploaded a video to YouTube, titled “I wanted you to hear from me first,” giving his version of events before the indictment dropped. In the video, filmed in a car with his wife and dog, he talked of the money in question but insisted he didn’t know it was from a foreign donor. Unfortunately, it appears there was a phone call between the congressman and the co-host of the fundraiser that brought in the illegal money. That individual was cooperating with the FBI, and in the call, he and Fortenberry discussed the illegal money in clear terms.
At his arraignment hearing today, Fortenberry’s attorney said he would try to get the court to suppress statements made by the congressman "because he was misled.”
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Last night, the “Trump Media and Technology Group” (TMTG) issued a press release announcing the creation of a “rival to the liberal media consortium” which would “fight back against the “Big Tech’ companies of Silicon Valley, which have used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in America.” The new social media site was called “Truth Social,” and his team advertised it as the first piece of a media empire that would take its place beside the leaders in the field. Rather than a “tweet,” a statement on the new site would be a “truth,” and the terms of service prohibited criticism of the former president.
Within hours the site had been hacked. Then it crashed. It also appears to have been built on open-source software whose developer warned that the Trump social media network might have violated the software company’s licensing rules.
Watching Trump’s flailing attempts to create his own media corporation—this is his second attempt—highlights that since 1980, the project of the Republican faction that is now in control of the party has been to take things apart rather than to build them. They have focused on dismantling the government and stopping legislation. It has been a negative project, rather than a positive one, and breaking things takes little of the hard work and creativity that it takes to build things.
When those accustomed to breaking things try to build them, they seem to have little idea of how much work it actually takes. They seem to think that actual accomplishments are there for the taking, and that splashy announcements and dramatic actions can solve intricate problems.
So, for example, we recently saw the story that in the midst of the early days of the pandemic, Trump adviser Stephen Miller went around then–defense secretary Mark Esper to try to send 250,000 troops to seal the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Aside from anything else, this would have dramatically weakened the U.S. around the world.
But it was at least not as immediately damaging as the suggestion of then-president Trump, who wanted to launch military attacks on Mexican drug cartels within Mexico, an idea that he backed away from only when advisers noted that this would be seen as a U.S. attack on Mexico, which is our largest trading partner.
Building is slow, hard work.
Tonight, at a town hall hosted by CNN, host Anderson Cooper asked Joe Biden if he expected to get a deal on the large infrastructure package the Democrats have been working for months to negotiate. Biden said he did think so, and he also said that this infrastructure deal was not, actually, the most difficult deal he’d ever negotiated. The most difficult one was the deal to ban assault weapons, and, as he said, he succeeded at that.
There is reason to think that a deal on infrastructure is close. The fighting among senators—which is at least partly performative, but some of which shows underlying tensions—and news of real cuts both suggest that real negotiations are underway. Real negotiations show effort to create a real deal.
Building things is hard work.
Today, the House of Representatives voted 229–202 to refer Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, who defied a congressional subpoena, to the Department of Justice on charges of criminal contempt.
In comments before the vote, the chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Bennie Thompson (D-MS), told his colleagues that if they voted against enforcing the subpoena, “you are saying to all future men and women who are called before this body that they can ignore a subpoena from Congress without consequence. The consequences of that vote won't be limited to this investigation and this subpoena alone.” A negative vote would cause “serious long-lasting damage to Congress.”
Only nine Republicans voted yes. Two hundred and two Republicans wanted Bannon, who is closely associated with the January 6 insurrection, to be able to ignore a congressional subpoena without any consequences for that defiance. The only representative who did not vote was Greg Pence (R-IN), brother of former vice president Mike Pence, whom the rioters threatened to hang.
During the debate, the vice chair of the January 6 committee, Liz Cheney (R-WY), called out Indiana Representative Jim Banks for writing to federal agencies to ask for any information they sent to the committee, representing himself as its ranking member, that is, its top Republican. It was a childishly transparent attempt by allies of the former president to figure out what the committee knows.
I mean, literally, under his name on a letter to the Secretary of the Interior are the words “Ranking Member,” although the letter notes that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who retained the right to reject appointments to the committee, refused his assignment after he made it clear he intended to obstruct its work. And yet, despite Banks’s identification of himself as “ranking member,” when asked to comment on the revelation about the letters, a spokesperson for Banks said, “This is a bizarre Democrat narrative meant to distract from the actual contents of Rep. Banks’ letter and to avoid talking about the actual activities of the Select Committee, which are partisan, authoritarian and indefensible.”
Cheney is a hard-line Republican.
The U.S. Attorney’s office for Washington, D.C., accepted the Bannon referral at 5:30 this afternoon. Tonight Pelosi issued a statement saying: “The vote for the criminal contempt of Congress resolution today goes beyond Bannon. It was a vote for the system of checks and balances and the Constitution.”
Meanwhile, we learned today that at least three months ago the Justice Department added two top prosecutors to the investigation of Matt Gaetz (R-FL), one of former president Trump’s closest allies, for sex trafficking.
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This morning, Jonathan Martin at the New York Times reported that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has warned Republican political consultants that they may not continue to work for both him and Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who is vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
While Republican lawmakers are trying to sweep the insurrection under the rug, Cheney is calling out the attack and demanding sunlight on what happened. Republican leaders are lining up behind former president Trump in hopes of retaining his loyalist voters, but Cheney is repeatedly, and increasingly clearly, suggesting that the president was responsible for the events of that day.
That McCarthy is trying to make her a pariah indicates a fight over the future of the Republican Party. While one fund-raising company has already cut ties with her, Cheney is not operating from a weak position. Her father is Richard (Dick) Cheney, who was President George W. Bush’s vice president and, perhaps more significant for today’s events, President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense. The Cheneys are likely not unaware of what is happening among intelligence officials, which seems likely to involve some current Republican lawmakers.
And Liz Cheney’s stand against McCarthy and Trump is not hurting her politically at home: she has raised more than $5 million for her reelection, compared to the $300,000 raised in the last two months or so by her Trump-backed opponent.
There is an important story behind McCarthy’s attack on Representative Cheney. She presents a threat to the pro-Trump Republican Party not simply because she is standing strong against the former president and the attack on our democracy.
She is offering to women and men in the suburbs a reasonable alternative to those pro-Trump representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) whose pistol packing and aggression gets attention for all the wrong reasons. Trump Republicans have lost the support of suburban women, and Cheney seems to be picking them up and explaining that Trump and his supporters, including McCarthy, tried to destroy our democracy. That McCarthy felt it necessary to try to undercut her this way suggests they see her as a major threat.
McCarthy had another reason to be unhappy today. Longtime readers of these letters may perhaps remember that McCarthy took money from a Ukraine-born U.S. businessman, Lev Parnas.
Parnas worked with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to try to find dirt on Joe Biden’s son Hunter in Ukraine. In 2019, prosecutors said that money was illegal: Parnas had taken $1 million from Ukraine oligarch Dmytro Firtash and had illegally funneled more than $350,000 to pro-Trump political action committees and other Republican lawmakers in 2016.
Today, a jury found Parnas guilty of making illegal campaign contributions.
In other developments that might be making Republican lawmakers uncomfortable, Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department attorney who wanted to help then-president Trump stay in the White House despite losing the election, is scheduled to testify before the January 6th committee next Friday.
According to CNN, Alyssa Farah, who was Trump’s director of strategic communications, has met voluntarily with Cheney and Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who, along with Cheney, is on the January 6 committee.
It appears there is concern about the mounting evidence before the January 6th committee. In an interview with National Review, John Eastman, who wrote a very clear memo outlining how then–vice president Mike Pence could overturn the results of the 2020 election, called that scenario “crazy.”
Meanwhile, business journalists are suggesting that the new Trump media company is not a failure at all, because it was never actually meant to be a media company so much as a way to siphon money out of investors.
Matt Levine in Bloomberg outlines how a vehicle called a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which is a publicly traded investment company, is designed to merge with a new company that is not yet public, to allow investment in that SPAC based on expectations of future income thanks to the new company. (Someone explained this to me by saying it’s like a sea slug taking over a shell so it can do business as the shell organism quickly and without oversight.)
In this case, the announcement that the new Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) would merge with a SPAC called Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC) sent DWAC’s stock soaring by as much as 160%. It was the most traded stock on the New York Stock Exchange, with more than 260 million shares traded by midday.
The company never has to produce anything. Investors can make money just based on how people think the company might perform—or not—in the future.
The man behind this scheme is the person to whom McCarthy is demanding the Republican Party demonstrate absolute loyalty.
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There are three stories in the news today that seem to me to add up to a larger picture.
First is the story of money laundering, which seems suddenly to be all over the news. Today we learned that federal prosecutors in Detroit have broken into a massive money-laundering operation between the United States and the United Arab Emirates called “The Shadow Exchange.” They confiscated $12 million and suggest this is the tip of the iceberg.
This story comes just weeks after the release of the Pandora Papers, which detailed the ways in which the world’s wealthy hide money. The United States is one of the money-laundering capitals of the world, and the consequences of our lax financial legislation are coming home to roost. Experts say that because of the lack of transparency required in our financial transactions, hundreds of billions of dollars are laundered in the U.S. every year.
Another story from earlier in the month by Casey Michel in Politico reveals what happened to a small town in Illinois when a Ukrainian oligarch bought a factory there apparently in order to launder money. The townspeople believed they were looking at a new, prosperous future with new investment in the town, only to watch the abandoned factory decay. And then, miraculously, another investor appeared, but that man, too, seems to have been using the purchase simply to launder money. Now, the factory is decrepit and must be dismantled at great cost to the town, along with the townspeople’s dreams.
The second story that caught my attention today is the continuing news dropping from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. Today we learned that a Facebook researcher created a profile that appeared to be of a political conservative North Carolina mother and that within five days, Facebook’s algorithm was steering the profile toward QAnon, a conspiracy theory touting then-president Trump as a secret warrior against a widespread pedophilia ring in the highest levels of government.
Although the fake profile did not follow those recommended groups, the profile was then inundated with groups and pages full of hate speech and disinformation. Other stories recently have emphasized that Facebook officials knew of the radicalization of users before the January 6 insurrection but declined to address the issue.
People often make the mistake of thinking that Facebook profits from the advertising it sells to users, but in fact the system works the opposite way. A media company profits from packaging users to sell to advertisers. Facebook has sliced and diced its users so that it can sell us with pinpoint accuracy to political interests eager to divide us or drive our votes.
It appears we now have hard evidence that the company knew its algorithms were peddling disinformation to divide us, and it did not fix them.
Tonight’s third story is that former president Trump’s loyalists set up a “command center” in mid-December at Washington, D.C.’s famous Willard Hotel to try to overturn the election. Those meeting to come up with a scheme to overturn the will of the voters included John Eastman, who wrote the memo outlining how Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to count the electors for certain states and thus throw the election to Trump; Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; adviser Stephen K. Bannon; former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, a convicted felon pardoned by Trump; One America News reporter Christina Bobb; and Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn.
It is significant that as this story has hit the news, Eastman, the author of the infamous memo, is running from it. He went to the respected conservative magazine National Review to argue, quite preposterously, that his memo was simply a thought exercise that he did not endorse.
The very choice of the Willard, rather than Trump's own hotel, suggests an attempt to create distance from the president, but Kerik, who rented the rooms, billed the Trump campaign for the $55,000 hotel bill. (Those participating are likely to discover that campaign activity is not part of official duties and so cannot be covered by executive privilege.)
To me, these three stories are as illustrative of this moment as the three crucial stories in the January 1903 edition of McClure’s Magazine were of the corruption that led to the Progressive Era. In that famous 1903 magazine, investigative journalists Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell exposed the political and corporate corruption that were silencing the voices of individuals in the United States and driving them into poverty.
The first two of today’s stories suggest the rise of global capital in our financial system and its power over us through the dominant influence of social media, a new technology most of us don’t understand particularly well. That power has led to the third story: the attempt of a president who has lost an election to turn to a Big Lie, spread through social media, that his victory has been stolen from him, and that his supporters must take matters into their own hands.
KIeptocrats, autocrats, and criminals are making a strong bid to control our country.
Will they succeed?
Maybe. But in a similar moment after 1903, the American people reasserted the rule of law.
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"To me, these three stories are as illustrative of this moment as the
three crucial stories in the January 1903 edition of McClure’s Magazine
were of the corruption that led to the Progressive Era."
Sounds good. We shall see.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
I had planned to post a picture tonight, but this evening Rolling Stone dropped an exclusive, blockbuster story from reporter Hunter Walker that demands attention.
The story says that two sources who are talking to the January 6th committee about planning the January rallies in Washington, D.C., have talked to Rolling Stone as well. They say they worked with congressional lawmakers and White House officials to plan rallies both in Washington, D.C., and around the country. They deny that they intended to storm the Capitol and imply they got used, which points to the sources being from within Women for America First, the organization that sponsored a bus tour and rallies around the country before heading to Washington for January 6.
They allegedly named Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Louie Gohmert (R-TX), as people with whom they planned. They also claim that Gosar promised them a blanket presidential pardon, although they do not say for what.
From the White House team, they singled out then–chief of staff Mark Meadows. “Meadows was 100 percent made aware of what was going on,” one of the sources said.
Katrina Pierson was a key figure in both accounts. She was on Trump’s campaign teams in 2016 and 2020, and worked with the organizers of the rallies before the mob stormed the Capitol.
One of those talking to Rolling Stone said: “It’s clear that a lot of bad actors set out to cause chaos…. They made us all look like s**t.” This person included Trump on their list of bad actors and described feeling used by him and then abandoned. “I’m actually pretty pissed about it and I’m pissed at him.”
Nick Dyer, who is communications director for Greene, said the congresswoman was only involved in planning to refuse to accept certified ballots, nothing more. He tried to compare Greene’s actions with those of Democrats who objected to Donald Trump’s 2016 win, and said that no one cares about the events of January 6 amongst what he suggests is the disaster of the Biden presidency.
No other spokespeople for the lawmakers involved answered requests for comment.
Between this, and the stories that continue to drop about Facebook, and the infrastructure bill, and voting rights measures…it seems likely to be a big week in Washington.
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“Caravans” of migrants to our southern border are once again headline news on the Fox News Channel, but while these anti-immigrant stories divert attention from news that those on the right would like to bury, as usual, they also establish a larger pattern.
Whipping up fears of immigration is standard for authoritarians trying to convince followers to support the loss of civil liberties in order to promote law and order. One of those who rose to power with just such an argument is Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, a figure those on the right are championing these days. Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson broadcast from Hungary appreciatively earlier this year, presenting Orbán’s government, which has systematically dismantled democracy, as enviable. The American Conservative Union is planning to have its 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Hungary, as well.
This backstory gave disturbing context to today’s news from the Government Accountability Office. The GAO is a government agency within the legislative branch (most of the ones you’re used to hearing about are in the executive branch) that audits, investigates, and issues reports for Congress. Known as the congressional watchdog, the GAO tries to cut through spin to do honest, thorough, and nonpartisan evaluations of government issues.
Today, the GAO reported that actions of the Trump administration had undermined U.S. goals in the Northern Triangle countries that are currently driving immigration to the southern border. Since 2008, the U.S. has funded development projects in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to promote economic development, provide security, and combat corruption. This investment was designed, in part, to slow the movement of immigrants escaping the violence and economic dislocation of the region to the U.S. border.
In March 2019, the Trump administration abruptly halted promised money, and that freeze continued until June 2020. Today’s GAO report documented how that suspension hurt 92 of the 114 projects underway under the control of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and 65 of the 168 projects operating under the State Department.
Migration to the border soared, right before the 2020 election.
While Trump Republicans were trying to convince white American voters that immigrants threatened them, another story today suggests the real goals of the Trump machine.
The Guardian revealed that several members of the secretive Council on National Policy (CNP) claim that they were the ones behind the 2017 tax cuts on corporations and wealthy Americans. Wealthy right-wing Christian activists organized the CNP in 1981 to push the country toward religious and libertarian policies.
Also today, the Washington Post Magazine ran a long story about CNP, calling it “the most unusual, least understood conservative organization in the nation’s capital.” CNP is registered as a charity, but it is essentially a central planning center for right-wing activists across the country. Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow, Jr., explained how CNP members, who initially opposed Trump, swung behind him when he promised to combat abortion.
Members of CNP are a who’s who of wealthy conservative figures, including Leonard Leo, a leading light of the Federalist Society, which advocates for a conservative judicial system; Steve Bannon, a key Trump adviser; David Bossie, who headed the group Citizens United and who was Trump’s deputy campaign manager; and Kellyanne Conway, a White House adviser. Their goal, they say, is to create a moral America.
So, it appears, the fearmongering about immigrants helped to give power to a secret group of wealthy Americans who lobbied for huge tax cuts for the richest Americans.
The stories about CNP suggest its members have focused on keeping emotions high and Trump in power. The CNP was instrumental in opposing business closures and mask mandates to combat the coronavirus. A number of members, including Cleta Mitchell—the lawyer who was on the phone with Trump during his infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to switch the state into the Trump column although Biden had won it—and Ginni Thomas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, backed “Stop the Steal” efforts.
Their efforts, we have increasing evidence, were promoted by Facebook, the giant social media company. Starting last Friday, 17 different news outlets have been publishing the “Facebook Papers” based on internal company documents provided to Congress and the press by whistleblower Frances Haugen. The stories allege that Facebook prioritized profits over truth and safety, deliberately amplifying right-wing voices and dividing the country.
Facebook denies the allegations.
Reports of migrant caravans might well be attempts to divert attention from the service of the Republicans to the wealthy, as well as from the story of January 6, which is becoming clearer as information continues to come out.
Today, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol interviewed Steve Bannon associate Dustin Stockton. Stockton was one of the organizers of the Women for America First rally on January 6 that got taken over by the unpermitted Stop the Steal rally which led to the attack on the Capitol.
According to a piece by Joshua Kaplan and Joaquin Sapien in ProPublica last June, Stockton was so concerned about the Stop the Steal people that he urged Amy Kremer, another leader of the Women for America First rally, to contact her associate Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in the days before January 6 to warn him things were getting out of hand. The committee has subpoenaed Kremer to testify on October 29. There are signs that Kremer or an associate might have been a source for yesterday’s Rolling Stone article, suggesting that someone from Women for America First is willing to cooperate with the committee.
The Rolling Stone article, which provided names of lawmakers allegedly involved in planning the January 6 rally, refocused attention on the fact that it was Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) who was speaking at length as the mob broke into the building. His speech delayed the evacuation of the House chamber for 15 minutes, so that the House members were still present when the mob, including Ashli Babbitt, tried to get at them. A police officer shot and killed Babbitt as she broke through the doors.
Last night’s Rolling Stone story also identified Republican Lauren Boebert (CO) as a participant in planning meetings for the events of January 6. Today she said in a carefully worded statement: “I had no role in the planning or execution of any event that took place at the Capitol or anywhere in Washington, DC on January 6.”
Today, once again, President Joe Biden refused to claim executive privilege to prevent the January 6 committee from seeing documents Trump wants to hide.
Meanwhile, the Democrats in Congress continue to try to move the country forward, hammering out their infrastructure measure. They hope to have it finished before President Biden leaves for meetings with European leaders later this week.
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For all the news stories that seem to tug us in one direction or another, there is just one overarching story in the news for Americans today.
We are in an existential fight to defend our democracy from those who would destroy it.
People seem to hark back to films from the 1930s and 1940s and think that so long as we don’t have tanks in our streets, our government is secure. But in this era, democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.
You can see this in Russia, where Vladimir Putin gradually concentrated power into his own hands. You can see it in Brazil, where Jair Bolsanaro, whose approval rating in late August was 23%, claims that the country’s elections are fraudulent and that “[e]ither we’ll have clean elections, or we won’t have elections.” You can see it in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has quite deliberately dismantled liberal democracy and replaced it with what he calls “illiberal democracy.”
On paper, Hungary is a democracy in that it still holds elections, but it is, in fact, a one-party state overseen by one man. Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy, replacing it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.”
No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. While Hungary still has elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for Orbán’s opponents to win an election.
Hungary is in the news in the United States because Americans on the right have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to hold elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.
In 2019, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson endorsed Hungary’s anti-abortion and anti-immigration policies; in that year, according to investigative researcher Anna Massoglia of Open Secrets, Hungary paid a D.C. lobbying firm $265,000, in part to arrange an interview on Carlson’s show. Recently, former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest at a forum denouncing immigration and urging traditional social values, where he told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump put on the court. Further indicating the drift of today’s right wing, the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held in Budapest.
In their embrace of the illiberal democracy of Hungary, those on the right argue that they are defending traditional American values.
Like Orbán, they focus relentlessly on immigration; “caravans” of immigrants have once again made the right-wing news, as they always do before an election. They worry that traditional families are under attack, hence Texas’s S.B. 8, which outlaws the constitutional right of abortion by empowering vigilantes. They insist that “real” America is being destroyed by multiculturalism; hence the hysteria over Critical Race Theory, an obscure legal theory from the 1970s that is not taught in K–12 schools, and the calls for “patriotic education.”
And, crucially, those on the right are openly embracing voter restrictions and the replacement of nonpartisan election officials with partisans.
Astonishingly, John Eastman, the founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and a member of the powerful Federalist Society, wrote a six-point plan for overturning the will of the voters in the 2020 election. Although he went to the reputable National Review to cover his tracks by saying his plan was just a thought experiment, just tonight a video appeared in which he told an apparent supporter that his ideas were right, and that it was Pence’s establishment biases that made him unwilling to implement them. His plan to overturn the election barely failed.
The 33 new election laws in 19 states will not fail. They are designed to replace the idea of democracy with a hierarchy in which a minority will determine our fate.
If it seems odd that a group of people who claim to be trying to “Make America Great Again” are taking their cues from a central European country of about 10 million people, it is worth noting that they are not simply talking about Critical Race Theory or Texas’s so-called heartbeat bill. We are in a larger struggle over the nature of human governments. And when American thinkers are praising Hungary, they are tapping into a long history of our own.
When the Founders declared it “self-evident, that all men are created equal,” they were making a bold declaration about the nature of governments that flew in the face of western tradition and thought. They denied that some individuals were better than others and had an inherent right to rule the rest. Governments, the Founders said, derived legitimacy not from religion, or heritage, but instead were legitimate only to the degree that those who lived under them consented to them. “[T]o secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” the Founders said.
This was a revolutionary argument. It rejected not just King George III, but all kings, claiming for the people the right to rule themselves. For all its limitations—the Founders could conceive of this idea in part because they excluded from their vision women, Black people, and all people of color—it was an astonishing declaration.
And yet, the idea that all men are created equal and that governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed began to fall apart in the late 1820s. Southern Democrats wanted to take control of Indigenous peoples' lands in the Southeast in order to spread the wildly lucrative system of plantation agriculture. Then, when they had displaced the tribes, they spread across those lands their economic system based on human enslavement.
But because southern leaders were outnumbered by Americans in the North who objected to their economic system, within a decade they were arguing that true democracy meant not that government depended upon the consent of the governed as a whole, but rather that local or state governments could choose how everyone, including enslaved people, women, Indigenous, and Mexican people, would live. And, of course, they limited voting to a few white men, who voted to keep themselves in power.
In 1860, southern white elites declared the American concept of democracy based in equality, government based in the consent of the people, to be obsolete. They declared they were going to start a new country, based in a hierarchy of gender and race, that they believed reflected God’s will.
In a speech in March 1861, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who would soon be the vice president of the Confederate States of America, explained to an audience that Jefferson’s belief that all men are created equal was “an error” and that anyone who still adhered to that idea was an insane “fanatic.” Stephens told listeners: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
And there it was: the replacement of the idea that all people are created equal with the idea that some people are better than others, and that those people, who truly understand God’s laws, should rule.
It is not an accident that the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021, carried the Confederate battle flag.
We are today in a struggle no less dangerous to our democracy than that of the 1860s, for all that it is fought with Facebook memes and cable television rather than artillery. And when our leaders talk fondly about Viktor Orbán, or Jair Bolsonaro— former president Trump endorsed his reelection today—we would do well to listen.
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At a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, Republican senators accused Attorney General Merrick Garland of “siccing” the FBI on parents who are simply concerned about their child’s education.
The backstory is that there has been a coordinated effort across the country to whip up protests at school board meetings over mask mandates and opposition to teaching Critical Race Theory in K–12 schools (where it is not taught), and they have gotten heated enough that protesters have threatened the lives of school board members, teachers, administrators, and school staff.
In response, the National School Board Association (NSBA) wrote to the administration asking for federal help in addressing the increasing threats. Garland issued a memo calling for federal law enforcement to work with local law enforcement as necessary to protect school board members.
Under pressure from Republican state representatives, the NSBA apologized for some of the language it had used in its initial letter—it suggested the protesters were engaging in domestic terrorism, for example—and today senators tried to get Garland, too, to apologize for his memo.
He refused. "I wish if senators were concerned about this that they would quote my words," he said. "This memorandum is not about parents being able to object in their school boards. They are protected by the First Amendment as long as there are no threats of violence, they are completely protected."
It was painfully obvious that the Republicans, especially Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), were trying to create sound bites for right-wing media, and perhaps to undermine Garland’s credibility should the Department of Justice bring charges against high-ranking lawmakers over the events of January 6. They portrayed Garland as part of a conspiracy to crush American liberty and demanded his resignation.
It appears to be the new conspiracy theory of the Trump Republicans to say that the administration is hunting them: Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson is advertising an upcoming special that appears to suggest that the Democratic-controlled government is launching a war on right-wing Americans.
But that increasing hysteria feels as if it has desperation behind it. We learned recently that 18 members of Trump’s White House staff are cooperating voluntarily with the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Only Stephen K. Bannon is not. These voices not only are likely to turn up valuable information, but also indicate that White House staffers are less worried about the wrath of the former president than the wrath of Congress.
If Trump has lost control of his team, it’s a whole new ball game. Anyone who can get out from under the wreckage will do so, and fast. That will make those remaining desperate to regain power. And Trump himself is facing more trouble. Today his lawyers asked a judge to block the IRS from giving his taxes to the House Ways and Means Committee.
Another indication of desperation today came from Georgia, where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell endorsed Herschel Walker for the Republican nomination for the Senate. Although he brings to the table name recognition as a famous football player, Walker is a deeply problematic candidate. First of all, it is not even clear he can run in Georgia since he lives in Texas—he switched his voting registration to an Atlanta home owned by his wife in August. Walker has a history of domestic violence and questionable business dealings, as well as a history of mental illness. Walker’s ex-wife said he pointed a gun at her and said: “I’m going to blow your f---ing brains out.” Walker’s ex-girlfriend told police he made a similar threat to her.
But Walker has said the 2020 election in Georgia was fraudulent, and Trump strongly endorsed him.
McConnell opposed Walker’s candidacy this summer and, just a week ago, suggested to CNN that the former president should stay out of the midterms. But on Monday, Senator John Thune (R-SD), the second-ranking Republican senator, endorsed Walker. Today Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), the Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference—the third-ranking Republican senator—endorsed him, too. And so did McConnell, bowing to the recognition that the Republicans need Trump’s voters to win so badly that they must let Trump call the shots.
“I am happy to endorse Herschel Walker for U.S. Senate in Georgia,” McConnell said. “Herschel is the only one who can unite the party, defeat Senator [Raphael] Warnock, and help us take back the Senate.” Conservative editor Bill Kristol noted on Twitter that McConnell said nothing about Walker being qualified for the position.
The Republicans want power.
Already, Republican lawmakers are using unprecedented measures to dictate to the Democratic president.
Today, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) called out Cruz for blocking all but four of President Joe Biden’s picks for ambassadorships (he let through former senators or their relatives). By this time in Trump’s presidency, the Senate had confirmed 22 of his ambassadors, 17 by a simple voice vote.
Cruz is putting holds on all Biden’s appointees until the president agrees to do as Cruz wants with regard to sanctions on a Russian company that is supplying gas to Germany. The construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline began during the Trump administration, meaning that Biden inherited a mess: our key ally Germany had committed to the pipeline, and sanctioning the company behind it would destabilize that relationship. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken concluded that it was “inevitable” that the pipeline would be finished, Biden and German Chancellor Angela Merkel reached a deal saying that if Russia used the pipeline for political pressure, the U.S. would slap sanctions on it.
Cruz wants sanctions now, and he is sabotaging the State Department until he gets his way.
This morning, the conservative magazine The Bulwark and the liberal magazine the New Republic jointly published “An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy.” Written by Todd Gitlin, Jeffrey C. Isaac, and Kristol, and signed by writers, scholars, and pundits from all political backgrounds, the letter deplores the efforts of the Trumpers to take control of our government and calls for Congress to pass voting rights legislation, by adjusting the filibuster if necessary.
The letter was a wake-up call. “[W]e urge all responsible citizens who care about democracy—public officials, journalists, educators, activists, ordinary citizens—to make the defense of democracy an urgent priority now.”
“Now is the time for leaders in all walks of life—for citizens of all political backgrounds and persuasions—to come to the aid of the Republic.”
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In 1929, October 28 was a Monday, the opening night for New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Four thousand glittering attendees thronged to the elegant building on foot or in one of a thousand limousines to see Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, the melodramatic story of an innocent French girl seduced by wealth, whose reluctance to leave her riches for true love leads to her arrest, deportation to the wilds of America, and tragic death. Flash bulbs blinded the crowd, gathered to see famous faces and expensive gowns, as photographers recorded the arrivals of the era’s social celebrities.
No one toasting the beginning of the opera season that night knew they were toasting the end of an era.
At ten o’clock the next morning, when the opening gong sounded in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange, men began to unload their stocks. So fast did trading go that by the end of the day, the ticker recording transactions ran two and a half hours late. When the final tally could be read, it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion. The market had been uneasy for weeks before the twenty-ninth, but Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. By mid-November, the industrial average was half of what it had been in September. The economic boom that had fueled the Roaring Twenties was over.
Once the bottom fell out of the stock market, the economy ground down. Manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade dropped by $7 billion, down to just $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 to 33 cents; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields. By 1932, over one million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933, the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.
No one knew how to combat the Great Depression, but wealthy Americans were sure they knew what had caused it. The problem, they said, was that poor Americans refused to work hard enough and were draining the economy. They must be forced to take less. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon told President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
Slash government spending, agreed the Chicago Tribune: lay off teachers and government workers, and demand that those who remain accept lower wages. Richard Whitney, a former president of the Stock Exchange, told the Senate that the only way to restart the economy was to cut government salaries and veterans’ benefits (although he told them that his own salary—which at sixty thousand dollars was six times higher than theirs—was “very little” and couldn’t be reduced).
President Hoover knew little about finances, let alone how to fix an economic crisis of global proportions. He tried to reverse the economic slide by cutting taxes and reassuring Americans that “the fundamental business of the country, that is, production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.” But taxes were already so low that most folks would see only a few extra dollars a year from the cuts, and the fundamental business of the country was not, in fact, sound. When suffering Americans begged for public works programs to provide jobs, Hoover insisted that such programs were a “soak the rich” program that would “enslave” taxpayers, and called instead for private charity.
By the time Hoover’s first term limped to a close, Americans were ready to try a new approach to economic recovery. They refused to reelect Hoover and turned instead to New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised to use the federal government to provide jobs and a safety net to enable Americans to weather hard times. He promised a “New Deal” for the American people.
FDR’s New Deal employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 public buildings. It provided a social safety net for ordinary Americans, providing unemployment and disability insurance, as well as aid to widows, orphans, and the elderly. It supported labor and regulated business, banking, and the stock market. It invested in infrastructure, rebuilding roads and bridges, providing electricity to rural areas, and building schools, post offices, airports, and hospitals around the country. When World War II broke out, the new system enabled the United States to defend democracy successfully against fascists.
The new system undercut fascism at home, too, where its adherents had been growing strong, and reminded Americans that when the government supported ordinary people, they could build a strong new future.
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The Republican Party has long ceased to offer policy ideas and is focusing on culture wars and obstruction. Their big statement this week has been to throw “Let’s go, Brandon” into speeches and, in the case of Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), into a rap video in which she stars. The phrase means “F**k Joe Biden,” for those in the know; they use it because social media moderators do not flag it.
The press secretary for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tweeted it out on Thursday morning, just after the president announced a framework for the Build Back Better bill, the larger infrastructure package the Democrats intend to propose alongside the smaller bipartisan infrastructure bill. Congress has been negotiating this larger package intensely for months, and it appears to be reaching a final form.
But while the media has followed every twist and turn of Democratic disagreements over the measure, suggesting those normal disagreements are somehow a sign of dysfunction, the big story of the negotiations has gone largely unnoticed. That big story is that Republican lawmakers simply refused to participate in discussions over a series of proposals that as a whole are backed by 57% of the American people and that have even higher approval rates individually: one poll found 83% of Americans eager to give the government the power to negotiate lower drug prices. (In contrast, only 33% of the American people liked the Trump tax cuts passed without Democratic votes in 2017.)
A refusal to join debate on such a popular issue is dysfunction, indeed.
Instead of participating in the democratic system, Republicans turned over to conservative Democrats, especially Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, the job of making conservative changes to the measure, while they simply fired insults at the president.
Republicans are frustrated in part because Biden and the Democrats are remaking the nation. After forty years in which lawmakers rolled back government action, the Democrats under Biden are investing again in the American people.
In his remarks about the Build Back Better plan on Thursday, Biden noted that for most of the twentieth century, we invested in ourselves, and that investment in our families and children, including through education, was key to our prosperity and international standing.
In the 1980s, though, we abandoned that investment, handing the task of developing the country to private interests. It didn’t work. From being first in the world for infrastructure, the World Economic Forum now lists us 13th. From leading the world in educational achievement, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development now ranks us 35th out of 37 major countries for investment in childhood education and care.
“We need to build America from the bottom up and the middle out, not from top down with the trickle-down economics that’s always failed us,” Biden said. “I can’t think of a single time when the middle class has done well but the wealthy haven’t done very well. I can think of many times, including now, when the wealthy and the super-wealthy do very well and the middle class don’t do well.”
While outlining the details of the Build Back Better plan can wait until there is a final bill, we do know that the final blueprint provides a massive investment in childcare and eldercare, families, and education, and it uses the need to address climate change to produce good jobs. The government will serve the American public, not a small group of business leaders.
“Any single element of this framework would fundamentally be viewed as a fundamental change in America,” Biden said accurately on Thursday. “Taken together, they’re truly consequential.”
The Biden administration announced another major investment in the American people this week.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a plan to modernize American diplomacy. The plan centers around State Department employees, “because,” Blinken said, “they’re our greatest asset.” He promised to “elevate new voices and encourage more initiative and more innovation,” and also to encourage diplomats to engage more fully with Americans at home, so that our foreign interactions both reflect the needs of our democracy and make sense to American citizens.
Blinken intends to ask for congressional approval to establish a new bureau for cyberspace and digital policy. He will also name a new special envoy for critical and emerging technology. This new push will challenge China’s growing power in these fields and reestablish U.S. leadership; Washington Post foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius called it “part of a much broader effort by the Biden administration to get serious about the global technology race.”
Blinken also plans to increase staffing to address future pandemics, and to seek funding for training diplomats to address climate issues.
His focus on the people of the State Department illustrates the nation’s shift away from unilateral actions and military solutions and toward multilateral diplomacy, meaning that the U.S. wants to “cooperate with other countries to contend with the greatest challenges of our time, none of which we can tackle effectively alone.” “[W]herever and whenever new rules are being debated, for example, on how the global economy should work, how the internet should be governed, how our environment should be protected, how human rights should be defined and defended,” Blinken said, “American diplomats need to be at the table.”
Under Biden, the Democrats are replacing the Republican ideology of the past forty years, which focused on individual liberty and cowboy diplomacy, with a plan to invest in our people and to cooperate with other countries.
This return to principles that ushered in our most prosperous years hardly seems like a good reason to curse the president.
[[Photo by Warren K. Leffler, “Federal City College, Skill Center,” 1969, Library of Congress.]
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In the weeks after the January 6 insurrection, one of the things that struck me as an odd political calculation was how quickly Republican lawmakers fell back into line behind former president Trump. Anyone watching could see that the information about Trump’s involvement in that insurrection that would come out by, well, right about now—about a year before the midterm elections—was going to be bad.
And here we are, and yes it is.
Today the Washington Post published a long report about the events before, during, and after January 6, compiled by a team of more than 25 reporters and additional staff who reviewed video and court transcripts, followed social media posts, and interviewed more than 230 people. The report lays the blame for January 6 on Trump and warns that we are in a fight for the survival of democracy.
The report is horrific, full of images, tapes, and timelines of a far more violent attack on our government than has previously been put together. It shows how very close the insurrectionists came to getting their hands on then–Vice President Mike Pence, who Trump told them was the architect of their disappointment.
What might have happened is the stuff of nightmares.
The report concludes: “Trump was the driving force at every turn as he orchestrated what would become an attempted political coup in the months leading up to Jan. 6, calling his supporters to Washington, encouraging the mob to march on the Capitol and freezing in place key federal agencies whose job it was to investigate and stop threats to national security.” It notes that the former president did not make any effort to stop the attacks until it was clear they wouldn’t succeed, and that lawmakers assumed he was backing the rioters.
The report lays out how, on January 6, Trump and his loyal lawyer John Eastman, the author of the infamous memo outlining a six-point plan for overturning the 2020 election, continued to try to steal the election even as rioters were running amok in the Capitol. As then–Vice President Mike Pence and his family were hiding for their safety from the mob, Eastman blamed Pence for the insurrection, saying that if he had only done as the memo suggested, the riot wouldn’t have happened.
Then, when Congress resumed to count the certified ballots, Eastman argued that the delay in debate caused by the insurrection meant that Congress had run out of time to count the certified votes, as established by the Electoral College Act, so that the election should be thrown back to the states.
The Washington Post report places the insurrection into context: “The consequences of that day are still coming into focus, but what is already clear is that the insurrection was not a spontaneous act nor an isolated event. It was a battle in a broader war over the truth and over the future of American democracy,” it says. “Since then, the forces behind the attack remain potent and growing.”
The Washington Post series raises a lot of questions. It notes both that FBI officials ignored a lot of red flags before January 6 and that Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, whom Trump put into office immediately after the election after firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper, refused to approve the use of the D.C. National Guard to defend the Capitol for more than two hours after Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund requested help.
Other news from the weekend suggests that there are things Trump does not want us to know about the insurrection. This weekend we learned that he is trying to block the National Archives and Records Administration from giving to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol information that includes call records from that day, information about visitors to the White House around then, and so on: material that is generally a matter of public record. Only the current president can invoke executive privilege, and President Joe Biden has declined to do so over these materials.
An older story involving the former president is also suddenly in the news. In October 2016, four computer scientists noticed unusual activity between the Trump organization; Russia’s Alfa Bank, which was connected to the Kremlin; and Spectrum Health, a Michigan-based healthcare organization connected to the DeVos family. The computer folks took their information to the FBI, which was already engaged in its own investigation of the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The story got folded into all the other material about the campaign and its ties to Russia, and was largely forgotten.
Then, earlier this month, a special counsel appointed by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr to investigate the Russia investigation indicted a cybersecurity lawyer for lying to the FBI. In the indictment, Special Counsel John Durham accused those computer scientists of advancing a story they did not believe in order to hurt Trump’s 2016 presidential bid.
The computer scientists have come out swinging. They reject the idea that they were advancing a political attack and maintain that the weird connections they saw did, indeed, show coordination between Trump and the Russian-based Alfa Bank. They believed there was enough evidence to open a criminal investigation. They have accused Durham of misrepresenting their debates over the material, and they say their evidence is solid and reproducible.
It is this mess to which Republican lawmakers have tied themselves.
The Washington Post suggests that they made that calculation in the immediate aftermath of January 6 because Trump continued to command his base and they worried about being primaried from the right if they didn’t support Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. And so they acquitted him in his second impeachment trial and supported the “audits” of state election results that had already been proved secure.
But that leaves a circle to be squared.
Winning a primary by staking out turf as a Trump supporter would mean losing in the general election… unless state legislatures fixed elections so that Republicans would win, no matter who the Republican candidate happened to be.
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Today, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) backed down from his obstructionism, agreeing to let the Democrats raise the debt ceiling by a simple majority rather than by the 60 votes they needed when the Republicans kept filibustering their bills.
A quick recap: the issue at stake was whether the United States would default on its debts, which it has never done before. The threat to default was purely a political ploy on the part of the Republicans to try to force the Democrats to abandon their very popular infrastructure measure.
Here’s the backstory: Congress actually originally intended the debt ceiling to enable the government to be flexible in its borrowing. In the era of World War I, when it needed to raise a lot of money fast, Congress stopped passing specific revenue measures and instead set a cap on how much money the government could borrow through all of the different instruments it used.
Now, though, the debt ceiling has become a political cudgel because if it is not raised when Congress spends more than it has the ability to repay, the country will default on its debts. The cap has been raised repeatedly since it was first imposed; indeed, the Republicans raised it three times under former president Donald Trump. Once again, it is too low, and by October 18, the Treasury will be unable to pay our debts.
To meet the nation’s obligations, Congress needs either to raise taxes, which Republicans passionately oppose, or to raise the debt ceiling so the Treasury can borrow more money. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has voted to raise or suspend the debt ceiling 32 times in his career, including the three times under Trump, refused to allow Republicans to vote to raise the debt ceiling.
Although the ceiling needed to be lifted because Trump added $7.8 trillion to the debt (which now stands at about $28 trillion), in part with the huge 2017 tax cuts that went overwhelmingly to the wealthy, McConnell tried to tie the need for more money to the Democrats’ infrastructure plan. This was false: the debt ceiling is not an appropriation; it simply permits the government to borrow money it needs to pay debts already incurred.
But McConnell and the Republicans want to dismantle an active government, not to build it. They hope to convince Americans that Democrats are racking up huge debts—even though it is the Republicans on the hook for today’s crisis—and that they should not be permitted to pass a bill that supports children and working parents and addresses climate change.
The Democrats insisted that the Republicans should join them in raising the ceiling, since they had been instrumental in making it necessary, but McConnell and his caucus refused. Finally, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warning that defaulting would crash the economy and with financial services firm Moody’s Analytics warning that a default would cost up to 6 million jobs, create an unemployment rate of nearly 9%, and wipe out $15 trillion in household wealth, the Democrats tried to pass a measure themselves.
Republicans wouldn’t let them. They filibustered it, trying to force the Democrats to save the country by raising the debt ceiling through a bill that can’t be filibustered, a process called reconciliation, which would make it harder for them to use reconciliation for their own infrastructure bill since Congress can pass only one of that type of reconciliation bill per year.
It was a remarkably cynical ploy, risking the financial health of the country and our standing in the world to make sure that a Republican minority could continue to hamstring what the Democratic majority considers a priority. Republicans have played chicken with government shutdowns since the 1980s, refusing to pass measures to fund the daily operations of the government and thereby stopping paychecks and government operations.
But defaulting on our obligations was a whole new game of brinksmanship. The greatest international asset the U.S. has right now is its financial system. To bring that to its knees to score political points would be interpreted, correctly, as a sign our country is so unstable it must be sidelined.
Midday today, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin highlighted this international doubt when he took the unusual step of weighing in on politics. He warned that a default would “undermine the economic strength on which our national security rests.” Paychecks for 1.4 million active duty military personnel and veterans’ benefits for 2.4 million veterans, as well as payments on military contracts, would stop. Equally dangerous, defaulting on loans would devastate the nation’s international reputation "as a reliable and trustworthy economic and national security partner."
Democrats said they could not guarantee the country would not default, and they were clearly starting to consider getting rid of the filibuster, at least for this particular issue, to enable them to pass a debt ceiling bill by a simple majority rather than by 60 votes.
Then McConnell blinked (although he didn’t cave). In a scorching statement that laid all the blame for the crisis on the Democrats, he offered to “allow” Democrats to use normal procedures—that is, the Republicans won’t filibuster them!—to extend the ceiling into December. Democrats indicate they will take that deal.
There is one major takeaway from this manufactured crisis: McConnell was willing to come right to the verge of burning the nation down to get his way. In the end, he stopped just before the sparks became an inferno, but it was much too close for comfort.
Still, he stopped. Trump and his supporters did not. The former president has been pushing Republicans to use the threat of default to get what they want, and he was not happy that McConnell had backed down. He issued a statement blaming McConnell for “folding” and added “He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand.”
Trump’s willingness to burn down the country is ramping up as the January 6 investigation gets closer to him. Tomorrow is the deadline for four of his aides to respond to subpoenas for documents and testimony from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol: former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, adviser Steve Bannon, and Defense Department aide Kash Patel. Meadows worked to overturn the 2020 election results and was in the thick of things on January 6, Scavino had met with Trump to plot to get congresspeople not to count the certified votes on January 6, Bannon strategized with other officials on January 5 to stop the count, and Patel was part of discussions about the strength of the Capitol Police.
The four are expected to defy the subpoenas at Trump’s insistence, a defiance that suggests they think he and his people are going to regain power. According to Glenn Kirschner, a former U.S. Army prosecutor, contempt of Congress earns a year of prison time; obstruction of Congress, five years; and obstruction of justice, 20 years.
The rest of the former president’s statements today were unhinged attacks on the committee.
A final note for October 6: U.S. District Judge Robert L. Pitman has temporarily blocked enforcement of Texas’s S.B. 8, the so-called “heartbeat” bill prohibiting abortions after six weeks, when most women don’t know they’re pregnant. The Justice Department had sued to stop enforcement of the law. Pitman stopped it on the grounds that it deprived “citizens of a significant and well-established constitutional right.”
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On this date five years ago, in the run-up to the 2016 election, the Washington Post broke the story of the so-called Access Hollywood tape, a video from 2005 in which Donald Trump told television host Billy Bush about his approach to women. "I don't even wait” to start kissing them, he said. “And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.... Grab 'em by the p***y. You can do anything."
Today’s events indicated that, as president, he took a similar approach to the Department of Justice.
This morning, the Democratic majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee released a draft report of its investigation into Trump’s attempt to use the Department of Justice to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The report found that Trump repeatedly tried to get the DOJ to endorse his false claims that the election was stolen and to overturn its results, singling out nine specific attempts to change the outcome. Trump, the report says, “grossly abused the power of the presidency.”
The report points to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as a key player in the attempt to subvert the DOJ, and it singles out a number of other officials as participants in the pressure campaign. Those people include Jeffrey Bossert Clark from within the DOJ, whom Trump tried to install as acting attorney general to push his demands; Representative Scott Perry (R-PA); Doug Mastriano, a Republican state senator from Pennsylvania; and Cleta Mitchell, a legal adviser to the Trump campaign. The draft report also notes that under Attorney General William Barr, the DOJ “deviated from longstanding practice” when it began to investigate allegations of fraud before the votes were certified.
The report concludes that the efforts to subvert the DOJ were part of Trump’s attempt “to retain the presidency by any means necessary,” a process that “without a doubt” “created the disinformation ecosystem necessary for Trump to incite almost 1000 Americans to breach the Capitol in a violent attempt to subvert democracy by stopping the certification of a free and fair election.”
The minority of the Senate Judiciary Committee promptly published a rebuttal, defending the former president by saying that “President Trump listened to his advisors, including high-level DOJ officials and White House Counsel and followed their recommendations.”
The top Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee is Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who is running for reelection in 2022 and is facing a primary challenger from the right. Grassley will be speaking on Saturday at Trump’s “rally” in Iowa. As then–Senate president pro tempore and thus the next person in line to count the electoral votes if Vice President Mike Pence were absent, Grassley was not uninvolved in the events of January 6.
Indeed, on January 5, Roll Call reported Grassley’s statement that he and not Vice President Mike Pence would preside over the counting of the certified votes the following day. “[I]f the Vice President isn’t there, and we don’t expect him to be there, I will be presiding over the Senate,” Grassley said. His staff immediately walked the statement back, but it does suggest he might have been aware of some of the White House machinations to overturn the election.
On CNN, host Jake Tapper called Grassley’s response to the majority’s report “a very, very generous to the point of delusional reflection of what actually happened.”
Today was also the deadline for four of Trump’s closest allies to turn over documents to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol and to schedule testimony. Former chief of staff Mark Meadows, social media manager Dan Scavino, adviser Steve Bannon, and former Defense Department official Kash Patel have until midnight tonight to contact the committee.
Trump’s lawyers wrote a letter telling the four men not to cooperate with the congressional subpoena. The letter claims that Trump is planning to contest the subpoenas on the basis of executive privilege.
But even if this president does accept his assertion of executive privilege—and there are good reasons for any president to be nervous about depositions from a chief of staff—such an assertion would likely not cover Steve Bannon.
Meanwhile, the committee issued three new subpoenas today, this time for people or entities involved in rallies to protest the 2020 election results to testify. The committee subpoenaed Ali Abdul Akbar, known as Ali Alexander, and Nathan Martin, as well as Stop the Steal L.L.C., an organization affiliated with the January 6 protest in Washington.
After the election, Alexander called frequently for violence to overturn the results and claimed to be in contact with White House officials and Representatives Mo Brooks (R-AL), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), and Andy Biggs (R-AZ) about January 6. In a now-deleted video, Alexander said: “We four schemed up… putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting… so that who we couldn’t lobby, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”
This evening the Senate managed to pass a measure to raise the debt ceiling until December, but it was not an easy sell. Trump continued to object to clearing the way for Democrats to keep the nation from tipping over the cliff into default despite the fact that the nation racked up $7.8 trillion in debt on his watch and raising the debt ceiling is necessary to cover that debt.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) promise that the Republicans would no longer block the Democrats from addressing the issue did not stop a number of Republican senators from continuing to object. Finally, 11 Republicans agreed to join the Democrats to break a Republican filibuster by a vote of 61–38. The Democrats then passed legislation to address the debt ceiling by a strict party vote of 50–48 and sent the measure to the House.
It took a filibuster-proof majority of the Senate not to pass a bill to protect the nation’s economic health and international standing, but simply to keep an angry minority at bay long enough to permit Democrats to pass that bill.
The news that the Senate had agreed to a deal made the Dow Jones Industrial Average jump 330 points.
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By midnight last night, four of former president Donald Trump’s closest allies were required to turn over documents to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. The four are former chief of staff Mark Meadows, social media manager Dan Scavino, adviser Steve Bannon, and former Defense Department official Kash Patel.
Today, committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) released a statement saying that Meadows and Patel “are, so far, engaging” with the committee, but that “Bannon has indicated that he will try to hide behind vague references to privileges of the former President.”
Meanwhile, Bannon told his podcast audience that he will have 20,000 “shock troops” ready to take over the country. “We control this country,” he said. “We have to start acting like it.” Bannon is using Trump’s reliance on executive privilege to defy the congressional subpoenas. Legal observers say this is a stretch, since Bannon was not part of the executive branch after 2017.
The committee expects all the witnesses to cooperate. “[W]e will not allow any witness to defy a lawful subpoena or attempt to run out the clock, and we will swiftly consider advancing a criminal contempt of Congress referral,” they wrote.
It seems significant that Meadows and Patel are not, apparently, relying on the former president to protect them, while Bannon is. Scavino has been eluding the subpoena, but Rawstory reported tonight that he had finally been served.
Bannon and Patel are scheduled to testify before the committee on October 14, while Scavino and Meadows are scheduled for October 15. Their cooperation—or lack of it—will then become very clear.
Today, the pressure on the former president got higher when the White House declined to assert executive privilege over some of the documents requested by the January 6 committee. Former president Trump’s attorneys had requested that the Biden administration withhold documents about Trump’s actions on January 6. NBC News reported this afternoon that White House Counsel Dana Remus has sent a letter to the National Archives saying that “President Biden has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified as to any of the documents.”
“These are unique and extraordinary circumstances,” Remus added. “Congress is examining an assault on our Constitution and democratic institutions provoked and fanned by those sworn to protect them, and the conduct under investigation extends far beyond typical deliberations concerning the proper discharge of the President’s constitutional responsibilities. The constitutional protections of executive privilege should not be used to shield, from Congress or the public, information that reflects a clear and apparent effort to subvert the Constitution itself.”
According to MSNBC, those documents include Twitter messages, phone and visitor logs, videos and photos of Trump’s events, all documents and communications related to Vice President Mike Pence’s movements and security, the planning around the counting of the certified votes, and any other documents concerning either the rally at the Ellipse or the Capitol riot.
In other news, the Republican attorney general of Texas, Ken Paxton, asked a federal appeals court to reinstate S.B. 8, the so-called heartbeat bill banning abortion six weeks into a pregnancy, before most women know they’re pregnant. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit granted his request to suspend the order blocking the law. So S.B. 8 is back in force.
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Spent the day with family and friends, and they wore me out!
The only sunrise I'm going to be awake for in the next several hours is the one below. I'll see you all tomorrow.
[Photo by Buddy Poland]
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The fight over raising the debt ceiling reveals that the Trump wing has taken control of the Republican Party.
Defaulting on our debt for the first time in our history would have crushed our economy and forfeited our international standing. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that a default would be “catastrophic,” creating “a permanently weaker nation.”
Financial analysts at Moody’s Analytics noted that when a problem with word-processing equipment at the Treasury led it inadvertently to miss payments on Treasury bills in 1979, the resulting jump in interest rates ultimately cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned that default would undermine our international reputation.
But when the House passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling, Senate Republicans killed the measure with the filibuster, the Senate rule that allows debate to continue without a vote until 60 members of the Senate vote to end debate—a rule that essentially means it takes 60 votes, rather than a simple majority, to pass any bill the minority wants to block.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) agreed that the ceiling must be raised. But then he insisted he would not allow Democrats to pass the bill with a simple majority. He told them they must pass a measure raising the debt ceiling in a reconciliation package, which cannot be filibustered but which would make it harder for Democrats to pass their popular infrastructure measures. Democrats noted that the Republicans ran up the debt and now should agree to pay it, and they refused to try to rush through a reconciliation package to shield the Republicans from their responsibility.
And then, as business leaders began to map out a pressure campaign to get McConnell to drop the filibuster, he backed down and agreed…not to allow a simple majority vote, but to find ten votes to break a filibuster.
As co-host of Pod Save America Dan Pfeiffer noted in his newsletter The Message Box, that approach suggested that McConnell has lost control of his caucus. Any senator can vote against allowing a simple majority, and it seems McConnell could not trust the other Republican senators to permit a vote and so had to try to force the Democrats to do things his way. But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called his bluff.
McConnell scrounged up the votes he needed but then wrote a scathing letter to President Joe Biden, announcing he would “not provide such assistance again if your all-Democrat government drifts into another avoidable crisis.” But the truth is that he is putting the best spin he can on the fact he can’t help even if he wanted to: he no longer controls the caucus.
Immediately, former president Trump issued a statement blaming McConnell for “folding to the Democrats, again. He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand. Don’t let them destroy our country!”
On September 22, Trump explained that to stop the Democrats, the Republicans might have to burn down the country: “The way I look at it,” he wrote, “what the Democrats are proposing, on so many different levels, will destroy our country. Therefore, Republicans have no choice but to do what they have to do, and the Democrats will have no choice but to concede all of the horror they are trying to inflict upon the future of the United States.”
Those who agree with Trump are now in charge of the Republican Party.
Today, on Fox News Sunday, the second-ranking Republican in the House, Steve Scalise (R-LA), refused repeatedly to say that Biden had won the 2020 election. Although then–attorney general and Trump loyalist Bill Barr said there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud, and state election officials and judges have all agreed there were no irregularities that would have changed the outcome, Scalise backed Trump’s Big Lie that he actually won the 2020 election.
He did so by arguing that certain states had not followed the Constitution when state judges, governors, and election officials expanded mail-in voting during the pandemic. There is no indication that those adjustments changed the outcome of the election, but in summer 2020 Trump became fixated on the idea that mail-in voting hurt his reelection campaign.
As soon as Trump lost the election, he began to try to get officials to cheat to say he won, and then to replace officials who refused with those he thought would help him keep the presidency. On January 2, he tried to browbeat Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger into “finding” 11,780 votes in Georgia—one more than Biden’s margin of victory. Then he fired the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, BJay Pak, because he would not produce evidence of fraud, replacing him with someone Trump hoped would.
Now, across Republican-dominated states, Trump Republicans are doing the same thing: attacking those Republican officials who refuse to say the 2020 election was stolen and replacing them with partisans who will. In Hood County, Texas, where Trump won 81% of the vote, his supporters are trying to get rid of the Republican elections official who is trying to preserve the security of elections by, for example, excluding from a private meeting a journalist from One America News.
At the local level, anti–mask mandate and anti-vaccine protesters are bullying school board members and town officials to demand that local leaders bow to their wishes, and they are threatening violence in a way that looks much like the rise of anti-socialist gangs in the 1930s that fed the rise of fascism.
Last week, Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who is currently defying a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol, told an audience that he would have 20,000 “shock troops” on hand to take over the government and deconstruct it as soon as Republicans again are in charge. “We control this country,” he said. “We have to start acting like it.”
Today, on the birthday of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by an officer as she tried to break through a barricaded door to stop the counting of the ballots that would make Biden president, Trump recorded a video for a family event saying: “There was no reason Ashli should have lost her life that day. We must all demand justice for Ashli and her family.”
Last night, in Iowa, Trump held a “rally.” Mainstream Republican officials, including Senator Chuck Grassley, Governor Kim Reynolds, and Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Ashley Hinson, attended. Right on cue, a Trump supporter told a reporter: “We’re just sick of it, you know, and we’re not going to take it any more. I see a civil war coming….”
Today’s split in the Republican Party mirrors the split in the Democrats in 1860. The leadership is made up of extremists who consider their opponents illegitimate, maintain they alone understand the Constitution, and are skewing the mechanics of our electoral system to keep themselves in power. In 1860, the Democratic Party split, its moderates joining with the fledgling Republicans to defend the United States of America.
Then, as now, the radicals calling for the destruction of the nation were a shrinking minority desperate to cling to power. Then they took up arms to divide the nation in two and keep power in their part of it; now they are launching a quieter war simply by rigging future elections to conquer the whole nation.
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Both the New York Times and the Washington Post today ran op-eds from Republicans or former Republicans urging members of their party who still value democracy to vote Democratic until the authoritarian faction that has taken over their party is bled out of it.
In the New York Times, Miles Taylor and Christine Todd Whitman wrote, “We are Republicans. There’s only one way to save our party from pro-Trump extremists.” Taylor served in the Department of Homeland Security and was the author of the 2018 New York Times piece by “Anonymous” criticizing former president Trump. Whitman was governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001, after which she headed the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush.
Taylor and Whitman note that “rational Republicans” had hoped after Trump’s defeat that they might take back the party, but it is clear now, they write, that they are losing the party’s “civil war.” But while they originally hoped to form a new party, they now agree that the only way to stop Trumpism “is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year—including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats.” To defend democracy, they write, “concerned conservatives must join forces with Democrats on the most essential near-term imperative: blocking Republican leaders from regaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives” and the Senate.
They call for Republicans to put country over party and back moderate Democrats, while also asking Democrats to concede that “there are certain races where progressives simply cannot win and acknowledg[e] that it makes more sense to throw their lot in with a center-right candidate who can take out a more radical conservative.”
At the Washington Post, Max Boot takes an even stronger stand: “I’m no Democrat—but I’m voting exclusively for Democrats to save our democracy.” Boot is a Russian-American specialist in foreign affairs who identifies as a conservative but no longer supports the Republican Party. He writes: “I’m a single-issue voter. My issue is the fate of democracy in the United States. Simply put, I have no faith that we will remain a democracy if Republicans win power. Thus, although I’m not a Democrat, I will continue to vote exclusively for Democrats—as I have done in every election since 2016—until the GOP ceases to pose an existential threat to our freedom.”
Boot singles out the dueling reports from the Senate Judiciary Committee about the nine ways in which Trump tried to pressure then–acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen to back his claims of election fraud. The Democrats on the committee established these efforts with an evidence-based report, only to have the Republicans on the committee, led by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), respond that the president was simply trying to promote confidence in the election results and that since he did not ultimately replace Rosen with another lawyer who promised to use the Justice Department to challenge the election—after the other leaders of the Justice Department threatened to resign in a mass protest—he did not actually abuse his office.
Boot writes, “It is mind-boggling that a defeated president won’t accept the election outcome…. What is even more alarming is that more than 60 percent of Republicans agree with his preposterous assertion that the election was stolen and want him to remain as the party’s leader.”
Taylor, Whitman, and Boot are hardly the first to be calling out the anti-democratic consolidation of the Republican Party. Yesterday, Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, managed Trump’s first impeachment trial, and sits on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, gave an interview to CBS’s Face the Nation in which he called the Republican Party “an autocratic cult around Donald Trump” that is “not interested in governing” or “maintaining the solvency of the country.”
But what makes today’s op-eds stand out is that they are from former Republicans, that they are calling not for a separate party but for Republicans to shift their votes to the Democrats, and that their identification of the Republicans as an existential threat to our democracy is being published in major newspapers.
Mainstream television and newspapers have been slow to identify the radicalization of the Republican Party as a threat to democracy. The Eastman memo, uncovered by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa at the end of September in their new book Peril, flew largely under the radar screen, explained away as more of Trump being Trump even as it laid out, in writing, the steps to overturn the 2020 election and even as we knew that the former president tried to put that plan into place. A study by Media Matters showed that ABC, NBC, and CBS all chose not even to mention the memo; they reach more than 20 million Americans.
On Saturday, a monologue by comedian Bill Maher about the Eastman memo titled “Slow Moving Coup” laid out in 8 minutes how Trump tried to steal the 2020 election and how, when officials resisted him, he set out to solidify his power for 2024. Maher woke people up to the ongoing crisis in our democracy.
Maher’s monologue, along with the draft Senate Judiciary Committee report, which sets out in detail the efforts the former president made to bend the Department of Justice to his will, seems to have driven home to members of the press the fact that they cannot present today’s news as business as usual, especially after their presentation of the debt ceiling crisis as a political horse race when one side was trying to save the country and the other to destroy it. In the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday, journalist Will Bunch wrote: “The future of American democracy depends, frankly, on whether journalists stop burying their head in ‘the work’ of balanced-but-misleading reporting and admit that, yes, actually, we are at war.”
Bunch pointed out that on Friday, the Nobel Peace Prize went to two journalists, Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia. Both have braved political persecution and threats to hold the autocratic leaders of their countries—Rodrigo Duterte and Vladimir Putin—to account, battling against the online disinformation and attacks on the press that shore up their support.
"In a battle for facts, in a battle for truth, journalism is activism," Ressa said in 2020. Disinformation, she said, “is how you transform a democracy. This is death by a thousand cuts. The same thing is happening in the United States. I think the goal of influence operations or information operations is to seed it, repeat it, incite hate and...change the way real people think, and that impacts the real world. This is happening all around the world. That's what the research has shown us, that's what the data shows us.”
In 1854, the elite slaveholders who controlled the Democratic Party at the time pressured Congress to bow to their will and overturn the Missouri Compromise that had kept enslavement out of the western territories. Northern men, who disagreed among themselves on party allegiance, and immigration, and economic policies, and women’s rights, and Black rights, recognized that the acquisition of new western slave states would mean it was only a question of time until the enslavers took over the federal government and made their oligarchical system national.
Northern men recognized they must put their political differences aside until they saved democracy. Abraham Lincoln later remembered that men were “thunderstruck and stunned” by the passage of the law that overturned the Missouri Compromise, “and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver…. “‘[O]ur drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform,” Lincoln said, but “[w]hen the storm shall be past, [men] shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
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Tonight the House voted to raise the debt ceiling by $480 billion, which should keep the country afloat until December 3. The vote was 219 to 206, with all Republicans either voting no or refusing to vote.
Republican representative Andy Biggs from Arizona moved to adjourn Congress rather than take the vote at all. Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) said he would not vote to raise the debt ceiling because government spending funds “tyranny” over people’s lives. He complained about “a border that’s not secure,” “Critical Race Theory being taught to our children,” and a litany of other Republican talking points.
The debt ceiling needs to be raised not to pay for future spending, but for past spending, including the $7.8 trillion the Republicans put on the national tab during the four years of the Trump presidency.
Permitting the nation to default on its debts would crash the economy and destroy our international standing, likely for the foreseeable future. But Republicans are willing to do that if it means regaining power by playing to their base.
With Democrats in control of the national government, Republicans are retreating to the states to launch their bid to take back national power. Having cemented their control of Republican-dominated states with new election laws that suppress Democratic voting or give control of certifying elections to Republican boards, Republicans are much more concerned about challenges from the right than they are about having to moderate their stands.
This has made them increasingly radical. Today, on the day that CNN reported that official deaths from coronavirus have reached 715,000, Ohio Republican representative Jim Jordan tweeted that Ohio should end all vaccine mandates. That would include vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, measles, mumps, and rubella, among other diseases.
Texas governor Greg Abbott went further. He signed an executive order prohibiting “any entity” from enforcing a vaccine mandate in Texas. This was not just a play to anti-vaxxers, but a declaration that his state is supreme over the federal government. Last month, President Joe Biden announced vaccine requirements for all federal workers and contractors, and today, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the Department of Labor announced a vaccine or testing requirement for any company with 100 or more employees.”
This is not the first time Abbott has made such a demonstration. In June, he and Arizona governor Doug Ducey sent a letter to the other 48 governors asking them to send reinforcements to the southern border to do the job the Biden administration was, they wrote, “unwilling or unable” to do.
Six Republican governors answered their call with support that was more symbolic than powerful. Florida governor Ron DeSantis sent 50 law enforcement officers; Ohio governor Michael DeWine sent 185; Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts sent 24. Iowa governor Kim Reynolds sent “up to 30” National Guard troops; Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson sent 40; and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem sent “up to 50,” allegedly funded by a private donation. She boasted of this deployment at the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) and on the Fox News Channel.
Those troops have been quietly brought home over the past few months, but their deployment demonstrated the states’ willingness to flex their muscles against the federal government and has forced the military into the center of the enforcement of right-wing ideology.
And, of course, the Texas anti-abortion law, S.B. 8, has offered a blueprint for other states to take away their citizens’ constitutional rights by turning over enforcement of the law to private individuals rather than the state. All constitutional rights—including all civil rights—could be overturned by vigilantes under this policy.
The Republicans’ resorting to cementing their power in the states echoes the path of southern Democrats in 1860. Aware they had lost control of the national government, they turned to radicalizing their states, then forced the states out of the Union quickly, before popular opposition could mobilize against secession.
When radicals took to the states to cement their power in 1860, the federal government had little power to stop them.
But in 1868, in the wake of the Civil War, Congress remedied that deficiency with the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. That amendment increased the power of the federal government over the states to protect civil rights. It declared, “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That same amendment protected the sanctity of the national debt, declaring that “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”
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President Joe Biden has tried to move the country beyond the partisanship of the current Republican Party by focusing on making government work so that people forget their differences and direct their attention to rebuilding the country. It is not an easy task, especially when the Republicans illustrate, as they did with their votes on raising the debt ceiling, that they would happily tank the country if it means regaining power.
But Biden’s push forward is bearing fruit.
Last Friday, October 8, 130 nations agreed to a minimum global tax of 15% on companies with an annual income higher than about $866 million, stopping what is called a “race to the bottom” as different countries try to attract businesses by cutting tax rates lower and lower. The deal should immediately raise about $150 billion around the world. It also requires companies to pay taxes in countries where their goods are sold, even if their plants are elsewhere, a requirement that should move about $125 billion around the world.
This agreement, hammered out by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a group of 38 high-income democracies, has been about six years in the making. Biden helped to revive the process when he took office, knowing that his own push to restore U.S. corporate taxes to a level closer to what they were when the Republicans under Trump cut them in 2017 depends on making sure that American companies won’t simply relocate to other countries.
But he was not alone in a desire to cut back on tax havens. In November 2020, a report from the OECD showed that countries were losing about $427 billion a year as corporations and wealthy individuals hid their money in tax havens. The U.S. alone is losing about $90 billion, although the losses hit poorer companies harder because they are losing a greater proportion of their revenue. Corporations are hiding about $1.38 trillion in profits, costing their home countries about $245 billion, while wealthy individuals using tax havens cost their home countries about $182 billion a year.
In December 2020, Congress rolled into a defense spending bill a law that requires shell companies to disclose their actual owners, cutting down on money laundering. “It is absurd that the U.S. allows criminals to launder their money here. We’re the only advanced country in the world that doesn’t already require disclosure” of company ownership,” said Representative Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), who sponsored the measure.
The Pandora Papers, an exposé published last week by the Washington Post and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, explored who is using tax havens and how they are constructed. It revealed that some of them have sprung up here in the U.S., notably in South Dakota. Lawmakers of both parties say they want to pass a law requiring investigations of foreign clients moving money or assets into the U.S. financial system.
Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka have not joined the global minimum tax agreement.
Today, OECD sent the deal to the finance ministers of the Group of Twenty, commonly known as the G20, consisting of 19 countries and the European Union which together make up about 90% of the gross world product, about 75–80% of international trade, and about two thirds of the world’s population. Those finance leaders are meeting today in Washington, D.C.
At the end of the month, it will go before the G20 leaders, who are meeting then in Rome. “Today’s agreement will make our international tax arrangements fairer and work better,” OECD Secretary-General Mathias Cormann said. “This is a major victory for effective and balanced multilateralism. It is a far-reaching agreement which ensures our international tax system is fit for purpose in a digitalized and globalized world economy.” If it is signed in 2022, it will take effect in 2023.
In the U.S., Republicans immediately opposed the deal and said they would stop it, but on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said she expects the measure to be put into the so-called reconciliation bill currently being hashed out in Congress.
Biden also announced today a deal among a number of different players to try to relieve the supply chain slowdowns that have built up as people turned to online shopping during the pandemic. Those slowdowns threaten the delivery of packages for the holidays, and Biden has pulled together government officials, labor unions, and company ownership to solve the backup.
The Port of Los Angeles, which handles 40% of the container traffic coming into the U.S., has had container ships stuck offshore for weeks. In June, Biden put together a Supply Chain Disruption Task Force, which has hammered out a deal. The port is going to begin operating around the clock, seven days a week. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union has agreed to fill extra shifts. And major retailers, including Walmart, FedEx, UPS, Samsung, Home Depot, and Target, have agreed to move quickly to clear their goods out of the dock areas, speeding up operations to do it and committing to putting teams to work extra hours.
“The supply chain is essentially in the hands of the private sector,” a White House official told Donna Littlejohn of the Los Angeles Daily News, “so we need the private sector...to help solve these problems.” But Biden has brokered a deal among the different stakeholders to end what was becoming a crisis.
Finally, data reveals that for all the oxygen anti–vaccine mandate people are consuming, Biden’s vaccine mandates (which in many cases allow for frequent testing rather than the vaccine) work. Since last month, when requirements went into effect, vaccination rates have jumped by 20 percentage points, reaching more than 90% in many of the health care companies, schools, and other affected organizations. The rate for Americans aged 18 to 64 not covered by mandates is only 63%. The same period has seen the rate of unvaccinated Americans cut by one third. In late July, when the President announced the first vaccination requirement for the federal government, from 95 million eligible Americans to 67 million.
As the number of people getting a first shot has jumped to about a million a day, cases of infection are declining, and deaths have dropped to about 1,690 a day, still a shocking number but one that is finally moving in the right direction.
This afternoon, the Biden administration lifted the restrictions on travelers crossing the Canadian and Mexican borders, allowing vaccinated individuals into the country. The president and chief executive of the U.S. Travel Association, Roger Dow, told the New York Times: “After months of closure, the reopening of U.S. land borders to vaccinated visitors will bring a welcome surge in travel from our two top source markets of inbound travel, Canada and Mexico.”
Biden is trying to move the country past the partisan battles of the past several years. He is also trying to show Americans that the government is often not the problem, but rather a solution to one.
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Today Stephen K. Bannon, a one-time adviser to former president Trump, was supposed to testify before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Yesterday, Bannon’s lawyer sent a letter to committee chair Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) saying that Bannon would neither produce documents nor testify because “President Trump”—not former president Trump—“is exercising his executive privilege; therefore, he has directed Mr. Bannon not to produce documents until the issue of executive privilege is resolved.”
This is a weird argument. Bannon was not, in fact, employed by the White House at the time of the January 6 insurrection, there is no executive privilege for a former president, the events of January 6 were not part of the duties of the president, and the current president, Democrat Joe Biden, has waived executive privilege in this case.
Furthermore, although Trump has suggested he “plans to” challenge the subpoenas on the grounds of executive privilege, he has apparently not actually done so, and he is having trouble finding lawyers willing to work for him. He has a bad reputation when it comes to paying his bills and is perceived as toxic after January 6.
When Bannon didn’t show up, committee chair Thompson issued a statement saying that the committee would “move forward with proceedings to refer Mr. Bannon for criminal contempt.” House rules require a three-day notice for a meeting to refer Bannon, so the committee will vote next Tuesday on a contempt report. If approved, the report will go to the House, which can then vote to send it to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
The former president promptly issued a statement complaining that the committee was considering criminal contempt, but the statement felt weak and repetitive—rather as if he was just going through the motions—and, ominously for Bannon, didn’t mention his former friend by name.
Even aside from this interplay, the law loomed large today in national politics.
The January 6th committee is already hearing from some of the key players in the Trump administration around the time of the insurrection. Yesterday, former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, who stepped in to head the Department of Justice after William Barr resigned in December 2020, testified before the committee.
On Tuesday, the committee issued a subpoena for Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department attorney who tried to find a way to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump talked of replacing Rosen with Clark, only to face an all-out rebellion from within the DOJ when officials threatened to resign as a group if he went forward with the plan. Within hours of the subpoena, Clark’s current employer had scrubbed him from their website.
Today, a judge ruled that the former president has to appear for a videotaped deposition in a lawsuit in which Mexican protesters said they were attacked in 2015 outside Trump Tower in New York as they protested against his slurs against Mexican immigrants. “Donald J. Trump shall appear for a deposition October 18, 2021 at 10 a.m. ... or, in the event of illness or emergency, on another mutually agreed to date on or before October 31, 2021,” Judge Doris Gonzalez's order said.
Also today, Andrew McCabe, whom Trump fired from the FBI 26 hours before his retirement in 2018, settled a lawsuit with the Department of Justice. McCabe was the deputy director of the FBI when Trump fired FBI director James Comey, and McCabe continued to explore the ties between the Trump administration and Russian operatives after Comey’s firing. Trump continued to browbeat McCabe until he was fired, just before his pension went into effect. The settlement restored his pension, paid him back pay, and provided some of his attorney’s fees. McCabe called it a “complete vindication.”
For all the other legal news in the media today, the former president seemed to focus his wrath on news from Arizona. His spokesperson hammered on the idea—now thoroughly debunked—that the vote in that county was suspicious.
But on that front, too, judges had something to say. The Arizona Senate had argued that they had the right to withhold records with information about their “audit” of the votes in that county because those records involved deliberations about the process, but today the Superior Court of Maricopa County ruled that the public’s interest in transparency trumped any argument for secrecy and that they must produce the records.
Trump loyalists are suddenly focusing on the supply chain delays that they say will ruin Christmas. Ohio Representative Jim Jordan tweeted today that Christmas presents were never late when Trump was in charge, leading Princeton historian Kevin Kruse to accompany Jordan’s tweet with a post of a CBS headline from December 24 of last year, saying “More than one million packages will not reach their destinations this Christmas.” Journalist Aaron Rupar, who writes the newsletter Public Notice, pointed out today that Christmas has been mentioned at least 106 times on the Fox News Channel since yesterday morning, not including reruns.
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Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told his colleagues that on Monday evening he plans to bring up the Freedom to Vote Act and to try to get it through the Senate.
The Republicans are determined not to let Democrats level the electoral playing field. While Democrats in the House, where legislation can pass with a simple majority vote, have passed voting rights laws, Democrats in the Senate have to deal with the filibuster, which enables senators in the minority to block legislation unless the Democrats can muster 60 votes. Republicans are dead set against voting rights laws. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has called voting reform “a solution in search of a problem,” driven by “coordinated lies about commonsense election laws that various states have passed.”
Are the 33 election laws 19 states have passed to restrict the vote really “commonsense election laws”?
Today, Meridith McGraw at Politico reported that America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a think tank of former Trump officials, says the priority for a second Trump administration would be new election laws. The president of AFPI, Brooke Rollins, who was in the Trump White House, said election reform would be top priority. Trump argues, without evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen. But, Rollins said, Trump might not have to push voting restrictions because the states have passed them already.
In 1776, the Founders declared “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
There have always been fights over who should have a say in our society, and until 1870, most voters in the United States were white men. After the Civil War, in 1870, the Republicans then in charge of Congress expanded the pool of voters to enfranchise Black men attacked by white gangs and undermined by white legislators.
In that year, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution declared that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” That amendment also gave Congress power to enforce that amendment.
Almost immediately, white southerners determined to prevent their Black neighbors from affecting society through their votes began to keep Black Americans from the polls. By the early 1960s, fewer than 5% of eligible Black voters were registered in Mississippi, and when organizers tried to help them enforce their right to vote, white gangs and government officials harassed them, occasionally to the point of murder.
Appalled at the violence playing out on the streets and then again on the evening news, lawmakers in 1965 passed the Voting Rights Act. It required that states with a history of discrimination get preapproval from the Department of Justice to change state election laws. The measure passed on a bipartisan basis.
But the impulse to expand voting rights in America would face a backlash in 1986, when Reagan Republicans realized they were in danger of losing control of the government and thus losing the 1986 tax cuts. Republicans began to talk of cutting down black voting under a “ballot integrity” initiative in 1986, and new voter restrictions in Florida paid off in the 2000 election, when Republican George W. Bush won by a handful of votes there after many more votes had been suppressed.
When Democrats tried to shore up voting with an expansion of voter registration at certain state offices in 1993, with the so-called Motor Voter Law, Republicans exploded. A New York Times writer said Republicans saw the measures “as special efforts to enroll core Democratic constituencies in welfare and jobless-benefits offices.” As Democrats began to focus on expanding voting rights, Republicans focused on restricting the vote.
By 1994, losing Republican candidates were charging that Democrats won elections with “voter fraud.” In 1996, House and Senate Republicans each launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, helping to convince Americans that voter fraud was a serious issue and that Democrats were winning elections thanks to illegal, usually immigrant, voters.
When voters nonetheless reelected Democratic president Bill Clinton in 1996, Republicans did their best to undermine his presidency—and eventually impeached him—but the elevation of biracial Democrat Barack Obama to the White House in 2008 prompted a new level of attacks on the electoral system. The Supreme Court in the 2010 Citizens United decision permitted a flood of corporate money to flow into the electoral system, and then, in the 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision, it gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
With Justice Department preclearance out of the way, states promptly began to pass discriminatory election laws. In 2021, in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court said such laws were not prohibited, thus greenlighting the new election laws passed by Republican-dominated states after voters choose Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.
And so, here we are. Republicans are trying to regain control of the government by making sure their opponents can’t vote, while Democrats are trying to level a badly tilted playing field. If the Democrats do not succeed in passing a voting rights law, we can expect America to become a one-party state that, at best, will look much like the American South did between 1876 and 1964.
Our nation will no longer be a democracy.
There are currently three voting measures before Congress. The For the People Act is a sweeping measure that cuts back on voter suppression, ends partisan gerrymandering, curbs dark money in politics, and combats corruption. The House of Representatives passed this measure in early March 2021 and sent it to the Senate, where Republicans blocked it using a filibuster.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act would restore the protections of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court gutted in the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision. The House of Representatives passed this measure in late August 2021 and sent it to the Senate, where it sits under threat of a filibuster.
In the Senate, Joe Manchin (D-WV) expressed misgivings about the voting measures and vowed to hammer out a voting rights bill that could attract the votes of ten Republicans and thus break a filibuster. He and a number of Democratic colleagues announced the Freedom to Vote Act in mid-September 2021. If there are ten Republicans to support the measure, we have not yet seen them.
The Senate will vote on the Freedom to Vote Act on Wednesday.
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On October 8, the executive director of curriculum and instruction for the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, Texas, told a teacher to make sure to follow Texas’s new law requiring teachers to present opposing views on controversial subjects. The Carroll school board had recently reprimanded a fourth-grade teacher who had kept an anti-racism book in her classroom, and teachers wanted to know what books they could keep in their own classrooms.
“Just try to remember the concepts of [House Bill] 3979,” the curriculum director said. “And make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust,” the director continued, “that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.”
The Holocaust was Nazi Germany’s systematic murder of about two thirds of Europe’s Jewish population—about six million people—during World War II.
“How do you oppose the Holocaust?” one teacher said.
“Believe me,” the director said. “That’s come up.”
The Texas legislature passed another law that is going into effect in December. S.B. 3, known as the Critical Race Theory bill. It specifies what, exactly, social studies courses should teach to students. Those guidelines present a vision of how American citizens should perceive their nation.
They should have “an understanding of the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government; the history, qualities, traditions, and features of civic engagement in the United States; the structure, function, and processes of government institutions at the federal, state, and local levels.”
But they should get that information in a specific way: through the Declaration of Independence; the United States Constitution; the Federalist Papers, including Essays 10 and 51; excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America; the transcript of the first Lincoln-Douglas debate; and the writings of the founding fathers of the United States; the history and importance of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964; and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.
While they managed to add in de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—and I would be shocked if more than a handful of people have ever read that account of early America—there are some pointed omissions from this list. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees Black voting, didn’t make it, although the Nineteenth Amendment, which grants women the right to vote, did. Also missing is the Voting Rights Act of 1965, although the Civil Rights Act of the previous year is there.
Topics explicitly eliminated from the teaching standard are also instructive. Those things cut from the standards include: “the history of Native Americans,” and “[founding] mothers and other founding persons.”
Under “commitment to free speech and civil discourse,” topics struck from the standards include “the writings of…George Washington; Ona Judge (a woman Washington enslaved and who ran away); Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings (the enslaved woman Jefferson took as a sexual companion after the death of his wife, her half-sister),” and “any other founding persons of the United States.”
The standards lost Frederick Douglass’s writings, the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that forced Indigenous Americans off their southeastern lands, and Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists defending the separation of church and state. The standards lost “historical documents related to the civic accomplishments of marginalized populations” including documents related to the Chicano movement, women’s suffrage and equal rights, the civil rights movement, Indigenous rights, and the American labor movement.
The standards also lost “the history of white supremacy, including but not limited to the institution of slavery, the eugenics movement, and the Ku Klux Klan, and the ways in which it is morally wrong” and “the history and importance of the civil rights movement.” The legislature took three pages to outline all the things that teachers may not teach, including all the systemic biases the right associates with Critical Race Theory (although that legal theory is not taught in K–12 schools), and anything having to do with the 1619 Project.
Teachers cannot be forced to teach current events or controversial issues, but if they choose to do so, they must “strive to explore that topic from diverse and contending perspectives without giving deference to any one perspective.” Supporters of the measure said that teachers should teach facts and not “choose sides.”
The lawmakers who wrote the new standards said they had been crafted to eliminate redundancy. In 2019, the state wrote standards to teach character traits—courage, integrity and honesty—and instructions to include particular people or events could simply duplicate those concepts. “If you want to talk about courage, talk about George Washington crossing the Delaware, or William Barret Travis defending the Alamo,” a member of the state board of education said.
Editing from our history Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the National Farmworkers’ Association—she was eliminated by name—as well as Abigail Adams and Frederick Douglass and the 1924 Snyder Act (by which the nation recognized Indigenous citizenship) does more than whitewash our history. That editing warps what it means to be an American.
Our history is not about individual feats of courage or honesty in a vacuum. It is about the tireless efforts of people in this country from all backgrounds and all walks of life to determine their own fate and to elect a government that will support that ambition.
A curriculum that talks about individual courage and integrity while erasing the majority of us, as well as the rules that enable us to have a say in our government by voting, is deliberately untethered from national democratic principles.
It gives us a school that does not dare take a position on the Holocaust.
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It's pretty much peak leaf season in Maine now.
Here's a picture of one of these glorious days to finish your weekend, and I'll see you tomorrow.
I suspect it's going to be a busy week.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
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Today, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol recommended that the House of Representatives find Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon in contempt of Congress. Bannon is refusing to cooperate with a subpoena for documents and testimony about the events surrounding the January 6 insurrection. Now the House will take up the question of contempt.
The committee report is a lot more interesting than that topline suggests (political historian here: although people tend to watch what happens before the TV cameras, committee reports are often where the action is).
The report starts by stating that the attempt of “a violent mob” to “halt the lawful counting of electoral votes and reverse the results of the 2020 election” was, according to “the words of many of those who participated in the violence, ...a direct response to false statements by then-President Donald J. Trump—beginning on election night 2020 and continuing through January 6, 2021—that the 2020 election had been stolen by corrupted voting machines, widespread fraud, and otherwise.”
The committee is laying the events of January 6 on Trump.
Congress established the committee, the report says, “to identify how the events of January 6th were planned, what actions and statements motivated and contributed to the attack on the Capitol, how the violent riot that day was coordinated with a political and public relations strategy to reverse the election outcome, and why Capitol security was insufficient to address what occurred.”
The committee is saying that the riot was coordinated ahead of time, and it appears to suggest that Capitol security was compromised.
Then the report explains why Bannon is an important witness. Its account of his actions in that crisis is an illuminating roundup of what we have seen in pieces in many other places. It concludes that Bannon knew specifically about the events of January 6 ahead of time.
On his January 5 podcasts, for example, he said:
“It’s not going to happen like you think it’s going to happen. OK, it’s going to be quite extraordinarily different. All I can say is, strap in. [. . .] You made this happen and tomorrow it’s game day. So strap in. Let’s get ready.”
“All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. [. . .] So many people said, ‘Man, if I was in a revolution, I would be in Washington.’ Well, this is your time in history.”
Bannon said that the country was facing a ‘‘constitutional crisis’’ and ‘‘that crisis is about to go up about five orders of magnitude tomorrow.’’
And: “It’s all converging, and now we’re on the point of attack tomorrow.”
So, the committee report suggests there was high-level planning for the January 6 insurrection. And it goes on:
The report says that it appears Bannon joined others eager to overturn the election “who gathered at the Willard Hotel, two blocks from the White House, on the days surrounding the January 6th attack…. The group that assembled at the Willard Hotel is reported to have included members of the Trump campaign’s legal team (including Rudolph Giuliani and John Eastman), several prominent proponents of false election fraud claims that had been promoted by Mr. Trump (e.g., Russell Ramsland, Jr. and Boris Epshteyn), as well as Roger Stone, who left the hotel with Oath Keeper bodyguards, and campaign spokesman Jason Miller.”
Then the report blows up the idea that Bannon had an excuse not to testify.
Bannon refused to honor the subpoena because he claimed that Trump was going to invoke executive privilege, but “Trump has had no communication with the Select Committee.” “This third-hand, non-specific assertion of privilege, without any description of the documents or testimony over which privilege is claimed, is insufficient to activate a claim of executive privilege,” it says. In any case, as a private citizen at the time of the events in question, Bannon would not be covered by executive privilege anyway.
This is a powerful document, laying out the direction the committee report is likely to go.
Today, former president Donald Trump did, in fact, invoke executive privilege…but not to cover Bannon.
He sued Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), the chair of the House Select Committee; the committee itself; the national archivist, David S. Ferriero; and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to try to prevent the National Archives from releasing records from the January 6 insurrection to the House committee investigating it.
The suit alleges that the investigation is a “fishing expedition” designed “to harass President Trump and senior members of his administration (among others) by sending an illegal, unfounded, and overbroad records request to the Archivist of the United States.” It relies on executive privilege and the argument that there is no legitimate legislative reason for Congress to have access to the records it wants to see.
There are some oddities in this lawsuit. First off, executive privilege covers current presidents, not past ones, and President Biden has waived the privilege for these documents, saying it would not be “in the best interests of the United States.” White House counsel Dana Remus wrote: “These are unique and extraordinary circumstances. Congress is examining an assault on our Constitution and democratic institutions provoked and fanned by those sworn to protect them, and the conduct under investigation extends far beyond typical deliberations concerning the proper discharge of the President's constitutional responsibilities.” So a former president is asking a court to overrule a current president.
Second, the lawsuit covers only the material at NARA and none of the other requests the committee has made. This is for the obvious reason that executive privilege can’t cover things outside the scope of official business—which is archived at NARA—but since there is almost certainly a great deal of overlap in the material requested from different parties, this lawsuit seems likely to be designed not to hide evidence so much as to gum up the works. If the committee can be held at bay until after the 2022 election, a Republican victory might end its investigation.
Third, the lawyer bringing the lawsuit is Jesse R. Binnall, a Trump loyalist associated with Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell, who is currently being sued for $1.3 billion by the voting technology company she accused of stealing the 2020 election. Binnall is not a top-of-the-line attorney.
In response to the lawsuit, committee chair Thompson and Vice Chair Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) issued a statement noting that “the former President’s clear objective”—Trump’s supporters never use the word “former” to refer to him—“is to stop the Select Committee from getting to the facts about January 6th and his lawsuit is nothing more than an attempt to delay and obstruct our probe…. It’s hard to imagine a more compelling public interest than trying to get answers about an attack on our democracy and an attempt to overturn the results of an election.”
“The Select Committee’s authority to seek these records is clear. We’ll fight the former President’s attempt to obstruct our investigation while we continue to push ahead successfully with our probe on a number of other fronts.”
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Always eager to stay in the news, former president Trump issued statements today insulting former secretary of state and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, who passed at 84 yesterday after suffering complications from Covid-19. Trump also complained about the removal of a statue of Thomas Jefferson from the New York City Council Chamber. Unfortunately, he undermined his claim to be defending American history when he misidentified Jefferson as “a principal writer of the Constitution of the United States.”
Jefferson was in France when the Framers were drafting the Constitution. Jefferson is the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.
The rest of the government was dealing with the real world today, and their actions were not frivolous.
Early this morning, the FBI raided the homes associated with Russian oligarch and aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska in New York City and Washington, D.C. Deripaska is closely associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin and worked with Paul Manafort, who directed Trump’s 2016 campaign. During that campaign, Manafort shared secret polling information with his associate Konstantin Kilimnik with the understanding that Kilimnick would give that information to Deripaska. In 2018, the U.S. government put sanctions on Deripaska, but maneuvering by then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) meant Congress lifted them in 2019. Just months later, Deripaska invested in an aluminum plant in Kentucky.
The FBI did not comment on the raids.
After yesterday’s report recommending that the House of Representatives hold Stephen K. Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress for his refusal to honor a congressional subpoena, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol tonight voted to hold Bannon in contempt.
Both committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and vice-chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) spoke before the vote. Thompson called out Bannon as the only witness who was stonewalling the committee, and he warned that the committee would not excuse anyone. “No one in this country, no matter how wealthy or how powerful, is above the law,” he said.
Republican Cheney was more pointed. She noted that Bannon appears to have had “substantial advance knowledge of the plans for January 6th and likely had an important role in formulating those plans.” She also suggested that the arguments Bannon and Trump were making “appear to reveal one thing: they suggest that President Trump was personally involved in the planning and execution of January 6th. And we will get to the bottom of that.”
Cheney went on to “add one further thought, principally for my Republican colleagues.” “You all know that there is no evidence of widespread election fraud sufficient to overturn the election; you all know that the Dominion voting machines were not corrupted by a foreign power. You know these claims are false. Yet former President Trump repeats them almost daily.”
She asked her colleagues to “consider the fundamental questions of right and wrong here. The American people must know what happened. They must know the truth. All of us who are elected officials must do our duty to prevent the dismantling of the rule of law, and to ensure nothing like that dark day in January ever happens again.”
The issue now moves to the House floor for a vote.
Cheney was not the only one admonishing the Republicans to put aside partisanship and stand up for the country. The Senate will vote tomorrow on whether to take up the Freedom to Vote Act, with Republicans threatening to filibuster that procedural vote. Senator Angus King (I-ME) established himself today as a key advocate of the measure, and as the Senate’s conscience.
He reminded his colleagues that in a world of absolute monarchs, the U.S. was founded on the radical idea “that the people… are the ultimate source of power and can govern themselves through their elected representatives.” That idea “was tested at Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, and the Wilderness. It was defended at Anzio, Iwo Jima, and Normandy, and was reaffirmed in 1965.”
But democracy is fragile, and it most often fails “from erosion from within.”
The senator warned that most failed democracies start with legitimate elections, but that leaders then manipulate the system to stay in power, just as they have done recently in Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, and Hungary. In the U.S., if the new laws suppressing the vote and permitting partisans to choose their own electors over the wishes of the voters are allowed to stand, “we will be left with a downward spiral toward a hollow shell of democracy, where only raw power prevails and its peaceful transfer becomes a distant memory.”
King noted the profoundly dangerous breakdown of trust in the electoral system and called out the Republicans’ “overtly partisan attempt” to use the loss of trust as a justification to skew elections in the future. He demolished the idea that our elections are corrupted by “voter fraud,” and suggested the new election laws going into effect in Republican-dominated states are “stone-cold partisan voter suppression.”
King urged his colleagues to change course, “to pull our country back from the brink, and to begin the work of restoring our democracy as we did in the Revolution, as we did in the Civil War, and as we did in the Civil Rights struggles: first, by simply telling the truth and then by enacting a set of basic protections of the sacred right to vote.” If they will not, he said, we will lose “our identity as a people,...the miracle of self-government, and…the idea of America.”
“We are the heirs and trustees…of a tradition that goes back to Lincoln, Madison, and, yes, our friend John McCain,” Senator King reminded his colleagues. “All of them were partisans… but all shared an overriding commitment to the idea that animates the American experiment, the idea that our government is of, by, and for the people…. Now is the moment that we’re called upon to reach beyond our region, our state, our party, ourselves to save and reinvigorate the sputtering flame of the American idea.”
“Indeed,” he said, “destiny has placed us here at one of history’s fateful moments. Our response to it will be our most important legacy…. I believe we all know our responsibility, and whether we like it or not, history will record whether we, each of us, meets that responsibility.”
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This afternoon, Senate Republicans blocked a discussion of the Freedom to Vote Act. The measure is the compromise bill put together by seven Democrats and one Independent after Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) said he could not support the more sweeping For the People Act passed by the House of Representatives. Manchin maintained that a carefully crafted bill could attract the ten Republican senators it needed to break a filibuster.
The Freedom to Vote Act would provide for automatic and same-day voter registration, and it would limit the culling of voters off voter rolls. It would provide for two weeks of early voting and allow anyone to vote by mail. It would make Election Day a holiday and make sure that there is a paper trail for ballots.
At the state level, it would start the process of rolling back the legislation passed by 19 Republican-dominated state legislatures to skew elections hard in their favor. It would prohibit partisan gerrymandering, require transparency in advertising, and protect election officials from the attacks they’ve endured since the 2020 presidential election. It would rebuild the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which oversees our election process but which was gutted under former president Trump.
These reforms are nonpartisan and are an attempt to push back against highly partisan state laws that voting rights experts say will essentially allow Republicans to declare their own outcomes for elections.
Today all Republicans voted no even to a discussion of the bill. All Democrats voted yes, but Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) switched his vote to a no so that, as a member of the majority, he could bring the measure back up later.
What is stopping the measure from coming to the floor for debate is the Senate filibuster rule. That rule is a holdover from the early days of Congress, when there was no way to stop a member from talking, so that anyone eager to make sure something could not pass could just talk until the other members of Congress gave up and moved to another piece of business. The House early on created a mechanism to move from debate to a vote, but the Senate did not.
The filibuster is essentially a refusal to stop talking, although a series of reforms have changed it a bit from its early days. During Woodrow Wilson’s term in the early twentieth century, the Senate adopted the cloture rule, which permitted two thirds of the Senate to vote to stop the debate—but not immediately—and to move on to a vote. That’s where we get the concept that it takes 60 senators to break a filibuster.
In the late twentieth century, the Senate also changed that idea of nonstop talking to a threat to talk, lowering the bar significantly for a minority to stop legislation it doesn’t like. Nowadays, they can just phone it in. It also exempted certain financial bills from the filibuster: those are the things that fall under “budget reconciliation” measures. In the early twenty-first century, the Senate exempted judicial nominations from the filibuster and then, under then–Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Supreme Court nominations. (That’s how Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett got confirmed to the Supreme Court.)
There is discussion now about removing voting rules from the filibuster as well, since we are in a bizarre situation where states that have heavily gerrymandered their districts to benefit Republicans are passing voting restrictions by simple majority votes while the federal government, charged with protecting voting rights, needs a supermajority of the Senate. Since the Republican Senate seats skew heavily toward rural areas, in this case, it is possible for 41 Republican senators, who represent just 21% of the population, to stop voting rights legislation backed by 70% of Americans.
If this is permitted to stand, more and more voters will be silenced, and the nation will fall under a system of minority rule much like that in the American South between about 1876 and 1964. The South always held elections…and the outcome was always preordained.
Meanwhile, the Republicans who are demanding control of our elections are also doubling down on their support for the former president, knowing that their most reliable voters are his loyalists.
Today the House Rules Committee passed a resolution to send the criminal referral for Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, who defied a congressional subpoena, to the House floor for a vote. That itself wasn’t much of a surprise—it was procedural—but more surprising was the loud fight Representatives Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) put up against the resolution.
Both men are fervent Trump supporters, and Jordan, at least, is himself likely to be a witness before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. While they conceded that Joe Biden is indeed president, they refused to agree that he won the 2020 election, and they maintained that the investigation into the attack on the counting of the certified ballots on January 6—an attack that came close to pulling down our government—is simply an effort to distract voters from what they consider to be the failures of the Biden administration.
When the Rules Committee took a vote on whether to advance the report to the House floor, all the Democrats voted yes, and the Republicans voted no. The vote was 9–4.
But there was a new feeling in the room. When Gaetz and Jordan started in with their usual attacks to create sound bites, the Democrats pushed back. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a professor of constitutional law, actually said to Gaetz: “You know what, that might work on Steve Bannon’s podcast, but that’s not gonna work in the Rules Committee of the United States House of Representatives.”
Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA), the committee’s chair, pressed Jordan about his own conversations with Trump that day. Jordan has repeatedly changed his story about what he remembers about talking with the former president that day but has admitted that they spoke more than once. “Of course I talked to the president,” Jordan told McGovern. “I talked to him that day. I’ve been clear about that. I don’t recall the number of times, but it’s not about me. I know you want to make it about that.”
Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the majority leader of the House of Representatives, says the House will vote on the committee's criminal contempt report for Steve Bannon tomorrow. Republican leaders are urging House Republicans to vote no.
A reminder: Bannon flat out refused to answer a congressional subpoena.
Perhaps the Democrats are pushing back on the bullying of the Trump loyalists in part because some who have previously escaped legal jeopardy are now in trouble. In Florida, Gaetz’s former friend Joel Greenberg, who has pleaded guilty to sex trafficking, got an extension on sentencing Monday because he is still providing information to investigators. Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Handberg told the court that Greenberg has made allegations that "take us to some places we did not anticipate."
There is a shorter timeline for Representative Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), who was indicted yesterday for lying to the FBI about foreign campaign contributions (which are illegal under U.S. law). Fortenberry uploaded a video to YouTube, titled “I wanted you to hear from me first,” giving his version of events before the indictment dropped. In the video, filmed in a car with his wife and dog, he talked of the money in question but insisted he didn’t know it was from a foreign donor. Unfortunately, it appears there was a phone call between the congressman and the co-host of the fundraiser that brought in the illegal money. That individual was cooperating with the FBI, and in the call, he and Fortenberry discussed the illegal money in clear terms.
At his arraignment hearing today, Fortenberry’s attorney said he would try to get the court to suppress statements made by the congressman "because he was misled.”
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Last night, the “Trump Media and Technology Group” (TMTG) issued a press release announcing the creation of a “rival to the liberal media consortium” which would “fight back against the “Big Tech’ companies of Silicon Valley, which have used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in America.” The new social media site was called “Truth Social,” and his team advertised it as the first piece of a media empire that would take its place beside the leaders in the field. Rather than a “tweet,” a statement on the new site would be a “truth,” and the terms of service prohibited criticism of the former president.
Within hours the site had been hacked. Then it crashed. It also appears to have been built on open-source software whose developer warned that the Trump social media network might have violated the software company’s licensing rules.
Watching Trump’s flailing attempts to create his own media corporation—this is his second attempt—highlights that since 1980, the project of the Republican faction that is now in control of the party has been to take things apart rather than to build them. They have focused on dismantling the government and stopping legislation. It has been a negative project, rather than a positive one, and breaking things takes little of the hard work and creativity that it takes to build things.
When those accustomed to breaking things try to build them, they seem to have little idea of how much work it actually takes. They seem to think that actual accomplishments are there for the taking, and that splashy announcements and dramatic actions can solve intricate problems.
So, for example, we recently saw the story that in the midst of the early days of the pandemic, Trump adviser Stephen Miller went around then–defense secretary Mark Esper to try to send 250,000 troops to seal the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Aside from anything else, this would have dramatically weakened the U.S. around the world.
But it was at least not as immediately damaging as the suggestion of then-president Trump, who wanted to launch military attacks on Mexican drug cartels within Mexico, an idea that he backed away from only when advisers noted that this would be seen as a U.S. attack on Mexico, which is our largest trading partner.
Building is slow, hard work.
Tonight, at a town hall hosted by CNN, host Anderson Cooper asked Joe Biden if he expected to get a deal on the large infrastructure package the Democrats have been working for months to negotiate. Biden said he did think so, and he also said that this infrastructure deal was not, actually, the most difficult deal he’d ever negotiated. The most difficult one was the deal to ban assault weapons, and, as he said, he succeeded at that.
There is reason to think that a deal on infrastructure is close. The fighting among senators—which is at least partly performative, but some of which shows underlying tensions—and news of real cuts both suggest that real negotiations are underway. Real negotiations show effort to create a real deal.
Building things is hard work.
Today, the House of Representatives voted 229–202 to refer Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, who defied a congressional subpoena, to the Department of Justice on charges of criminal contempt.
In comments before the vote, the chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Bennie Thompson (D-MS), told his colleagues that if they voted against enforcing the subpoena, “you are saying to all future men and women who are called before this body that they can ignore a subpoena from Congress without consequence. The consequences of that vote won't be limited to this investigation and this subpoena alone.” A negative vote would cause “serious long-lasting damage to Congress.”
Only nine Republicans voted yes. Two hundred and two Republicans wanted Bannon, who is closely associated with the January 6 insurrection, to be able to ignore a congressional subpoena without any consequences for that defiance. The only representative who did not vote was Greg Pence (R-IN), brother of former vice president Mike Pence, whom the rioters threatened to hang.
During the debate, the vice chair of the January 6 committee, Liz Cheney (R-WY), called out Indiana Representative Jim Banks for writing to federal agencies to ask for any information they sent to the committee, representing himself as its ranking member, that is, its top Republican. It was a childishly transparent attempt by allies of the former president to figure out what the committee knows.
I mean, literally, under his name on a letter to the Secretary of the Interior are the words “Ranking Member,” although the letter notes that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who retained the right to reject appointments to the committee, refused his assignment after he made it clear he intended to obstruct its work. And yet, despite Banks’s identification of himself as “ranking member,” when asked to comment on the revelation about the letters, a spokesperson for Banks said, “This is a bizarre Democrat narrative meant to distract from the actual contents of Rep. Banks’ letter and to avoid talking about the actual activities of the Select Committee, which are partisan, authoritarian and indefensible.”
Cheney is a hard-line Republican.
The U.S. Attorney’s office for Washington, D.C., accepted the Bannon referral at 5:30 this afternoon. Tonight Pelosi issued a statement saying: “The vote for the criminal contempt of Congress resolution today goes beyond Bannon. It was a vote for the system of checks and balances and the Constitution.”
Meanwhile, we learned today that at least three months ago the Justice Department added two top prosecutors to the investigation of Matt Gaetz (R-FL), one of former president Trump’s closest allies, for sex trafficking.
Building things takes slow, hard work.
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This morning, Jonathan Martin at the New York Times reported that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has warned Republican political consultants that they may not continue to work for both him and Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who is vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
While Republican lawmakers are trying to sweep the insurrection under the rug, Cheney is calling out the attack and demanding sunlight on what happened. Republican leaders are lining up behind former president Trump in hopes of retaining his loyalist voters, but Cheney is repeatedly, and increasingly clearly, suggesting that the president was responsible for the events of that day.
That McCarthy is trying to make her a pariah indicates a fight over the future of the Republican Party. While one fund-raising company has already cut ties with her, Cheney is not operating from a weak position. Her father is Richard (Dick) Cheney, who was President George W. Bush’s vice president and, perhaps more significant for today’s events, President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense. The Cheneys are likely not unaware of what is happening among intelligence officials, which seems likely to involve some current Republican lawmakers.
And Liz Cheney’s stand against McCarthy and Trump is not hurting her politically at home: she has raised more than $5 million for her reelection, compared to the $300,000 raised in the last two months or so by her Trump-backed opponent.
There is an important story behind McCarthy’s attack on Representative Cheney. She presents a threat to the pro-Trump Republican Party not simply because she is standing strong against the former president and the attack on our democracy.
She is offering to women and men in the suburbs a reasonable alternative to those pro-Trump representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) whose pistol packing and aggression gets attention for all the wrong reasons. Trump Republicans have lost the support of suburban women, and Cheney seems to be picking them up and explaining that Trump and his supporters, including McCarthy, tried to destroy our democracy. That McCarthy felt it necessary to try to undercut her this way suggests they see her as a major threat.
McCarthy had another reason to be unhappy today. Longtime readers of these letters may perhaps remember that McCarthy took money from a Ukraine-born U.S. businessman, Lev Parnas.
Parnas worked with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to try to find dirt on Joe Biden’s son Hunter in Ukraine. In 2019, prosecutors said that money was illegal: Parnas had taken $1 million from Ukraine oligarch Dmytro Firtash and had illegally funneled more than $350,000 to pro-Trump political action committees and other Republican lawmakers in 2016.
Today, a jury found Parnas guilty of making illegal campaign contributions.
In other developments that might be making Republican lawmakers uncomfortable, Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department attorney who wanted to help then-president Trump stay in the White House despite losing the election, is scheduled to testify before the January 6th committee next Friday.
According to CNN, Alyssa Farah, who was Trump’s director of strategic communications, has met voluntarily with Cheney and Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who, along with Cheney, is on the January 6 committee.
It appears there is concern about the mounting evidence before the January 6th committee. In an interview with National Review, John Eastman, who wrote a very clear memo outlining how then–vice president Mike Pence could overturn the results of the 2020 election, called that scenario “crazy.”
Meanwhile, business journalists are suggesting that the new Trump media company is not a failure at all, because it was never actually meant to be a media company so much as a way to siphon money out of investors.
Matt Levine in Bloomberg outlines how a vehicle called a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), which is a publicly traded investment company, is designed to merge with a new company that is not yet public, to allow investment in that SPAC based on expectations of future income thanks to the new company. (Someone explained this to me by saying it’s like a sea slug taking over a shell so it can do business as the shell organism quickly and without oversight.)
In this case, the announcement that the new Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) would merge with a SPAC called Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC) sent DWAC’s stock soaring by as much as 160%. It was the most traded stock on the New York Stock Exchange, with more than 260 million shares traded by midday.
The company never has to produce anything. Investors can make money just based on how people think the company might perform—or not—in the future.
The man behind this scheme is the person to whom McCarthy is demanding the Republican Party demonstrate absolute loyalty.
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There are three stories in the news today that seem to me to add up to a larger picture.
First is the story of money laundering, which seems suddenly to be all over the news. Today we learned that federal prosecutors in Detroit have broken into a massive money-laundering operation between the United States and the United Arab Emirates called “The Shadow Exchange.” They confiscated $12 million and suggest this is the tip of the iceberg.
This story comes just weeks after the release of the Pandora Papers, which detailed the ways in which the world’s wealthy hide money. The United States is one of the money-laundering capitals of the world, and the consequences of our lax financial legislation are coming home to roost. Experts say that because of the lack of transparency required in our financial transactions, hundreds of billions of dollars are laundered in the U.S. every year.
Another story from earlier in the month by Casey Michel in Politico reveals what happened to a small town in Illinois when a Ukrainian oligarch bought a factory there apparently in order to launder money. The townspeople believed they were looking at a new, prosperous future with new investment in the town, only to watch the abandoned factory decay. And then, miraculously, another investor appeared, but that man, too, seems to have been using the purchase simply to launder money. Now, the factory is decrepit and must be dismantled at great cost to the town, along with the townspeople’s dreams.
The second story that caught my attention today is the continuing news dropping from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen. Today we learned that a Facebook researcher created a profile that appeared to be of a political conservative North Carolina mother and that within five days, Facebook’s algorithm was steering the profile toward QAnon, a conspiracy theory touting then-president Trump as a secret warrior against a widespread pedophilia ring in the highest levels of government.
Although the fake profile did not follow those recommended groups, the profile was then inundated with groups and pages full of hate speech and disinformation. Other stories recently have emphasized that Facebook officials knew of the radicalization of users before the January 6 insurrection but declined to address the issue.
People often make the mistake of thinking that Facebook profits from the advertising it sells to users, but in fact the system works the opposite way. A media company profits from packaging users to sell to advertisers. Facebook has sliced and diced its users so that it can sell us with pinpoint accuracy to political interests eager to divide us or drive our votes.
It appears we now have hard evidence that the company knew its algorithms were peddling disinformation to divide us, and it did not fix them.
Tonight’s third story is that former president Trump’s loyalists set up a “command center” in mid-December at Washington, D.C.’s famous Willard Hotel to try to overturn the election. Those meeting to come up with a scheme to overturn the will of the voters included John Eastman, who wrote the memo outlining how Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to count the electors for certain states and thus throw the election to Trump; Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; adviser Stephen K. Bannon; former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik, a convicted felon pardoned by Trump; One America News reporter Christina Bobb; and Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn.
It is significant that as this story has hit the news, Eastman, the author of the infamous memo, is running from it. He went to the respected conservative magazine National Review to argue, quite preposterously, that his memo was simply a thought exercise that he did not endorse.
The very choice of the Willard, rather than Trump's own hotel, suggests an attempt to create distance from the president, but Kerik, who rented the rooms, billed the Trump campaign for the $55,000 hotel bill. (Those participating are likely to discover that campaign activity is not part of official duties and so cannot be covered by executive privilege.)
To me, these three stories are as illustrative of this moment as the three crucial stories in the January 1903 edition of McClure’s Magazine were of the corruption that led to the Progressive Era. In that famous 1903 magazine, investigative journalists Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell exposed the political and corporate corruption that were silencing the voices of individuals in the United States and driving them into poverty.
The first two of today’s stories suggest the rise of global capital in our financial system and its power over us through the dominant influence of social media, a new technology most of us don’t understand particularly well. That power has led to the third story: the attempt of a president who has lost an election to turn to a Big Lie, spread through social media, that his victory has been stolen from him, and that his supporters must take matters into their own hands.
KIeptocrats, autocrats, and criminals are making a strong bid to control our country.
Will they succeed?
Maybe. But in a similar moment after 1903, the American people reasserted the rule of law.
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I had planned to post a picture tonight, but this evening Rolling Stone dropped an exclusive, blockbuster story from reporter Hunter Walker that demands attention.
The story says that two sources who are talking to the January 6th committee about planning the January rallies in Washington, D.C., have talked to Rolling Stone as well. They say they worked with congressional lawmakers and White House officials to plan rallies both in Washington, D.C., and around the country. They deny that they intended to storm the Capitol and imply they got used, which points to the sources being from within Women for America First, the organization that sponsored a bus tour and rallies around the country before heading to Washington for January 6.
They allegedly named Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Madison Cawthorn (R-NC), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Louie Gohmert (R-TX), as people with whom they planned. They also claim that Gosar promised them a blanket presidential pardon, although they do not say for what.
From the White House team, they singled out then–chief of staff Mark Meadows. “Meadows was 100 percent made aware of what was going on,” one of the sources said.
Katrina Pierson was a key figure in both accounts. She was on Trump’s campaign teams in 2016 and 2020, and worked with the organizers of the rallies before the mob stormed the Capitol.
One of those talking to Rolling Stone said: “It’s clear that a lot of bad actors set out to cause chaos…. They made us all look like s**t.” This person included Trump on their list of bad actors and described feeling used by him and then abandoned. “I’m actually pretty pissed about it and I’m pissed at him.”
Nick Dyer, who is communications director for Greene, said the congresswoman was only involved in planning to refuse to accept certified ballots, nothing more. He tried to compare Greene’s actions with those of Democrats who objected to Donald Trump’s 2016 win, and said that no one cares about the events of January 6 amongst what he suggests is the disaster of the Biden presidency.
No other spokespeople for the lawmakers involved answered requests for comment.
Between this, and the stories that continue to drop about Facebook, and the infrastructure bill, and voting rights measures…it seems likely to be a big week in Washington.
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“Caravans” of migrants to our southern border are once again headline news on the Fox News Channel, but while these anti-immigrant stories divert attention from news that those on the right would like to bury, as usual, they also establish a larger pattern.
Whipping up fears of immigration is standard for authoritarians trying to convince followers to support the loss of civil liberties in order to promote law and order. One of those who rose to power with just such an argument is Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, a figure those on the right are championing these days. Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson broadcast from Hungary appreciatively earlier this year, presenting Orbán’s government, which has systematically dismantled democracy, as enviable. The American Conservative Union is planning to have its 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Hungary, as well.
This backstory gave disturbing context to today’s news from the Government Accountability Office. The GAO is a government agency within the legislative branch (most of the ones you’re used to hearing about are in the executive branch) that audits, investigates, and issues reports for Congress. Known as the congressional watchdog, the GAO tries to cut through spin to do honest, thorough, and nonpartisan evaluations of government issues.
Today, the GAO reported that actions of the Trump administration had undermined U.S. goals in the Northern Triangle countries that are currently driving immigration to the southern border. Since 2008, the U.S. has funded development projects in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to promote economic development, provide security, and combat corruption. This investment was designed, in part, to slow the movement of immigrants escaping the violence and economic dislocation of the region to the U.S. border.
In March 2019, the Trump administration abruptly halted promised money, and that freeze continued until June 2020. Today’s GAO report documented how that suspension hurt 92 of the 114 projects underway under the control of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and 65 of the 168 projects operating under the State Department.
Migration to the border soared, right before the 2020 election.
While Trump Republicans were trying to convince white American voters that immigrants threatened them, another story today suggests the real goals of the Trump machine.
The Guardian revealed that several members of the secretive Council on National Policy (CNP) claim that they were the ones behind the 2017 tax cuts on corporations and wealthy Americans. Wealthy right-wing Christian activists organized the CNP in 1981 to push the country toward religious and libertarian policies.
Also today, the Washington Post Magazine ran a long story about CNP, calling it “the most unusual, least understood conservative organization in the nation’s capital.” CNP is registered as a charity, but it is essentially a central planning center for right-wing activists across the country. Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow, Jr., explained how CNP members, who initially opposed Trump, swung behind him when he promised to combat abortion.
Members of CNP are a who’s who of wealthy conservative figures, including Leonard Leo, a leading light of the Federalist Society, which advocates for a conservative judicial system; Steve Bannon, a key Trump adviser; David Bossie, who headed the group Citizens United and who was Trump’s deputy campaign manager; and Kellyanne Conway, a White House adviser. Their goal, they say, is to create a moral America.
So, it appears, the fearmongering about immigrants helped to give power to a secret group of wealthy Americans who lobbied for huge tax cuts for the richest Americans.
The stories about CNP suggest its members have focused on keeping emotions high and Trump in power. The CNP was instrumental in opposing business closures and mask mandates to combat the coronavirus. A number of members, including Cleta Mitchell—the lawyer who was on the phone with Trump during his infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to switch the state into the Trump column although Biden had won it—and Ginni Thomas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, backed “Stop the Steal” efforts.
Their efforts, we have increasing evidence, were promoted by Facebook, the giant social media company. Starting last Friday, 17 different news outlets have been publishing the “Facebook Papers” based on internal company documents provided to Congress and the press by whistleblower Frances Haugen. The stories allege that Facebook prioritized profits over truth and safety, deliberately amplifying right-wing voices and dividing the country.
Facebook denies the allegations.
Reports of migrant caravans might well be attempts to divert attention from the service of the Republicans to the wealthy, as well as from the story of January 6, which is becoming clearer as information continues to come out.
Today, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol interviewed Steve Bannon associate Dustin Stockton. Stockton was one of the organizers of the Women for America First rally on January 6 that got taken over by the unpermitted Stop the Steal rally which led to the attack on the Capitol.
According to a piece by Joshua Kaplan and Joaquin Sapien in ProPublica last June, Stockton was so concerned about the Stop the Steal people that he urged Amy Kremer, another leader of the Women for America First rally, to contact her associate Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in the days before January 6 to warn him things were getting out of hand. The committee has subpoenaed Kremer to testify on October 29. There are signs that Kremer or an associate might have been a source for yesterday’s Rolling Stone article, suggesting that someone from Women for America First is willing to cooperate with the committee.
The Rolling Stone article, which provided names of lawmakers allegedly involved in planning the January 6 rally, refocused attention on the fact that it was Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) who was speaking at length as the mob broke into the building. His speech delayed the evacuation of the House chamber for 15 minutes, so that the House members were still present when the mob, including Ashli Babbitt, tried to get at them. A police officer shot and killed Babbitt as she broke through the doors.
Last night’s Rolling Stone story also identified Republican Lauren Boebert (CO) as a participant in planning meetings for the events of January 6. Today she said in a carefully worded statement: “I had no role in the planning or execution of any event that took place at the Capitol or anywhere in Washington, DC on January 6.”
Today, once again, President Joe Biden refused to claim executive privilege to prevent the January 6 committee from seeing documents Trump wants to hide.
Meanwhile, the Democrats in Congress continue to try to move the country forward, hammering out their infrastructure measure. They hope to have it finished before President Biden leaves for meetings with European leaders later this week.
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For all the news stories that seem to tug us in one direction or another, there is just one overarching story in the news for Americans today.
We are in an existential fight to defend our democracy from those who would destroy it.
People seem to hark back to films from the 1930s and 1940s and think that so long as we don’t have tanks in our streets, our government is secure. But in this era, democracies die more often through the ballot box than at gunpoint.
You can see this in Russia, where Vladimir Putin gradually concentrated power into his own hands. You can see it in Brazil, where Jair Bolsanaro, whose approval rating in late August was 23%, claims that the country’s elections are fraudulent and that “[e]ither we’ll have clean elections, or we won’t have elections.” You can see it in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has quite deliberately dismantled liberal democracy and replaced it with what he calls “illiberal democracy.”
On paper, Hungary is a democracy in that it still holds elections, but it is, in fact, a one-party state overseen by one man.
Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy, replacing it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.”
No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists. While Hungary still has elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for Orbán’s opponents to win an election.
Hungary is in the news in the United States because Americans on the right have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to hold elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.
In 2019, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson endorsed Hungary’s anti-abortion and anti-immigration policies; in that year, according to investigative researcher Anna Massoglia of Open Secrets, Hungary paid a D.C. lobbying firm $265,000, in part to arrange an interview on Carlson’s show. Recently, former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest at a forum denouncing immigration and urging traditional social values, where he told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump put on the court. Further indicating the drift of today’s right wing, the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held in Budapest.
In their embrace of the illiberal democracy of Hungary, those on the right argue that they are defending traditional American values.
Like Orbán, they focus relentlessly on immigration; “caravans” of immigrants have once again made the right-wing news, as they always do before an election. They worry that traditional families are under attack, hence Texas’s S.B. 8, which outlaws the constitutional right of abortion by empowering vigilantes. They insist that “real” America is being destroyed by multiculturalism; hence the hysteria over Critical Race Theory, an obscure legal theory from the 1970s that is not taught in K–12 schools, and the calls for “patriotic education.”
And, crucially, those on the right are openly embracing voter restrictions and the replacement of nonpartisan election officials with partisans.
Astonishingly, John Eastman, the founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence and a member of the powerful Federalist Society, wrote a six-point plan for overturning the will of the voters in the 2020 election. Although he went to the reputable National Review to cover his tracks by saying his plan was just a thought experiment, just tonight a video appeared in which he told an apparent supporter that his ideas were right, and that it was Pence’s establishment biases that made him unwilling to implement them. His plan to overturn the election barely failed.
The 33 new election laws in 19 states will not fail. They are designed to replace the idea of democracy with a hierarchy in which a minority will determine our fate.
If it seems odd that a group of people who claim to be trying to “Make America Great Again” are taking their cues from a central European country of about 10 million people, it is worth noting that they are not simply talking about Critical Race Theory or Texas’s so-called heartbeat bill. We are in a larger struggle over the nature of human governments. And when American thinkers are praising Hungary, they are tapping into a long history of our own.
When the Founders declared it “self-evident, that all men are created equal,” they were making a bold declaration about the nature of governments that flew in the face of western tradition and thought. They denied that some individuals were better than others and had an inherent right to rule the rest. Governments, the Founders said, derived legitimacy not from religion, or heritage, but instead were legitimate only to the degree that those who lived under them consented to them. “[T]o secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” the Founders said.
This was a revolutionary argument. It rejected not just King George III, but all kings, claiming for the people the right to rule themselves. For all its limitations—the Founders could conceive of this idea in part because they excluded from their vision women, Black people, and all people of color—it was an astonishing declaration.
And yet, the idea that all men are created equal and that governments derive legitimacy from the consent of the governed began to fall apart in the late 1820s. Southern Democrats wanted to take control of Indigenous peoples' lands in the Southeast in order to spread the wildly lucrative system of plantation agriculture. Then, when they had displaced the tribes, they spread across those lands their economic system based on human enslavement.
But because southern leaders were outnumbered by Americans in the North who objected to their economic system, within a decade they were arguing that true democracy meant not that government depended upon the consent of the governed as a whole, but rather that local or state governments could choose how everyone, including enslaved people, women, Indigenous, and Mexican people, would live. And, of course, they limited voting to a few white men, who voted to keep themselves in power.
In 1860, southern white elites declared the American concept of democracy based in equality, government based in the consent of the people, to be obsolete. They declared they were going to start a new country, based in a hierarchy of gender and race, that they believed reflected God’s will.
In a speech in March 1861, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, who would soon be the vice president of the Confederate States of America, explained to an audience that Jefferson’s belief that all men are created equal was “an error” and that anyone who still adhered to that idea was an insane “fanatic.” Stephens told listeners: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
And there it was: the replacement of the idea that all people are created equal with the idea that some people are better than others, and that those people, who truly understand God’s laws, should rule.
It is not an accident that the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021, carried the Confederate battle flag.
We are today in a struggle no less dangerous to our democracy than that of the 1860s, for all that it is fought with Facebook memes and cable television rather than artillery. And when our leaders talk fondly about Viktor Orbán, or Jair Bolsonaro— former president Trump endorsed his reelection today—we would do well to listen.
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At a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, Republican senators accused Attorney General Merrick Garland of “siccing” the FBI on parents who are simply concerned about their child’s education.
The backstory is that there has been a coordinated effort across the country to whip up protests at school board meetings over mask mandates and opposition to teaching Critical Race Theory in K–12 schools (where it is not taught), and they have gotten heated enough that protesters have threatened the lives of school board members, teachers, administrators, and school staff.
In response, the National School Board Association (NSBA) wrote to the administration asking for federal help in addressing the increasing threats. Garland issued a memo calling for federal law enforcement to work with local law enforcement as necessary to protect school board members.
Under pressure from Republican state representatives, the NSBA apologized for some of the language it had used in its initial letter—it suggested the protesters were engaging in domestic terrorism, for example—and today senators tried to get Garland, too, to apologize for his memo.
He refused. "I wish if senators were concerned about this that they would quote my words," he said. "This memorandum is not about parents being able to object in their school boards. They are protected by the First Amendment as long as there are no threats of violence, they are completely protected."
It was painfully obvious that the Republicans, especially Senators Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), were trying to create sound bites for right-wing media, and perhaps to undermine Garland’s credibility should the Department of Justice bring charges against high-ranking lawmakers over the events of January 6. They portrayed Garland as part of a conspiracy to crush American liberty and demanded his resignation.
It appears to be the new conspiracy theory of the Trump Republicans to say that the administration is hunting them: Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson is advertising an upcoming special that appears to suggest that the Democratic-controlled government is launching a war on right-wing Americans.
But that increasing hysteria feels as if it has desperation behind it. We learned recently that 18 members of Trump’s White House staff are cooperating voluntarily with the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Only Stephen K. Bannon is not. These voices not only are likely to turn up valuable information, but also indicate that White House staffers are less worried about the wrath of the former president than the wrath of Congress.
If Trump has lost control of his team, it’s a whole new ball game. Anyone who can get out from under the wreckage will do so, and fast. That will make those remaining desperate to regain power. And Trump himself is facing more trouble. Today his lawyers asked a judge to block the IRS from giving his taxes to the House Ways and Means Committee.
Another indication of desperation today came from Georgia, where Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell endorsed Herschel Walker for the Republican nomination for the Senate. Although he brings to the table name recognition as a famous football player, Walker is a deeply problematic candidate. First of all, it is not even clear he can run in Georgia since he lives in Texas—he switched his voting registration to an Atlanta home owned by his wife in August. Walker has a history of domestic violence and questionable business dealings, as well as a history of mental illness. Walker’s ex-wife said he pointed a gun at her and said: “I’m going to blow your f---ing brains out.” Walker’s ex-girlfriend told police he made a similar threat to her.
But Walker has said the 2020 election in Georgia was fraudulent, and Trump strongly endorsed him.
McConnell opposed Walker’s candidacy this summer and, just a week ago, suggested to CNN that the former president should stay out of the midterms. But on Monday, Senator John Thune (R-SD), the second-ranking Republican senator, endorsed Walker. Today Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), the Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference—the third-ranking Republican senator—endorsed him, too. And so did McConnell, bowing to the recognition that the Republicans need Trump’s voters to win so badly that they must let Trump call the shots.
“I am happy to endorse Herschel Walker for U.S. Senate in Georgia,” McConnell said. “Herschel is the only one who can unite the party, defeat Senator [Raphael] Warnock, and help us take back the Senate.” Conservative editor Bill Kristol noted on Twitter that McConnell said nothing about Walker being qualified for the position.
The Republicans want power.
Already, Republican lawmakers are using unprecedented measures to dictate to the Democratic president.
Today, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) called out Cruz for blocking all but four of President Joe Biden’s picks for ambassadorships (he let through former senators or their relatives). By this time in Trump’s presidency, the Senate had confirmed 22 of his ambassadors, 17 by a simple voice vote.
Cruz is putting holds on all Biden’s appointees until the president agrees to do as Cruz wants with regard to sanctions on a Russian company that is supplying gas to Germany. The construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline began during the Trump administration, meaning that Biden inherited a mess: our key ally Germany had committed to the pipeline, and sanctioning the company behind it would destabilize that relationship. When Secretary of State Antony Blinken concluded that it was “inevitable” that the pipeline would be finished, Biden and German Chancellor Angela Merkel reached a deal saying that if Russia used the pipeline for political pressure, the U.S. would slap sanctions on it.
Cruz wants sanctions now, and he is sabotaging the State Department until he gets his way.
This morning, the conservative magazine The Bulwark and the liberal magazine the New Republic jointly published “An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy.” Written by Todd Gitlin,
Jeffrey C. Isaac, and Kristol, and signed by writers, scholars, and pundits from all political backgrounds, the letter deplores the efforts of the Trumpers to take control of our government and calls for Congress to pass voting rights legislation, by adjusting the filibuster if necessary.
The letter was a wake-up call. “[W]e urge all responsible citizens who care about democracy—public officials, journalists, educators, activists, ordinary citizens—to make the defense of democracy an urgent priority now.”
“Now is the time for leaders in all walks of life—for citizens of all political backgrounds and persuasions—to come to the aid of the Republic.”
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In 1929, October 28 was a Monday, the opening night for New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Four thousand glittering attendees thronged to the elegant building on foot or in one of a thousand limousines to see Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, the melodramatic story of an innocent French girl seduced by wealth, whose reluctance to leave her riches for true love leads to her arrest, deportation to the wilds of America, and tragic death. Flash bulbs blinded the crowd, gathered to see famous faces and expensive gowns, as photographers recorded the arrivals of the era’s social celebrities.
No one toasting the beginning of the opera season that night knew they were toasting the end of an era.
At ten o’clock the next morning, when the opening gong sounded in the great hall of the New York Stock Exchange, men began to unload their stocks. So fast did trading go that by the end of the day, the ticker recording transactions ran two and a half hours late. When the final tally could be read, it showed that an extraordinary 16,410,030 shares had traded hands, and the market had lost $14 billion. The market had been uneasy for weeks before the twenty-ninth, but Black Tuesday began a slide that seemingly would not end. By mid-November, the industrial average was half of what it had been in September. The economic boom that had fueled the Roaring Twenties was over.
Once the bottom fell out of the stock market, the economy ground down. Manufacturing output dropped to levels lower than those of 1913. The production of pig iron fell to what it had been in the 1890s. Foreign trade dropped by $7 billion, down to just $3 billion. The price of wheat fell from $1.05 a bushel to 39 cents; corn dropped from 81 to 33 cents; cotton fell from 17 to 6 cents a pound. Prices dropped so low that selling crops meant taking a loss, so struggling farmers simply let them rot in the fields. By 1932, over one million people in New York City were unemployed. By 1933, the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers. Unable to afford rent or pay mortgages, people lived in shelters made of packing boxes.
No one knew how to combat the Great Depression, but wealthy Americans were sure they knew what had caused it. The problem, they said, was that poor Americans refused to work hard enough and were draining the economy. They must be forced to take less. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon told President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”
Slash government spending, agreed the Chicago Tribune: lay off teachers and government workers, and demand that those who remain accept lower wages. Richard Whitney, a former president of the Stock Exchange, told the Senate that the only way to restart the economy was to cut government salaries and veterans’ benefits (although he told them that his own salary—which at sixty thousand dollars was six times higher than theirs—was “very little” and couldn’t be reduced).
President Hoover knew little about finances, let alone how to fix an economic crisis of global proportions. He tried to reverse the economic slide by cutting taxes and reassuring Americans that “the fundamental business of the country, that is, production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis.” But taxes were already so low that most folks would see only a few extra dollars a year from the cuts, and the fundamental business of the country was not, in fact, sound. When suffering Americans begged for public works programs to provide jobs, Hoover insisted that such programs were a “soak the rich” program that would “enslave” taxpayers, and called instead for private charity.
By the time Hoover’s first term limped to a close, Americans were ready to try a new approach to economic recovery. They refused to reelect Hoover and turned instead to New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised to use the federal government to provide jobs and a safety net to enable Americans to weather hard times. He promised a “New Deal” for the American people.
FDR’s New Deal employed more than 8.5 million people, built more than 650,000 miles of highways, built or repaired more than 120,000 bridges, and put up more than 125,000 public buildings. It provided a social safety net for ordinary Americans, providing unemployment and disability insurance, as well as aid to widows, orphans, and the elderly. It supported labor and regulated business, banking, and the stock market. It invested in infrastructure, rebuilding roads and bridges, providing electricity to rural areas, and building schools, post offices, airports, and hospitals around the country. When World War II broke out, the new system enabled the United States to defend democracy successfully against fascists.
The new system undercut fascism at home, too, where its adherents had been growing strong, and reminded Americans that when the government supported ordinary people, they could build a strong new future.
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The Republican Party has long ceased to offer policy ideas and is focusing on culture wars and obstruction. Their big statement this week has been to throw “Let’s go, Brandon” into speeches and, in the case of Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), into a rap video in which she stars. The phrase means “F**k Joe Biden,” for those in the know; they use it because social media moderators do not flag it.
The press secretary for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tweeted it out on Thursday morning, just after the president announced a framework for the Build Back Better bill, the larger infrastructure package the Democrats intend to propose alongside the smaller bipartisan infrastructure bill. Congress has been negotiating this larger package intensely for months, and it appears to be reaching a final form.
But while the media has followed every twist and turn of Democratic disagreements over the measure, suggesting those normal disagreements are somehow a sign of dysfunction, the big story of the negotiations has gone largely unnoticed. That big story is that Republican lawmakers simply refused to participate in discussions over a series of proposals that as a whole are backed by 57% of the American people and that have even higher approval rates individually: one poll found 83% of Americans eager to give the government the power to negotiate lower drug prices. (In contrast, only 33% of the American people liked the Trump tax cuts passed without Democratic votes in 2017.)
A refusal to join debate on such a popular issue is dysfunction, indeed.
Instead of participating in the democratic system, Republicans turned over to conservative Democrats, especially Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, the job of making conservative changes to the measure, while they simply fired insults at the president.
Republicans are frustrated in part because Biden and the Democrats are remaking the nation. After forty years in which lawmakers rolled back government action, the Democrats under Biden are investing again in the American people.
In his remarks about the Build Back Better plan on Thursday, Biden noted that for most of the twentieth century, we invested in ourselves, and that investment in our families and children, including through education, was key to our prosperity and international standing.
In the 1980s, though, we abandoned that investment, handing the task of developing the country to private interests. It didn’t work. From being first in the world for infrastructure, the World Economic Forum now lists us 13th. From leading the world in educational achievement, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development now ranks us 35th out of 37 major countries for investment in childhood education and care.
“We need to build America from the bottom up and the middle out, not from top down with the trickle-down economics that’s always failed us,” Biden said. “I can’t think of a single time when the middle class has done well but the wealthy haven’t done very well. I can think of many times, including now, when the wealthy and the super-wealthy do very well and the middle class don’t do well.”
While outlining the details of the Build Back Better plan can wait until there is a final bill, we do know that the final blueprint provides a massive investment in childcare and eldercare, families, and education, and it uses the need to address climate change to produce good jobs. The government will serve the American public, not a small group of business leaders.
“Any single element of this framework would fundamentally be viewed as a fundamental change in America,” Biden said accurately on Thursday. “Taken together, they’re truly consequential.”
The Biden administration announced another major investment in the American people this week.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a plan to modernize American diplomacy. The plan centers around State Department employees, “because,” Blinken said, “they’re our greatest asset.” He promised to “elevate new voices and encourage more initiative and more innovation,” and also to encourage diplomats to engage more fully with Americans at home, so that our foreign interactions both reflect the needs of our democracy and make sense to American citizens.
Blinken intends to ask for congressional approval to establish a new bureau for cyberspace and digital policy. He will also name a new special envoy for critical and emerging technology. This new push will challenge China’s growing power in these fields and reestablish U.S. leadership; Washington Post foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius called it “part of a much broader effort by the Biden administration to get serious about the global technology race.”
Blinken also plans to increase staffing to address future pandemics, and to seek funding for training diplomats to address climate issues.
His focus on the people of the State Department illustrates the nation’s shift away from unilateral actions and military solutions and toward multilateral diplomacy, meaning that the U.S. wants to “cooperate with other countries to contend with the greatest challenges of our time, none of which we can tackle effectively alone.” “[W]herever and whenever new rules are being debated, for example, on how the global economy should work, how the internet should be governed, how our environment should be protected, how human rights should be defined and defended,” Blinken said, “American diplomats need to be at the table.”
Under Biden, the Democrats are replacing the Republican ideology of the past forty years, which focused on individual liberty and cowboy diplomacy, with a plan to invest in our people and to cooperate with other countries.
This return to principles that ushered in our most prosperous years hardly seems like a good reason to curse the president.
[[Photo by Warren K. Leffler, “Federal City College, Skill Center,” 1969, Library of Congress.]
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It's a cold, rainy night here. Perfect sleeping weather, and I'm going to take advantage of it.
I'll see you tomorrow.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
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In the weeks after the January 6 insurrection, one of the things that struck me as an odd political calculation was how quickly Republican lawmakers fell back into line behind former president Trump. Anyone watching could see that the information about Trump’s involvement in that insurrection that would come out by, well, right about now—about a year before the midterm elections—was going to be bad.
And here we are, and yes it is.
Today the Washington Post published a long report about the events before, during, and after January 6, compiled by a team of more than 25 reporters and additional staff who reviewed video and court transcripts, followed social media posts, and interviewed more than 230 people. The report lays the blame for January 6 on Trump and warns that we are in a fight for the survival of democracy.
The report is horrific, full of images, tapes, and timelines of a far more violent attack on our government than has previously been put together. It shows how very close the insurrectionists came to getting their hands on then–Vice President Mike Pence, who Trump told them was the architect of their disappointment.
What might have happened is the stuff of nightmares.
The report concludes: “Trump was the driving force at every turn as he orchestrated what would become an attempted political coup in the months leading up to Jan. 6, calling his supporters to Washington, encouraging the mob to march on the Capitol and freezing in place key federal agencies whose job it was to investigate and stop threats to national security.” It notes that the former president did not make any effort to stop the attacks until it was clear they wouldn’t succeed, and that lawmakers assumed he was backing the rioters.
The report lays out how, on January 6, Trump and his loyal lawyer John Eastman, the author of the infamous memo outlining a six-point plan for overturning the 2020 election, continued to try to steal the election even as rioters were running amok in the Capitol. As then–Vice President Mike Pence and his family were hiding for their safety from the mob, Eastman blamed Pence for the insurrection, saying that if he had only done as the memo suggested, the riot wouldn’t have happened.
Then, when Congress resumed to count the certified ballots, Eastman argued that the delay in debate caused by the insurrection meant that Congress had run out of time to count the certified votes, as established by the Electoral College Act, so that the election should be thrown back to the states.
The Washington Post report places the insurrection into context: “The consequences of that day are still coming into focus, but what is already clear is that the insurrection was not a spontaneous act nor an isolated event. It was a battle in a broader war over the truth and over the future of American democracy,” it says. “Since then, the forces behind the attack remain potent and growing.”
The Washington Post series raises a lot of questions. It notes both that FBI officials ignored a lot of red flags before January 6 and that Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, whom Trump put into office immediately after the election after firing Defense Secretary Mark Esper, refused to approve the use of the D.C. National Guard to defend the Capitol for more than two hours after Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund requested help.
Other news from the weekend suggests that there are things Trump does not want us to know about the insurrection. This weekend we learned that he is trying to block the National Archives and Records Administration from giving to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol information that includes call records from that day, information about visitors to the White House around then, and so on: material that is generally a matter of public record. Only the current president can invoke executive privilege, and President Joe Biden has declined to do so over these materials.
An older story involving the former president is also suddenly in the news. In October 2016, four computer scientists noticed unusual activity between the Trump organization; Russia’s Alfa Bank, which was connected to the Kremlin; and Spectrum Health, a Michigan-based healthcare organization connected to the DeVos family. The computer folks took their information to the FBI, which was already engaged in its own investigation of the ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. The story got folded into all the other material about the campaign and its ties to Russia, and was largely forgotten.
Then, earlier this month, a special counsel appointed by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr to investigate the Russia investigation indicted a cybersecurity lawyer for lying to the FBI. In the indictment, Special Counsel John Durham accused those computer scientists of advancing a story they did not believe in order to hurt Trump’s 2016 presidential bid.
The computer scientists have come out swinging. They reject the idea that they were advancing a political attack and maintain that the weird connections they saw did, indeed, show coordination between Trump and the Russian-based Alfa Bank. They believed there was enough evidence to open a criminal investigation. They have accused Durham of misrepresenting their debates over the material, and they say their evidence is solid and reproducible.
It is this mess to which Republican lawmakers have tied themselves.
The Washington Post suggests that they made that calculation in the immediate aftermath of January 6 because Trump continued to command his base and they worried about being primaried from the right if they didn’t support Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen. And so they acquitted him in his second impeachment trial and supported the “audits” of state election results that had already been proved secure.
But that leaves a circle to be squared.
Winning a primary by staking out turf as a Trump supporter would mean losing in the general election… unless state legislatures fixed elections so that Republicans would win, no matter who the Republican candidate happened to be.
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