We are in what feels like a moment of paradigm shift.
On this, the third day of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it appears the invasion is not going the way Russian president Vladimir Putin hoped. The Russians do not control the airspace over the country, and, as of tonight, despite fierce fighting that has taken at least 198 Ukrainian lives, all major Ukrainian cities remain in Ukrainian hands. Now it appears that Russia’s plan for a quick win has made supply lines vulnerable because military planners did not anticipate needing to resupply fuel and ammunition. In a sign that Putin recognizes how unpopular this war is at home, the government is restricting access to information about it.
Russia needed to win before other countries had time to protest or organize and impose the severe economic repercussions they had threatened; the delay has given the world community time to put those repercussions into place.
Today, the U.S. and European allies announced they would block Russia’s access to its foreign currency reserves in the West, about $640 billion, essentially freezing its assets. They will also bar certain Russian banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication system, known as SWIFT, which essentially means they will not be able to participate in the international financial system. Lawmakers expect these measures to wreak havoc on Russia’s economy.
The Ukrainian people have done far more than hold off Putin’s horrific attack on their country. Their refusal to permit a corrupt oligarch to take over their homeland and replace their democracy with authoritarianism has inspired the people of democracies around the world.
The colors of the Ukrainian flag are lighting up buildings across North America and Europe and musical performances are beginning with the Ukrainian anthem. Protesters are marching and holding vigils for Ukraine. The answer of the soldier on Ukraine’s Snake Island to the Russian warship when it demanded that he and his 12 compatriots lay down their weapons became instantly iconic. He answered: “Russian warship: Go f**k yourself.”
That defiance against what seemed initially to be an overwhelming military assault has given Ukraine a psychological edge over the Russians, some of whom seem bewildered at what they are doing in Ukraine. It has also offered hope that the rising authoritarianism in the world is not destined to destroy democracy, that authoritarians are not as strong as they have projected.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has stepped into this moment as the hero of his nation and an answer to the bullying authoritarianism that in America has lately been mistaken for strength. Zelensky was an actor, after all, and clearly understands how to perform a role, especially such a vital one as fate has thrust on him.
Zelensky is the man former president Donald Trump tried in July 2019 to bully into helping him rig the 2020 U.S. election. Then, Trump threatened to withhold the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine resist Russian expansion until Zelensky announced an investigation of Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
Since the invasion, Zelensky has rallied his people by fighting for Kyiv both literally and metaphorically. He is releasing videos from the streets of Kyiv alongside his government officers, and has been photographed in military garb on the streets. Offered evacuation out of the country by the U.S., he answered, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” His courage and determination have boosted the morale of those defending their country against invaders and, in turn, captured the imagination of people around the world hoping to stem the recent growth of authoritarianism, who are now making him—and Ukraine—an icon of courage and principle.
In a sign of which way the wind is blowing, today Czech president Miloš Zeman and Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, both of whom have nurtured friendly relations with Putin, came out against the invasion. Zeman called for Russia to be thrown out of SWIFT; Orbán said he would not oppose sanctions. Even Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson has begun to backpedal on his enthusiasm for Russia’s side in this war.
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was part of the scheme to get Zelensky to announce an investigation of Hunter Biden, today got in on the act of defending Ukraine. He tweeted: “The Ukrainian People are fighting for freedom from tyranny. Whether you realize or not, they are fighting for you and me.” But then he continued: “And our current administration is doing the minimum to support them, even though Biden’s colossal weakness and ineptitude helped to embolden Putin to do it.”
The right-wing talking point that Biden is weak and inept and therefore emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine is belied by the united front the western world is presenting. After the former president tried to weaken NATO and even discussed withdrawing from the treaty, Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have managed to strengthen the alliance again. They have brought the G7 (the seven wealthiest liberal democracies), the European Union, and other partners and allies behind extraordinary economic sanctions, acting in concert to make those sanctions much stronger than any one country could impose.
They have managed to get Germany behind stopping the certification of Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany that would have tied Europe more closely to Russia, and in what Marcel Dirsus, a German political scientist and fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University, told the Washington Post was possibly “one of the biggest shifts in German foreign policy since World War II,” Germany is now sending weapons to Ukraine and has agreed to impose economic sanctions.
Biden has facilitated this extraordinary international cooperation quietly, letting European leaders take credit for the measures his own administration has advocated. It is a major shift from the U.S.’s previous periods of unilateralism and militarism, and appears to be far more effective.
Asked tonight what he would do differently than Biden in Ukraine, former president Trump answered: “Well, I tell you what, I would do things, but the last thing I want to do is say it right now.”
For all the changes in the air, there is still a long way to go to restore democracy.
There is also a long way to go to restore Ukraine. Tonight the Russians are storming Kyiv.
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Southern novelist William Faulkner’s famous line saying “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” is usually interpreted as a reflection on how the evils of our history continue to shape the present. But Faulkner also argued, equally accurately, that the past is “not even past” because what happens in the present changes the way we remember the past.
Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the defiant and heroic response of the people of Ukraine to that new invasion are changing the way we remember the past.
Less than a week ago, Russian president Vladimir Putin launched an assault on Ukraine, and with his large military force, rebuilt after the military’s poor showing in its 2008 invasion of Georgia, it seemed to most observers that such an attack would be quick and deadly. He seemed unstoppable. For all that his position at home has been weakening for a while now as a slow economy and the political opposition of people like Alexei Navalny have turned people against him, his global influence seemed to be growing. That he believed an attack on Ukraine would be quick and successful was clear today when a number of Russian state media outlets published an essay, obviously written before the invasion, announcing Russia’s victory in Ukraine, saying ominously that “Putin solved the Ukrainian question forever…. Ukraine has returned to Russia.”
But Ukrainians changed the story line. While the war is still underway and deadly, and while Russia continues to escalate its attacks, no matter what happens the world will never go back to where it was a week ago. Suddenly, autocracy, rather than democracy, appears to be on the ropes.
In that new story, countries are organizing against Putin’s aggression and the authoritarianism behind it. Leaders of the world’s major economies, including Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Singapore, though not China, are working together to deny Putin’s access to the world’s financial markets.
As countries work together, international sanctions appear to be having an effect: a Russian bank this morning offered to exchange rubles for dollars at a rate of 171:1. Before the announcement that Europe and the U.S. would target Russia’s central bank, the rate was 83:1. Monday morning, Moscow time, the ruble plunged 30%. As Russia’s economy descends into chaos, investors are jumping out: today BP, Russia’s largest foreign investor, announced it is abandoning its investment in the Russian oil company Rosneft and pulling out of the country, at a loss of what is estimated to be about $25 billion.
The European Union has suddenly taken on a large military role in the world, announcing it would supply fighter jets to Ukraine. Sweden, which is a member of the E.U., will also send military aid to Ukraine. And German chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany, which has tended to underfund its military, would commit 100 billion euros, which is about $112.7 billion, to support its armed forces. The E.U. has also prohibited all Russian planes from its airspace, including Russian-chartered private jets.
Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, tweeted: “Russian elites fear Putin. But they no longer respect him. He has ruined their lives—damaged their fortunes, damaged the future of their kids, and may now have turned society away from them. They were living just fine until a week ago. Now, their lives will never be the same.”
Global power is different this week than last. Anti-authoritarian nations are pushing back on Russia and the techniques Putin has used to gain outsized influence. Today the E.U. banned media outlets operated by the Russian state. The White House and our allies also announced a new “transatlantic task force that will identify and freeze the assets of sanctioned individuals and companies—Russian officials and elites close to the Russian government, as well as their families, and their enablers.”
That word “enablers” seems an important one, for since 2016 there have been plenty of apologists for Putin here in the U.S. And yet now, with the weight of popular opinion shifting toward a defense of democracy, Republicans who previously cozied up to Putin are suddenly stating their support for Ukraine and trying to suggest that Putin has gotten out of line only because he sees Biden as weak. Under Trump, they say, Putin never would have invaded Ukraine, and they are praising Trump for providing aid to Ukraine in 2019.
They are hoping that their present support for Ukraine and democracy makes us forget their past support for Putin, even as former president Trump continues to call him “smart.” And yet, Republicans changed their party’s 2016 platform to favor Russia over Ukraine; accepted Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from northern Syria in October 2019, giving Russia a strategic foothold in the Middle East; and looked the other way when Trump withheld $391 million to help Ukraine resist Russian invasion until newly elected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to help rig the 2020 U.S. presidential election. (Trump did release the money after the story of the “perfect phone call” came out, but the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which investigated the withholding of funds, concluded that holding back the money at all was illegal.)
But rather than making us forget Republicans’ enabling of Putin’s expansion, the new story in which democracy has the upper hand might have the opposite effect. Now that people can clearly see exactly the man Republicans have supported, they will want to know why our leaders, who have taken an oath to our democratic Constitution, were willing to throw in their lot with a foreign autocrat. The answer to that question might well force us to rethink a lot of what we thought we knew about the last several years.
In today’s America, the past certainly is not past.
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It’s a picture night, folks. The news is a firehose, but too many late nights mean I simply must get some sleep.
The spot in this photo, the Angle, was the high-water mark of the Confederacy. It was here, on a battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 3, 1863, that United States soldiers stopped the Confederate soldiers of Pickett’s Charge, turning back the men who were fighting to establish a nation based on the proposition that men were created unequal and that some men should rule the rest.
Although the war would continue for well over another year, that moment broke the back of the Confederacy.
Four months later, on November 19, as the war was dragging on and Americans seemed ready to give up, President Abraham Lincoln reminded them why they were fighting. In a speech at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, where more than 3000 U.S. soldiers were killed, he recalled the inspirational idea at the heart of the United States. “Four score and seven years ago,” he said, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure,” Lincoln said. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here” had “nobly advanced” the unfinished work of defending democracy, Lincoln said, but the task was not done. He urged the living to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
I happened to be at the Angle on Saturday, February 26, 2022, the third day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That was the day on which it became clear that Ukrainian resistance to Russian president Vladimir Putin, supported by the cooperation of the U.S. and European allies and partners in strangling Russia’s economic system, was forging a global alliance against the authoritarianism that has been growing in power around the world.
It was an odd thing to be walking the Gettysburg battlefield on that day, constantly checking Twitter to follow the news, seeing, perhaps, the modern-day echo of the Angle, as people dedicated to a government of the people, by the people, for the people, begin to repel those who would gather all power to themselves.
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In Ukraine, Russian troops escalated their bombing of cities, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Mariupol, in what Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky called a campaign of terror to break the will of the Ukrainians. Tonight (in U.S. time), airborne troops assaulted Kharviv, which is a city of about 1.5 million, and a forty-mile-long convoy of tanks and trucks is within 17 miles of Kyiv, although a shortage of gas means they’ll move very slowly.
About 660,000 refugees have fled the country.
But the war is not going well for Putin, either, as international sanctions are devastating the Russian economy and the invasion is going far more slowly than he had apparently hoped. The ruble has plummeted in value, and the Kremlin is trying to stave off a crisis in the stock market by refusing to open it. Both Exxon and the shipping giant Maersk have announced they are joining BP in cutting ties to Russia, Apple has announced it will not sell products in Russia, and the Swiss-based company building Nord Stream 2 today said it was considering filing for insolvency.
Ukraine’s military claimed it today destroyed a large Russian military convoy of up to 800 vehicles, and Ukrainian authorities claim to have stopped a plot to assassinate Zelensky and to have executed the assassins. The death toll for Russian troops will further undermine Putin’s military push. Russians are leaving dead soldiers where they lie, likely to avoid the spectacle of body bags coming home. It appears at least some of the invaders had no idea they were going to Ukraine, and some have allegedly been knocking holes in their vehicles’ gas tanks to enable them to stay out of the fight. Morale is low.
Associated Press correspondent Francesca Ebel reports from Russia: “Life in Russia is deteriorating extremely rapidly. So many of my friends are packing up & leaving the country. Their cards are blocking. Huge lines for ATMs etc. Rumours that borders will close soon. ‘What have we done? How did we not stop him earlier?’ said a friend to me y[ester]day.” The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Andrew Roth, agreed. “Something has definitely shifted here in the last two days.”
According to the BBC, a local government body in Moscow's Gagarinsky District called the war a “disaster” that is impoverishing the country, and demanded the withdrawal of troops from Ukraine. Another, similar, body said the invasion was "insane" and "unjustified" and warned, "Our economy is going to hell."
Putin clearly did not expect the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the U.S. and other allies and partners around the world, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and others, to work together to stand against his aggression. Even traditionally neutral Switzerland is on board. The insistence of the U.S. on exposing Putin’s moves ahead of time, building a united opposition, and warning of false flag operations to justify an invasion meant that the anti-authoritarian world is working together now to stop the Russian advance. Today, Taiwan announced it sent more than 27 tons of medical supplies to Ukraine, claiming its own membership in the "democratic camp" in the international community.
This extraordinary international cooperation is a tribute to President Joe Biden, who has made defense of democracy at home and abroad the centerpiece of his presidency. Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and State Department officials have been calling, meeting, listening, and building alliances with allies since they took office, and by last Thanksgiving they were making a concerted push to bring the world together in anticipation of Putin’s aggression.
Their early warnings have rehabilitated the image of U.S. intelligence, badly damaged during the Trump years, when the president and his loyalists attacked U.S. intelligence and accepted the word of autocrats, including Putin.
It has also been a diplomatic triumph, but in his State of the Union address tonight, Biden quite correctly put it second to the “fearlessness,…courage,…and determination” of the Ukrainians who are resisting the Russian troops.
The theme of Biden’s speech tonight was unity. He worked to bring Americans from all political persuasions into a vision of the country we could all share, focusing on the measures—lower prescription drug costs, background checks for gun ownership, access to abortion, voting rights, immigration, civil rights, corporate taxation—that polls show enjoy enormous popular support.
“Last year COVID-19 kept us apart,” he began, addressing a vaccinated, boosted, and audience that was largely maskless, since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently eased mask recommendations according to risk level. “This year we are finally together again.”
Tonight, we meet as Democrats, Republicans and Independents. But most importantly as Americans. With a duty to one another, to the American people, to the Constitution. And with an unwavering resolve that freedom will always triumph over tyranny.” He urged people to “stop seeing each other as enemies, and start seeing each other for who we really are: Fellow Americans.”
Biden outlined the ways in which his administration has “helped working people—and left no one behind.” The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan helped us to fight Covid-19 and rebuilt the economy after the devastation of the pandemic. It helped the nation gain more than 6.5 million new jobs last year, more jobs created in one year than in any other time in our history.
The economy grew at an astonishing rate in Biden’s first year: 5.7%, the strongest growth in 40 years. Forty years of tax cuts, initiated in the belief that freeing up private capital would enable the wealthy to invest efficiently in the economy, have led to “weaker economic growth, lower wages, bigger deficits, and the widest gap between those at the top and everyone else in nearly a century,” Biden pointed out.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris believe instead that both the economy and the country do best when the government invests in ordinary people. The administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will rebuild America, creating well-paying jobs. The administration has also brought home military contracts, using tax dollars to provide Americans good jobs and to bring manufacturing back home. Biden called on Congress to pass the Bipartisan Innovation Act, which invests in innovation and will spark additional investment in new technologies like electric vehicles.
Biden not only outlined the ways in which he plans to nurture his vision of government, he took on Republican criticisms.
Biden said he plans to combat the inflation that has plagued the recovery by cutting the cost of prescription drugs and letting Medicare negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs the way the VA already does. He called for cutting energy and child care costs. He called for avoiding supply chain issues by strengthening domestic manufacturing. He spoke up against the price gouging that has characterized the pandemic years, and he called for corporations and the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share of taxes through a minimum 15% tax rate for corporations.
Biden also undercut Republican accusations that Democrats want to “defund” the police by countering that we need to fund the police at even higher rates, an idea he talked about on the campaign trail when he urged better funding for social services to relieve law enforcement from the community policing issues for which they are currently ill prepared. At the same time, he noted that his Department of Justice has “required body cameras, banned chokeholds, and restricted no-knock warrants for its officers.”
To those complaining about the effect of this spending on the deficit—this has the name of Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) all over it—Biden noted that by the end of the year, “the deficit will be down to less than half what it was before I took office.” He is, he said, “the only president ever to cut the deficit by more than one trillion dollars in a single year.”
Biden offered a “Unity Agenda for the Nation.” He outlined “[f]our big things we can do together”: beat the opioid epidemic, make the way we address mental health equal to the way we address physical health, support our veterans, and end cancer as we know it.
Biden’s speech listed items that are very popular but that are nonetheless highly unlikely to pass the Senate, where Republicans use the filibuster to stop any programs that support Biden’s ideology of government. The speech subtly reminded listeners that it is Republican members of Congress who are standing between these popular programs and the American people.
Since the attack on Ukraine made the line between democracies and autocracies crystal clear, Republicans have tried desperately to backpedal their previous coziness with Putin (in 2018, eight Republican lawmakers spent July 4 in Moscow, for example) and to declare their solidarity with Ukraine. Whether that sudden shift toward democracy would affect their approach to U.S. politics has been unclear. Tonight’s speech had some clues: Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said they wouldn’t attend because they didn’t have time to waste getting covid tests, and Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) actually turned their back on Biden’s cabinet members when they came in, then heckled the president as he spoke.
“In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security,” Biden said. And Americans “will meet the test. To protect freedom and liberty, to expand fairness and opportunity. We will save democracy.”
78% of voters polled by CBS said they approved of Biden’s speech.
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In the midst of all the news stories that have taken the headlines, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has continued its work. Today, in a lawsuit, it told a judge that the committee “has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
The filing also said that a “review of the materials may reveal that the president and members of his campaign engaged in common law fraud in connection with their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.” One of the emails it released to support the filing indicated that Trump legal advisor John Eastman knew those delaying the electoral count were breaking the law.
The January 6th committee is investigating the events of January 6, 2021, to see what changes in the law, if any, should be in place to make sure what happened on January 6 cannot happen again. It cannot charge anyone with a crime, although it can make a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, which the department will then consider. Today’s statement makes it seem likely that the committee will be making such a referral.
Former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal told MSNBC: "This is as deadly serious as it gets, seditious conspiracy."
The filing was in a case over whether Eastman, the author of the memo outlining how then–vice president Mike Pence could use his role in the counting of electoral votes to overturn the election, can refuse to turn over about 11,000 pages of emails and documents to the committee. Eastman wants to withhold them, saying they are covered by attorney-client privilege. But he has not been able to establish that Trump was his client, and, further, attorney-client privilege cannot be invoked to cover a crime.
Also today, in a case concerning whether the Oath Keepers, who stormed the Capitol on January 6, engaged in seditious conspiracy, Joshua James of Alabama pleaded guilty. According to CBS News congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane, who is following all the January 6 cases, James agreed that he tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power and that Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes had a “plan” for accomplishing that disruption. In the plea deal, James said that “Rhodes instructed James &..conspirators to be prepared, if called upon, to report to the White House grounds to secure the perimeter & use lethal force if necessary against anyone who tried to remove President Trump."
Meanwhile, the Russian attack on Ukraine continues to escalate. Today, United States ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield confirmed that Russia has used cluster munitions and vacuum bombs, which are prohibited under the Geneva Conventions establishing limits to deadly weapons, in Ukraine.
A million refugees have now crossed the border to get out of Ukraine. People are also fleeing Russia as its economy collapses and Russian president Vladimir Putin persists in turning the country into a global outcast. Russian-American journalist Julia Ioffe wrote: “Friend after friend fleeing Russia. Five today alone. The best and the brightest, the journalists who were telling people the truth about their country—gone. Emigres, like the white Russians of a century ago. Putin is destroying two countries at once.” Russian authorities have started to crack down and refuse to let people leave.
In both the U.S. and Russia in the last several years, anti-democratic leaders have sought to impose their will on voters, and the similarities between those impulses make them unlikely to be independent of each other.
On July 27, 2016, even before the Republican National Committee changed the party’s platform to weaken the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its struggle to fight off Russia’s 2014 invasion, U.S. News & World Report senior politics writer David Catanese noted that senior security officials were deeply concerned about then-candidate Trump’s ties to Russia.
July 27 was the day Trump referred at a news conference to his opponent and then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s emails that were not turned over for public disclosure from her private server and said: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” (We know now that Russian hackers did, in fact, begin to target her accounts on or around that day.)
Former secretary of defense Leon Panetta, who served under nine presidents, told Catanese that Trump was "a threat to national security,” not only because of his call for help from Russia, but because of his suggestion that he would abandon the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) if he were elected and, as Catanese put it, “his coziness toward Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
Former National Security Advisor Thomas E. Donilon also expressed concern over the hack of the Democratic National Committee by Russian operatives, and said that such an attack mirrored similar attacks in Estonia, Georgia, and, most prominently, Ukraine. He called on officials to confront Russian leaders publicly.
Cybersecurity expert Alan Silberberg told Catanese that Trump looked like an ally of Putin. "The Twitter trail, if you dig into it over the last year, the Russian media is mirroring him, putting out the same tweets at almost the same time," Silberberg said.
"You get the sense that people think it's a joke,” Panetta said. “The fact is what he has said has already represented a threat to our national security."
Putin’s attempt to destroy democracy in Ukraine militarily has invited a reexamination of the cyberattacks, disinformation, division, attacks on opponents, and installation of puppet leaders he used to gain control of Ukraine before finally turning to bombs. This reexamination, in turn, has led journalists to note that those same techniques have poisoned politics in countries other than Ukraine.
Over the weekend, British investigative journalist Carol Cadwalladr warned that we are 8 years into “The first Great Information War,” a war sparked by Putin’s fury at the removal of his puppet Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 from the presidency of Ukraine. Putin set out to warp reality to confuse both Ukrainians & the world. The “meddling” we saw in the 2016 election was not an attempt to elect Trump simply so he would end the sanctions former president Barack Obama had imposed on Russia in 2014 after it invaded Ukraine. It was an attempt to destabilize democracy. “And it's absolutely crucial that we now understand that Putin's attack on Ukraine & the West was a JOINT attack on both,” she wrote.
Today in The Guardian, political and cultural observer Rebecca Solnit wrote a piece titled “It’s time to confront the Trump-Putin network.”
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As Russia’s war on Ukraine enters its second week, the lines are clear.
This morning—in America’s time—Russian president Vladimir Putin called French president Emmanuel Macron and talked for an hour and a half. Putin warned that he aimed to take “full control” of Ukraine by diplomatic or military means. He said that he was “prepared to go all the way.”
Tonight, Russian troops shelled the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power complex in southeast Ukraine. A fire broke out at the plant but, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, did not affect essential equipment. What the attack did do, though, was sow fear of nuclear meltdown, giving Putin a psychological win in his war.
Standing against Putin and his vision of freedom to act as he wishes against sovereign countries are countries around the world that are exerting financial pressure on Russia, cutting it off from the rest of the world. It is a new moment in global history, one in which businesses and economic pressure are being enlisted to protect democracy, rather than undermine it.
That economic pressure in the form of sanctions is working not just on large financial transactions, but also on things like simple maintenance of airplanes. Airplane manufacturers Boeing and Airbus have suspended the shipping of parts, maintenance, and technical support for the Russian airplane fleet. Russia is huge. Downing the whole airplane fleet though economic pressure will severely affect the ability of goods and people to move throughout the country.
The Biden administration increased pressure on 8 more oligarchs close to Putin, along with their families, and restricted the visas of 19 oligarchs and 47 members of their families in hopes that that pressure would lead them to undermine the president. The sanctioned Russians include Yevgeny Prigozhin and his wife, daughter, and son. In addition to being close to Putin, Prigozhin is the owner of the Wagner Group, an infamous paramilitary organization that has been accused of war crimes. Prigozhin is also wanted by the FBI for his role in attacking the 2016 U.S. election.
Concerns that Putin might continue to invade sovereign nations have led countries to turn to European democracies for protection. Moldova has officially applied for membership in the European Union. “We want to live in peace, prosperity, be part of the free world,” said Moldova’s president, Maia Sandu. “While some decisions take time, others must be made quickly and decisively, and taking advantage of the opportunities that come with a changing world.”
The U.S., and other countries that belong to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, are supporting Ukraine from outside its borders. For NATO to take on the fight against Putin’s armies directly in Ukraine runs the risk of uniting the currently demoralized Russian people behind their leader, and enables him to start a war against NATO, which would engulf all of Europe.
Tonight, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham crossed that line when, on Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s television show, he called for someone to assassinate Putin. He then repeated his comment on Twitter. This was an astonishing propaganda coup for Putin, enabling him to argue that he is indeed in a war with America, rather than engaging in an unprovoked attack on neighboring Ukraine. This is exactly what the Biden administration has gone out of its way to avoid.
It was an astonishing moment…and also an interesting one. It undermines the position of the U.S. and our partners and allies, but in whose service? After initially opposing Trump’s reach for the presidency, Graham threw in his lot utterly with the former president, who has many possible reasons both to undermine Biden and to keep Putin in power. Perhaps Graham’s comment was intended to help Trump. Or perhaps Graham might have simply made a colossally stupid mistake. Whatever the case, the enormous implications of his statement make it one that would be a mistake to ignore.
Graham was not the only one to bolster Putin’s position today. Tucker Carlson tonight told his audience that indeed he was wrong in his earlier defense of the Russian president but then continued to stoke the same racist and sexist fires he has fed all along, blaming his misreading of the situation on Vice President Kamala Harris.
Today the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian media outlets, as well as some of those involved with them, that worked to “spread Russian disinformation and influence perceptions as a part of their invasion of Ukraine.”
Closer to home, a federal court in the Southern District of New York charged John Hanick with violating U.S. sanctions and making false statements concerning his years of work for sanctioned Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev. Malofeyev was key to destabilizing Ukraine in order to support a Russian takeover. Hanick worked for him from 2013 until at least 2017, establishing TV networks in Russia, Bulgaria, and Greece to spread destabilizing messages.
Hanick was one of the founding producers of the Fox News Channel. He became an admirer of Putin because of the Russian leader’s anti-LGBTQ stance and his belief that Putin was a devout Christian. Apparently, he turned that enthusiasm into an attempt to undermine democracy in favor of Putin’s authoritarianism.
Yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a new interagency law enforcement task force, KleptoCapture, dedicated to enforcing sanctions, export restrictions, and economic countermeasures the U.S. and its allies and partners have imposed to respond to Russian aggression. In a statement, about the Hanick indictment, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damien Williams said, “The indictment unsealed today shows this office’s commitment to the enforcement of laws intended to hamstring those who would use their wealth to undermine fundamental democratic processes.”
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Just a few quick markers tonight because I need some sleep.
Russia’s war against Ukraine continues. Fourteen wide-bodied aircraft from the U.S. and the European Union delivered anti-tank missiles, rocket launchers, guns, and ammunition to Ukraine today to help it hold on against Russia. The extra aid was approved less than a week ago, and the munitions began flowing two days later.
Russia’s economy continues to nosedive. The Russian stock market has been closed all week, and yesterday, a Russian stock market analyst took out a bottle and drank to the death of the stock market on live television. According to CNN’s global affairs analyst Bianna Golodryga, the Moscow Stock Exchange will remain closed through next Wednesday, and possibly beyond. Russians are fleeing their country into Finland.
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, who is bound to be strictly neutral on political matters, withdrew invitations for a diplomatic reception issued to Russian and Belarusian diplomats to show her disapproval of the attack on Ukraine. She also gave from her private funds a “generous donation” to Ukraine humanitarian aid.
The U.S. has swung against Russia after years in which members of the Republican Party in particular have spoken admiringly of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s strength and commitment to so-called conservative values. Former vice president Mike Pence was expected to try to open up some space between Putin and the Republicans, telling a gathering of Republican donors tonight, “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin. There is only room for champions of freedom.”
Former president Trump, who still commands loyalty from party members, has spoken admiringly of Putin’s attack on Ukraine. Pence’s statement appears to be an attempt to recenter the party away from Trump.
And, speaking of Trump, a legal filing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday said that advisors repeatedly told the former president that he had lost the 2020 election and that he nonetheless insisted on pursuing the lie that he had won. In Salon, Amanda Marcotte pointed out that Trump apparently felt comfortable pursuing the lie because he did not believe there would be any consequences for his illegal behavior.
That conviction that the former president and his cronies were above the law clearly influenced Trump advisor Roger Stone, who permitted a Danish film crew to follow him around for more than two years, including during the days before January 6, 2021.
A stunning exposé in the Washington Post today by Dalton Bennett and Jon Swaine shows that Stone helped to coordinate the “Stop the Steal” protests and met before the January 6 riot with a member of the far-right Oath Keepers group who has since pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy. Stone refused to let the filmmakers see him for about 90 minutes during the height of the violence on January 6—an aide said he was napping—but when the extent of the crisis became clear, he slipped out of Washington on a private plane, claiming he was afraid incoming attorney general Merrick Garland would prosecute him.
Stone then lobbied hard for a presidential pardon for himself and a number of Trump supporters in Congress for trying to overturn the election. When White House counsel Pat Cipollone opposed the requests, Stone texted a friend, “See you in prison.”
Stone has categorically denied all the conclusions drawn from the film footage.
On this date in 1789, the first U.S. Congress met for the first time, operating under the U.S. Constitution and cementing it into existence.
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If the broader patterns of war apply, Russian president Vladimir Putin is making the war as senselessly brutal as possible, likely hoping to force Ukraine to give in quickly before global sanctions completely crush Russia and the return of warm weather eases Europe’s need for Russian oil and gas.
Russian shelling has created a humanitarian crisis in urban areas, and last night, a brief ceasefire designed to let residents of Mariupol and Volnovakha escape the cities through “humanitarian corridors” broke down as Russian troops resumed firing, forcing the people back to shelter. This morning, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to more than 280 members of the U.S. Congress to describe Ukraine’s “urgent need” for more support, both military and humanitarian.
Today, Putin said that the continued resistance of President Zelensky and his government threatens Ukraine’s existence. He also said that the sanctions imposed against Russia, Russian companies, Russian oligarchs and their families, and himself by the global alliance arrayed against him are “akin to a declaration of war.” (Remember, saying things doesn’t make them so; words are often a posture.)
The global economic pressure on Russia and the Russian oligarchs is already crushing the Russian economy—today Mastercard and Visa suspended operations in the country—while other countries’ refusal to sell airplane parts, for example, will soon render Russian planes useless, a major crisis for a country the size of Russia. Meanwhile, support is pouring into Ukraine: aside from the military support coming, yesterday the World Bank said it was preparing ways to transfer immediate financial support.
There are suggestions, too, among those who study military strategy that the Russian invasion has been far weaker than they expected. The Russian forces on paper are significantly stronger than those of Ukraine, and by now they should have established control of the airspace. Ground forces are also not moving as efficiently as it seems they should be.
Today, Phillips P. O’Brien, Professor of Strategic Studies at University of St Andrews, outlined how the Russian military, so impressive on paper, might in fact have continued the terrible logistics problems of the Soviet Union. On the ground, they appear to have too few trucks, too little tire maintenance, out-of-date food, and too little fuel. In the air, they are showing signs that they cannot plan or execute complicated maneuvers, in which they have had little practice.
Russia expert Tom Nichols appeared to agree, tweeting: “Ukrainian resistance has been amazing, but I am astonished—despite already low expectations—at how utter Russian military incompetence has made a giant clusterf**k out of an invasion against a much weaker neighbor.”
Meanwhile, Russians are now aware that they are at war—something that Putin had apparently hidden at first—and a number are protesting. The government has cracked down on critics, and rumors are flying that Putin is about to declare martial law. It appears he is already turning to mercenaries to fight his war. The U.S. government has urged all Americans to leave Russia.
And so, time is a key factor in this war: will Russian forces pound Ukraine into submission before their own country can no longer support a war effort?
Closer to home, the Russian war on Ukraine has created a crisis for the Republican Party here in the U.S.
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post reported on Thursday that after Trump won the 2016 election and we learned that Russia had interfered to help him, Republicans’ approval of Putin jumped from about 14% to 37%.
In the Des Moines Register today, columnist Rekha Basu explained how the American right then swung behind Putin because they saw him as a moral crusader, defending religion and “traditional values,” from modern secularism and "decadence," using a strong hand to silence those who would, for example, defend LGBTQ rights.
Now, popular support has swung strongly against the Russian leader—even among Republicans, 61% of whom now strongly dislike the man. This is widening the split in the Republican Party between Trump supporters and those who would like to move the party away from the former president.
In a tweet today, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) referred to the “Putin wing” of the Republican Party when she shared a video clip of Douglas Macgregor, whom Trump nominated for ambassador to Germany and then appointed as senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense, telling a Fox News Channel host that Russian forces have been “too gentle” and “I don’t see anything heroic” about Zelensky.
Possibly eager to show their participation in Ukraine’s defense, when Zelensky spoke to Congress this morning, two Republican senators—Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Steve Daines (R-MT)—shared screenshots of his Zoom call while it was going on, despite the explicit request of Ukraine’s ambassador not to share details of the meeting until it was over, out of concern for Zelensky’s safety.
In an appearance on Newsmax, Trump’s secretary of state John Bolton pushed back when the host suggested that the Trump administration was “pretty tough on Russia, in a lot of ways.” Bolton said that Trump “barely knew where Ukraine was” and repeatedly complained about Russian sanctions. Bolton said Trump should have sanctioned the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany, rather than letting it proceed, and concluded: “It’s just not accurate to say that Trump's behavior somehow deterred the Russians.”
Still, the sudden attempt of the Republicans to rewrite history cannot erase the fact that every Republican in the House of Representatives voted against impeaching Trump when he withheld $391 million in aid for Ukraine that Congress had appropriated, offering to release it only on the condition that President Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That is, they were willing to look the other way as Trump weakened Ukraine in an attempt to rig the 2020 election by creating a scandal he hoped would sink his chief opponent.
Democrats supported impeachment, though, and the case went to the Senate to be tried. And there, every single Republican senator except Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT), who voted to convict him for abuse of power, acquitted Trump of the charges stemming from his attempt to hamstring Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.
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It was a beautiful sunny day today in Selma, Alabama, where thousands of people, including Vice President Kamala Harris and five other senior White House officials, met to honor the 57th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when law enforcement officers tried to beat into silence those Black Americans marching for their right to have a say in the government under which they lived.
The story of March 7 in Selma is the story of Americans determined to bring to life the principle articulated in the Declaration of Independence that a government’s claim to authority comes from the consent of the governed. It is also a story of how hard local authorities, entrenched in power and backed by angry white voters, made that process.
In the 1960s, despite the fact Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So, in 1963, local Black organizers launched a voter registration drive.
It was hard going. White Selma residents had no intention of permitting their Black neighbors to have a say in their government. Indeed, white southerners in general were taking a stand against the equal right of Black Americans to vote. During the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration drive in neighboring Mississippi, Ku Klux Klan members worked with local law enforcement officers to murder three voting rights organizers and dispose of their bodies.
To try to hold back the white supremacists, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, designed in part to make it possible for Black Americans to register to vote. In Selma, a judge stopped voter registration meetings by prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.
To call attention to the crisis in her city, voting rights activist Amelia Boynton traveled to Birmingham to invite the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to the city. King had become a household name after the 1963 March on Washington where he delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.
King and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965, and for seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2000 of them for a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.
Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.
Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.
On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bull whips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis, and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.
Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the marchers in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
The marchers were determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, and when Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them, President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1965 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama state capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.
On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”
That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson recalled “the outrage of Selma” when he said "This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies."
The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where Black Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down “regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.” He called the right to vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” and pledged that “we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.”
But less than 50 years later, in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. Since then, states have made it harder to vote. In the wake of the 2020 election, in which voters handed control of the government to Democrats, Republican-dominated legislatures in at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting. As legislatures start their 2022 sessions, those in at least 27 states are considering more than 250 bills with restrictive provisions.
On this 57th anniversary of the Selma march, President Joe Biden vowed to continue to promote voting access through last year’s executive order and with the help of the Department of Justice, and he called, again, for Congress to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the young man on the Pettus Bridge who went on to serve 17 terms in Congress. Together, these acts would protect the right to vote.
“I will continue to use every tool at my disposal to strengthen our democracy and keep alive the promise of America for all Americans,” Biden said in a statement. “The battle for the soul of America has many fronts. The right to vote is the most fundamental.”
In Selma today, Vice President Harris told the people gathered: “Today, the eyes of the world are on Ukraine, and the brave people who are fighting to protect their country and their democracy. And, their bravery is a reminder that freedom and democracy can never be taken for granted by any of us.”
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Every day, people write to me and say they feel helpless to change the direction of our future.
I
always answer that we change the future by changing the way people
think, and that we change the way people think by changing the way we
talk about things. To that end, I have encouraged people to speak up
about what they think is important, to take up oxygen that otherwise
feeds the hatred and division that have had far too much influence in
our country of late.
Have any of your efforts mattered?
Well,
apparently some people think they have. Last week, President Biden’s
team reached out to ask if I would like some time with him to have a
conversation to share with you all.
On Friday, February 25, I sat
down with the president in the China Room of the White House to talk
about American democracy and the struggles we face.
It was an
amazing time to be able to talk to the President. Russian president
Vladimir Putin had just attacked Ukraine, Biden was preparing to give
his first State of the Union address, and the president had just made
the historic announcement of the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown
Jackson for a seat on the Supreme Court.
But I didn’t want to ask
the president about anything I could learn from other publicly
available sources—I already read those every day to write my Letters
from an American. I wanted to hear from a historic figure in a historic
time about how he thinks about America in this pivotal moment, to put
the specifics of what he does in a larger context.
In my books, I
have argued that throughout our history, America has swung between the
defense of equality outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the
defense of private property outlined in the Constitution.
Our
peculiar history of racism has meant that every time it seems we are
approaching equality before the law, those determined to prevent that
equality have turned people against it by insisting that government
protection of equality will cost tax dollars, thus amounting to a
redistribution of wealth from those with property to those without. That
is, if Black and Brown Americans, and poor people, are permitted to
vote, they will demand roads and schools and hospitals, and those can be
paid for only by taxes on people with money. In this argument, an equal
say in our government for all people amounts to socialism.
With
this argument, those defending their property turn ordinary Americans
against each other and take control of our political system. Once in
power, they rig the system for their own benefit. Money flows upward
until there is a dramatic split between ordinary people and those very
few wealthy Americans who, by then, control the economy, the government,
and society.
This point in the cycle came about in the 1850s, the 1890s, the 1920s, and now, again, in our present.
In
the past, just when it seemed we were approaching the end of democracy
and replacing it with oligarchy—and in each of these periods, elites
literally talked about how they alone should lead the country—the
American people turned to leaders who helped them reclaim democracy.
We
know these leaders from our history. Presidents Abraham Lincoln,
Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt all have entered the
pantheon of our leaders because of their defense of democracy in the
face of entrenched power. But all of those presidents became who they
were because they rose to the challenge of the pivotal moments in which
they lived. They worked to reflect the increasingly loud voices of the
majority of the American people.
James Buchanan, William McKinley, Herbert Hoover, and Donald Trump did not.
And
now President Biden stands at another pivotal moment in our history.
What he does in this moment will reflect what the American people demand
from his leadership.
So do your voices matter? He wouldn’t have
taken the time in the midst of such an important day in America to talk
to you if they didn’t.
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For all the breathless reports of Russia’s war on Ukraine, it is unclear who is gaining advantage. This is in part because both sides are fighting the war with propaganda as well as with missiles, and it is hard to sort out what is real and what is not. Indeed, image and reality may merge, since images often shape what later becomes real. So, for example, the many stories of Ukrainian resistance feed that resistance, while the stories of Russian failures hurt morale.
One thing that is absolutely clear is that Russia is firing on civilian areas indiscriminately, creating horrific damage and humanitarian crises in urban areas that two weeks ago were normal city blocks. More than 1.7 million Ukrainians have had to flee their homes.
But the war is not proceeding according to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s plans. To control Ukraine, Russia needed to take it quickly, and although its military is 8 times the size of Ukraine’s, it has not managed to do so. The Russian government has admitted the loss of 498 soldiers; U.S. officials say the number is conservatively more than 3000, and Ukrainian officials estimate the Russian troop deaths at over 10,000.
According to a briefing by a senior U.S. defense official reported by Washington Post military reporter Dan Lamothe, the U.S. assesses that the Russian combat power massed at the Ukrainian border before the war is now fully committed, and there is no evidence they are moving in more troops, although there are reports that Russia is trying to recruit soldiers accustomed to urban combat from Syria. Without the troop power it needs or an effective air assault, Russia is using long-range, inaccurate weapons that create widespread devastation.
In the short term, the Russian invasion is going far more slowly than expected and economic sanctions are biting the Russian economy hard. Officials warn that Russia will continue to grind Ukraine down, but how much Putin can afford to do over time as the sanctions hurt more and more is not clear.
Outside of the horror that is happening within Ukraine, Russia’s apparent weakness and Ukraine’s strength will almost certainly rework geopolitics.
At the very least, the underperformance of the Russian military will enable opponents to exploit the holes it now sees (today, for example, it appeared that Russia’s boasted encrypted battlefield communications system doesn’t actually work).
More, though, the missteps of the Russian army have significantly weakened the country. Estonia’s chief of defense, Lieutenant General Martin Herem, told reporters “Today what I have seen is that even this huge army or military is not so huge.” Brigadier General Rauno Sirk, commander of Estonia’s air force, said of the Russian air force: “If you look at what’s on the other side, you’ll see that there isn’t really an opponent anymore.”
Andrei Kozyrev, Russia’s foreign minister from 1990 to 1996, tweeted: “The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus. But as a military advisor you cannot report that to the President. So they reported lies to him instead. Potemkin military[.]”
Perhaps the actions of Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, who is facing an election on April 3, reveal how that weakness might change political alliances. Orbán had brought his country close to Russia but now opposes the invasion.
If Putin’s authoritarian government has turned out to be weaker militarily than was expected, democracies have proved stronger.
Max Bergman, a senior fellow for Europe and Russia at the Center for American Progress, noted that U.S. security assistance to Ukraine appears to have been unusually effective because it did not focus on high-tech gadgets and bells and whistles, but rather on reforming what was in 2014 a corrupt military and on helping the Ukrainian forces with basic systems, like secure cell phones, stockpiles, and resupply. It wasn’t flashy, but it appears to have been effective, helping the Ukrainians to hold their own against the Russians. If this observation holds up, it could lead to a reassessment of foreign military aid.
Logistics seem to have been key to addressing the humanitarian crisis outside Ukraine as well, as 1.7 million Ukrainians have fled their country. In two weeks, that astonishing number of refugees has been absorbed by Poland (1,028,000), Hungary (180,000), Moldova (83,000), Slovakia (128,000), Romania (79,000), Russia (53,000), and Belarus (406), and others, according to the United Nations. The communications and plans necessary simply to move that many people, let alone feed and shelter them, show an astonishing level of cooperation. Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday was in Moldova, the small former Soviet state that borders Ukraine, where he pledged America’s support.
The ability of European countries to come together to stand against Russia, as well as the global cooperation in cutting Russia off from the world economy, has offered an illustration of how countries can enforce a rules-based world and showed the strength of democracies.
The widespread crackdown on illicit Russian money will have an equally important long-term effect. A recent study revealed that Russian money has corrupted British politics; now we are beginning to learn just how much of it has done the same in the U.S. A piece today in the Washington Post by Peter Whoriskey explained that, according to the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, oligarchs associated with Putin have donated millions of dollars to U.S. philanthropies, museums, and universities since Putin rose to power, using their money to buy access to elite circles. Also today, a former campaign staffer for Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has been charged with funneling Russian money into the 2016 election.
Also clear over the past month is that the U.S. seems to have finally begun to take on Russian propaganda. The administration was ahead of every Russian false flag operation and warned the world what our intelligence community believed was going to happen. This took away the element of surprise that has worked so well for Putin in the past.
Even more, though, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and his administration have replaced Putin’s popular vision of an invincible Russia with one in which the Russians seem weak and Ukraine strong, its success inevitable. They have turned Russian propaganda on its head.
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This morning, President Joe Biden announced an executive order that will ban the import of Russian oil, liquified natural gas, and coal to the United States, as part of a plan to cut Russia off from the world economy.
Biden did this under pressure from Congress, which was preparing its own bill for this outcome. The administration hesitated to take this step independently from other allies and partners. In 2021, the U.S. imported only 3% of its oil from Russia, and that number has been dropping in 2022, while Europe is not in a position to cut off Russian oil, although the European Union did offer a plan to cut Russian gas imports by two thirds this year, and Britain declared it would stop importing Russian oil in 2023.
According to a new Reuters poll, 63% of Americans approve of cutting off Russian oil despite expected price hikes. Still, rising gasoline prices are a big problem, and the optics of cutting off any oil supplies right now will hurt the administration.
The government has little to do with the cost of gasoline. Since our oil companies are privately owned, the cost of oil goes up and down according to supply and demand. That, in turn, can depend on disruptions to crude oil supplies, refinery operations, or pipeline problems, or even on what people think will be future demands. Last year, in the midst of the pandemic, the economic recession meant there was little demand for oil, and prices were very low. That meant producers reduced production, and they have not yet fully ramped it up again.
Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, the booming U.S. economy meant increased demand for oil and thus increased prices. U.S. companies increased their production, but perhaps not enough to address the imbalance between supply and demand that would address soaring gasoline prices. And in that gap, oil companies made huge profits.
On February 20, 2022, Tom Wilson of Financial Times reported that the seven top oil companies, including BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron, would return a near-record $38 to $41 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks, after distributing $50 billion in dividends. The Wall Street Journal in January noted, “While that is good for investors in the company, there are mounting concerns that there isn’t enough investment in new fossil-fuel supply to meet growing demand.”
Low supplies are driving prices up, but Republicans are trying to turn those high gas prices into a culture war, blaming Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline for the nation’s high gas prices. Representative Jake LaTurner (R-KS), for example, has launched a paid ad on Facebook and Twitter saying that the Keystone XL pipeline “would have produced 830,000 barrels of oil per day, more than enough to offset what we import from Russia.” Others blame Biden’s cancellation of new oil permits in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for high prices.
In fact, both of these points are misleading.
The Keystone Pipeline, which runs from oil sand fields in Alberta, Canada, into the United States and to Cushing, Oklahoma, exists and is fully operational. The XL Pipeline consists of two new additions to the original pipeline, together adding up to 1700 new miles. One addition was designed to connect Cushing to oil refineries in Texas, on the Gulf Coast. That section was built and went into operation in January 2017.
The second extension is the one that caused such a fuss. It was to carry crude oil from Alberta to Kansas, traveling through Montana and North Dakota, where it would pick up U.S. crude oil to deliver it to the Gulf Coast of Texas. (This would have had the effect of raising oil prices in the middle of the country.) This leg crossed an international border, and thus the Canadian company building it needed approval from the State Department. The proposed pipeline would threaten water supplies in the Northwest if it leaked, for it would run over a huge aquifer, and the people who lived downstream from the proposed route, including Lakotas and members of other Indigenous tribes, protested the pipeline’s construction.
The Trump administration approved this construction, and the opposition of environmentalists, Indigenous Americans, and Democrats to the pipeline enabled Republicans to turn it into a cultural symbol, suggesting that the opposition of these groups was hobbling the economy. In fact, the company behind the project was Canadian and wanted the extension to shorten transportation routes for its oil. The winners on the American side were the refinery owners; the jobs the project would create were primarily in the construction of the project.
As soon as he took office, Biden halted the construction. But blaming today’s high prices on the cancellation of this spur of the Keystone Pipeline is a resort to that culture war. Even if Biden had not overturned Trump’s approval of the project, it would not be completed yet, and even if it were completed, there is no guarantee that it would have delivered more oil to the U.S., rather than to the ports for export elsewhere. The U.S. exports about half of its oil production to other countries, both because the crude we produce is hard for us to refine and because of the demand for it overseas. The Keystone pipeline was designed for export.
The argument that Biden’s cancellation of new oil drilling leases on public property has driven prices up is similarly misleading. On November 17, 2020, after he lost the election, former president Trump abruptly allowed oil and gas companies to pick out land for drilling rights on about 1.6 million acres of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Biden froze those permits as soon as he took office. Only about 10% of drilling takes place on public land, and there are currently about 9000 permits already issued that have not been developed.
But oil drilling on public land returns huge sums of money to the states in whose boundaries the drilling occurs; at the hearing for the confirmation of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said that his state collects more than a billion dollars a year in royalties and taxes from the oil, gas, and coal produced on federal lands in the state, and warned that the Biden administration’s opposition to oil permits is “taking a sledgehammer to Western states’ economies.”
Oil prices are skyrocketing because of the dislocation of the pandemic, the Russian invasion, and the disinclination of countries to buy from Russia, even though oil sales have not yet been sanctioned.
To combat those prices, the Biden administration asked Saudi Arabia to increase production; the Saudis declined. On Saturday, U.S. officials met Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, who has run a brutal regime, is accused of human rights violations, and is aligned with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Venezuelan oil has been under U.S. sanctions since 2019, and with Russian assets frozen, Maduro needs financial support, while the U.S. and its allies need oil. After Saturday’s talks, the Venezuela government released two of six U.S. citizens from custody, apparently as a gesture of goodwill as talks go forward.
For all the fighting over oil, Biden pointed out today that we have an interest in stopping Putin’s aggression, and that the best way to reduce the price of oil is to shift to renewable energy. “[T]ransforming our economy to run on [electric vehicles], powered by clean energy, will mean that in the future, no one has to worry about gas prices.”
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Yesterday, the Department of Justice indicted Henry “Enrique” Tarrio on a conspiracy charge in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Tarrio is a leader of the far-right extremist Proud Boys, the white supremacists that former president Trump told to stand back and stand by in his September 2020 debate with Joe Biden. Tarrio was not at the Capitol itself on January 6th because a court had ordered him to leave the city the day before after destroying a Black Lives Matter banner at an earlier protest.
The indictment charges that before leaving the city, Tarrio met with Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and others in a parking garage. He also texted with someone who talked about “revolution” and sent a plan called “1776 Returns″ that called for occupying “crucial buildings” in Washington with “as many people as possible.” Tarrio allegedly agreed with the texter and added “ I’m not playing games.”
The indictment of someone who was not physically present at the riot expands the circle of those identified as part of the conspiracy. Violating the law the indictment identifies carries a sentence of up to 20 years.
Also yesterday, the Justice Department prevailed in the first case against a January 6 defendant as a jury unanimously found Guy Reffitt guilty of obstructing an official proceeding. Prosecutors produced what the New York Times called “exhaustive” evidence, illustrating just how extensive their investigations have been.
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has also been busy. It has been engaged in a legal fight with John Eastman, the lawyer who wrote the Eastman memo outlining a plan for then–vice president Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election. Eastman has been fighting desperately to stop the committee from seeing his emails around the time of the insurrection, claiming that they are covered by attorney-client privilege and that former president Trump was his client. But the committee noted that there is no evidence there was such a relationship between the two of them, and that privilege doesn’t hold if it is covering up a crime or fraud.
Each time the court has sided with the committee, Eastman has thrown more sand in the gears to slow down or stop the document review. Today, a federal judge decided he would personally review 111 emails sent between January 4 and January 7, 2021, to see if they should be protected or given to the committee.
Also today, the January 6 committee issued a subpoena to an email fundraising vendor whose ads pushed the lie that the election was stolen. The committee wants to learn more about the ads and how they motivated rioters, as well as “the flow of funds, and whether contributions were actually directed to the purpose indicated.”
Trump advisor Stephen Miller today sued to block the January 6th committee’s November subpoena for his phone records. Miller is on a cell phone plan with his parents and says that the subpoena might pick up the other numbers on the account. He also says it violates his privacy rights because there are personal communications about his wife and newborn daughter.
On March 3, the January 6 committee subpoenaed Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump, Jr., since she was in “direct contact with key individuals, raised funds for the rally immediately preceding the violent attack on the United States Capitol, and participated in that event.” Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) noted that Guilfoyle had “backed out of her original commitment to provide a voluntary interview.”
Other people involved in the attempt to overturn the election are in more immediate trouble. Tina Peters, the Republican clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, along with her deputy, Belinda Knisley, has been indicted by a Colorado grand jury on a number of charges stemming from the release of confidential information from the county’s election systems. That information apparently got turned over to those “investigating” the election numbers. Peters says she is simply exposing the criminality of voting machine manufacturers and politicians. She is currently running for the office of secretary of state in Colorado.
Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell is also in the news, this time because a committee of the State Bar of Texas asked a district court to judge Powell for professional misconduct with regard to overturning the 2020 election and to “determine and impose an appropriate sanction.”
BuzzFeed broke the story tonight that Powell, whose nonprofit has raised significantly more than $15 million, has been paying the legal expenses for members of the Oath Keepers.
Another person pushing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, paradoxically strengthened a lawsuit against the network. Smartmatic, a company that makes voting machines, has sued FNC over the many instances of FNC personalities falsely claiming that the voting machines had been part of a massive voter fraud in 2020. FNC says the lawsuit is “baseless” and an assault upon the First Amendment.
Today, New York Supreme Court Judge David B. Cohen ruled that the case against FNC can go forward because the statements of its personalities were baseless and reckless. One of the key points in the decision was Carlson’s own initial dismissal of Powell’s outrageous claims. Carlson’s repeated demands for proof of her claims and her inability to provide any suggest that FNC knew, or should have known, that Powell was lying.
And yet, for all the mounting evidence that there was a conspiracy surrounding Trump to overturn the will of the voters—the centerpiece of our governmental system—in the 2020 election, key Republicans are doubling down on him.
Trump’s attorney general William Barr has just published a book detailing how Trump lied about the election and threatened democracy. And yet, on a tour to sell the book, Barr on Monday told NBC's Savannah Guthrie that he would nonetheless vote for Trump if he were the Republican nominee in 2024. "Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it's inconceivable to me that I wouldn't vote for the Republican nominee," he said.
This same conviction that Democrats must be stopped at all costs is pushing the drive to destroy democracy by concentrating political power in state legislatures. In a dissent this week, four right-wing Supreme Court justices indicated they support a further step in that concentration, backing a legal argument that state legislatures have ultimate power to determine their own voting procedures, including the selection of presidential electors, regardless of what a majority of voters want.
Under the dressing of new legal terminology, this is, at heart, the old state’s rights argument. If a state’s legislature can determine who gets to vote, a minority can control that legislature and entrench itself in power, passing laws that keep the majority subservient to those in control. It was this very concept Congress overrode in 1868 with the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, saying that no state could deprive a citizen of the equal protection of the laws.
Resurrecting it now would pave the way for a January 6th–type coup through the law, rather than through the plots of a ragtag mess of insurrectionists.
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On June 5, 1944, in his 29th Fireside Chat, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the American people that Rome had fallen to American and Allied troops the previous day. He used the talk not only to announce this important milestone in the deadly war, but also to remind Americans they were engaged in a war between democracy and fascism. And while fascists insisted their ideology made countries more efficient and able to serve their people, the Allies’ victory in Rome illustrated that the ideology of fascism, which maintained that a few men should rule over the majority of the population, was hollow.
Rome was the seat of fascism, FDR told his listeners, and under that government, “the Italian people were enslaved.” He explained: “In Italy the people had lived so long under the corrupt rule of Mussolini that, in spite of the tinsel at the top—you have seen the pictures of him—their economic condition had grown steadily worse. Our troops have found starvation, malnutrition, disease, a deteriorating education and lowered public health—all by-products of the Fascist misrule.”
FDR continued: “We and the British will do and are doing everything we can to bring them relief. Anticipating the fall of Rome, we made preparations to ship food supplies to the city…we have already begun to save the lives of the men, women and children of Rome…. This, I think, is an example of the magnificent ability and energy of the American people in growing the crops, building the merchant ships, in making and collecting the cargoes, in getting the supplies over thousands of miles of water, and thinking ahead to meet emergencies—all this spells, I think, an amazing efficiency on the part of our armed forces, all the various agencies working with them, and American industry and labor as a whole.”
“No great effort like this can be a hundred percent perfect,” he said, “but the batting average is very, very high.”
That speech highlighting logistics as a key difference between democracy and fascism comes to mind these days as we watch democracy and authoritarianism clash in Ukraine.
A report last month by Washington, D.C., nonprofit Freedom House, which studies democracy, political freedom, and human rights, painted a bleak picture. “Global freedom faces a dire threat,” authors Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz wrote. “Around the world, the enemies of liberal democracy—a form of self-government in which human rights are recognized and every individual is entitled to equal treatment under law—are accelerating their attacks.”
In 2019, Russian president Vladimir Putin told the Financial Times that the ideology of liberalism on which democracy is based has “outlived its purpose.” Multiculturalism, freedom, and human rights must give way to “the culture, traditions, and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.”
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has been open about his determination to replace western-style democracy with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy,” ending the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture and rejecting “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.”
According to President Joe Biden, Chinese president Xi Jinping believes that autocracies are “the wave of the future—democracy can’t function in an ever complex world.”
Freedom House documents that for sixteen years, global freedom has declined. Authoritarians are undermining basic liberties, abusing power, and violating human rights, and their growing global influence is shifting global incentives toward autocratic governments and away from democracy, “jeopardizing the consensus that democracy is the only viable path to prosperity and security, while encouraging more authoritarian approaches to governance.” Over the past year, 60 countries became less free, while only 25 improved.
“They're going to write about this point in history," Biden told a group of news anchors in April 2021, shortly after he took office. "Not about any of us in here, but about whether or not democracy can function in the 21st century…. Things are changing so rapidly in the world, in science and technology and a whole range of other issues, that—the question is: In a democracy that's such a genius as ours, can you get consensus in the timeframe that can compete with autocracy?"
The last few weeks have demonstrated the same advantage of democracy over authoritarianism that FDR saw in the fall of Rome. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was supposed to demonstrate the efficient juggernaut of authoritarianism. But Putin’s lightning attack on a neighboring state did not go as planned. Ukrainians have insisted on their right to self-determination, demonstrating the power of democracy with their lives.
At the same time, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown the weakness of modern authoritarianism. Putin expected to overrun a democratic neighbor quickly, but his failure to do so has revealed that his army’s perceived power was FDR’s “tinsel at the top”: lots of bells and whistles but outdated food, a lack of support vehicles, conscripted and confused soldiers, and compromised communications. The corruption inherent in a one-party state of loyalists, unafflicted by oversight, has hollowed out the Russian military, making it unable to feed or supply its troops.
That authoritarian government, it turns out, depended on democracies. As businesses pull out of Russia, the economy has collapsed. The ruble is worth less than a penny, and the Russian stock market remains closed. Today, the Russian economic ministry announced it would take the property of businesses leaving the country. Notably, it claimed the right to take about $10 billion of jets that had been leased to Russian airlines, quite possibly a way to get spare parts for the airplanes the huge country needs and can no longer get.
Putin is trying to prop up his power by insisting his people believe lies: on Friday, he signed a law making it a crime for media to produce any coverage the government says is “false information” about the invasion. He is now pushing the false claim that the U.S. is developing biological weapons in Ukraine, and has requested a meeting of the U.N. Security Council tomorrow to discuss this issue. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby called the story “classic Russian propaganda.”
In contrast, democracies and allies, marshaled into a unified force in large part by Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and the U.S. State Department, have done the boring, complicated, hard work of logistics, diplomacy, and intelligence, a combination that has crushed the Russian economy and is enabling the Ukrainian army to hold off an army 8 times its size. While there is a horrific humanitarian crisis inside Ukraine, those over the borders have managed the extraordinary logistics of processing and moving 2 million refugees from Ukraine in two weeks.
In 1944, FDR pointed out that democratic government was messy but it freed its people to work and think and fight in ways that authoritarian governments could not. In Fireside Chat 29, he warned his listeners not to read too much into the fall of Rome, because fascism had “not yet been driven to the point where [it] will be unable to recommence world conquest a generation hence…. Therefore, the victory still lies some distance ahead." But, he added, "That distance will be covered in due time—have no fear of that."
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If I took a night off last weekend, I don't remember it, and I am tired, tired, tired.
So I'm turning tonight's letter over to my friend Nadia Povalinska, who has recently fled her home in Ukraine, and who has graciously shared her love of her country with me over the years.
I love Nadia's images of Ukraine, and this one especially. It is from before the war, just a few weeks and a lifetime ago.
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In our history, the United States has gone through turning points when we have had to adjust our democratic principles to new circumstances. The alternative is to lose those principles to a small group of people who insist that democracy is outdated and must be replaced by a government run by a few leaders or, now, by a single man.
The Declaration of Independence asserted as “self-evident” that all people are created equal and that God and the laws of nature have given them certain fundamental rights. Those include—but are not limited to—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The role of government was to make sure people enjoyed these rights, and thus governments are legitimate only if those they rule consent to that government.
The Founders’ concept that all men were created equal and had a right to consent to the government under which they lived, the heart of the Declaration of Independence, was revolutionary. For all that it excluded Indigenous Americans, Black colonists, and all women, the very idea that men were not born into a certain place in a hierarchy and could create a government that reflected such an idea upended traditional western beliefs.
From the beginning, though, there were plenty of Americans who doubled down on the idea of human hierarchies in which a few superior men should rule the rest. They argued that the Constitution was designed to protect property alone and that as a few men accumulated wealth, they should run things. Permitting those without property to have a say in their government would mean they could demand that the government provide things that might infringe on the rights of property-owners.
These undercurrents have always tossed our republic, but four times in our history, new pressures have brought these two ideas into open conflict. In the 1850s, 1890s, and 1930s and in the present, we have had to fit our democracy to new circumstances.
In the 1850s, the pressures of western expansion forced Americans to figure out what, exactly, they wanted the nation to stand for. Northern states, whose mixed economy needed educated workers, and thus widely shared economic and political power, opposed the hierarchical system of human enslavement. Southern states, whose economy rested on the production of raw materials by enslaved workers, opposed equality. Aside from occasional flare-ups, the two systems had muddled along together for sixty years, despite the reality that the enslavers were shrinking farther and farther into the minority as population in the North boomed.
The U.S. acquisition of western land with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo opened the opportunity for enslavers to address their weakening position by dominating the national government. If they could spread enslavement into the new territories, they could overawe the North in Congress and pass laws to make their system national. As South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond put it: "I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson that ‘all men are born equal.”’
When Congress, under extraordinary pressure from the pro-southern administration, passed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, overturning the Missouri Compromise and letting slavery spread into the West, northerners of all parties woke up to the looming loss of their democratic government. A railroad lawyer from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, remembered how northerners were “thunderstruck and stunned; 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” to push back against the slaveowning oligarchy. And while they came from different parties, he said, they were “still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
Slavery apologists urged white voters not to worry about Black Americans held in slavery, but Lincoln urged Americans to come together to protect the Declaration of Independence. "I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop?... If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!”
When voters agreed with Lincoln and elected him to the presidency in 1860, southerners tried to create their own nation based on human inequality. As Georgia Senator Alexander Stephens, soon to be the vice president of the Confederacy, explained in March 1861: “Our new government is founded…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.”
In office, Lincoln reached back to the Declaration—written “four score and seven years ago”— and charged Americans to “resolve that…this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The victory of the United States government in the Civil War ended the power of enslavers in the government, but new crises in the future would revive the conflict between the idea of equality and a nation of hierarchies.
In the 1890s, the rise of industrialism led to the concentration of wealth at the top of the economy. Steel baron Andrew Carnegie celebrated the “contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer,” for although industrialization created “castes,” it created “wonderful material development,” and “while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.” Those at the top were there because of their “special ability,” and anyone seeking a fairer distribution of wealth was a “Socialist or Anarchist…attacking the foundation upon which civilization rests.” Instead, he said, society worked best when a few wealthy men ran the world, for “wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves.”
Once again, people of all political parties came together to reclaim American democracy. Although Democrat Grover Cleveland was the first to complain that “corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters,” it was Republican Theodore Roosevelt who is now popularly associated with the development of a government that regulated the excesses of big business. He complained about that “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” and ushered in the Progressive Era with government regulation of business to protect the ability of individuals to participate in American society as equals.
The rise of a global economy in the twentieth century repeated the pattern. After socialists took control of Russia in 1917, American men of property insisted that any restrictions on their control of resources or the government were a form of “Bolshevism,” but in the 1930s a worldwide depression brought voters of all parties behind President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who used the government to provide a “New Deal for the American people.” His government regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure. Then, after Black and Brown veterans coming home from World War II demanded equality, that New Deal government, under Democratic president Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, worked to end racial and, later, gender hierarchies in American society.
Now, once again, we are at an inflection point. The rise of global oligarchs and the internet, which enables those oligarchs to spread disinformation, has made significant numbers of American voters once again slide away from democracy to embrace the idea that the country would work better with a few leaders making the rules for the rest of us. In nineteen states, Republican-dominated legislatures have passed laws that restrict the vote and entrench minority rule, even up to allowing state legislatures to overturn election results. If that is permitted to stand, that minority can choose our president, and it is increasingly backing one single man, one individual, to rule over the rest of us.
If history is any guide, we are at the point when voters of all parties must push back, to say that we do, in fact, believe in the principles stated in the Declaration of Independence, that all people are created equal, and that our government is legitimate only if we have a say in it.
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Russian president Vladimir Putin has asked China for help in his war against Ukraine, according to U.S. officials. Observers see this as a defining moment for China and the direction it wants to take in the twenty-first century. In what might be a sign of how China will react to that request, the spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said he had never heard of it. "The high priority now is to prevent the tense situation from escalating or even getting out of control,” he said.
Meanwhile, Russian forces struck a military facility in Ukraine about 15 miles from the Polish border. Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and by the terms of the treaty establishing NATO, “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” and the parties will retaliate accordingly.
Biden has repeatedly warned that NATO will respond to any attack on a member country, but Russian state TV continues to insist that no NATO country will actually help another. This assertion has observers concerned that Putin might widen the war to involve NATO, which would give him the legitimacy he needs to justify his war of aggression.
Others say that these events indicate weakness and frustration on Putin’s part. As the Russian invasion has gone more slowly than he had apparently anticipated, the Russian military is firing indiscriminately at civilian targets, evidently trying to terrorize the country into submission. But the troops are underfed and undersupplied, and there appear to be too few of them to subdue Ukraine. Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press says that Russia has opened 14 recruitment centers in Syria.
The strike in western Ukraine near the Polish border killed at least 35 people and wounded more than 100. The facility received western arms shipments. National security adviser Jake Sullivan said the strike “does not come as a surprise” but “shows…that Vladimir Putin is frustrated by the fact that his forces are not making the kind of progress that he thought that they would make against major cities including Kyiv, that he’s expanding the number of targets, that he’s lashing out and he’s trying to cause damage in every part of the country.”
Sullivan also said that the U.S. is very concerned that Russia will use chemical weapons. It has falsely accused Ukraine and the U.S. of preparing chemical weapons, which might well be a warning that Putin intends to use them himself.
Putin, of course, has used chemical weapons before, most recently against opposition leader Alexei Navalny. His goons also did so on March 4, 2018, in the U.K, in a poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. That poisoning seemed to be a sign that Putin was confident enough in his power that he was willing to kill someone in England and dare then–prime minister Theresa May to do something about it.
What happened next seemed to illustrate Putin’s growing security in the face of weak U.S. and European resistance. May condemned the attack, as did U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. But May couldn’t do much because Brexit had isolated England and then-president Trump refused to back her. He promptly fired Tillerson, along with one of Tillerson’s deputies who contradicted the White House version of why Tillerson was out. Russian state TV then warned May not to threaten a country armed with nuclear warheads. And, just about then, Republicans in the House exonerated Trump from “colluding” with Russia in the 2016 election, outright rejecting the evidence and findings of our own intelligence community.
There remains a lot to learn not only about why former president Trump allowed such aggression, but also about why members of the Republican Party were willing to look the other way when U.S. policy under Trump benefited Russia—when the U.S. abruptly withdrew from northern Syria in October 2019, for example, or when Trump withheld money appropriated for Ukraine’s defense to pressure Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into helping him rig the 2020 election.
At least part of the answer to that question is the disinformation campaign launched by Russia to undermine our democracy. False stories in the media have divided us and convinced many people in the U.S. of things that are simply lies.
Former representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) released a video today echoing Russia’s false story of “25 to 30 U.S. funded bio labs in Ukraine,” and demanded a ceasefire to secure them.
Later this afternoon, White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted: "This is preposterous. It's the kind of disinformation operation we've seen repeatedly from the Russians over the years in Ukraine and in other countries, which have been debunked, and an example of the types of false pretexts we have been warning the Russians would invent.” Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) slammed Gabbard for “parroting false Russian propaganda.”
David Corn of Mother Jones today broke another news story: a Russian government agency distributed a 12-page document to media outlets telling them, “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally….”
The call to feature Carlson is in the section titled “Victory in Information War.”
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Today, Russia continued its offensive against Ukraine, striking hard at civilians in Kyiv and Mariupol. The Russian army is gaining ground, but it appears to be sustaining massive losses of personnel and equipment which, in turn, is making leaders focus on grinding Ukraine into submission through sheer brutality.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky will speak virtually to Congress on Wednesday morning. They said: “The Congress remains unwavering in our commitment to supporting Ukraine as they face [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s cruel and diabolical aggression, and to passing legislation to cripple and isolate the Russian economy as well as deliver humanitarian, security and economic assistance to Ukraine. We look forward to the privilege of welcoming President Zelenskyy’s address to the House and Senate and to convey our support to the people of Ukraine as they bravely defend democracy.”
American focus on the horrors unleashed on Ukraine has clarified our own struggle between democracy and authoritarianism here at home.
In the Freedom House 2022 report on the dire threat to global freedom, released last month, authors Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz noted that “democracies are being harmed from within by illiberal forces, including unscrupulous politicians willing to corrupt and shatter the very institutions that brought them to power.” Their primary example was that of the United States, which “has fallen below its traditional peers on key democratic indicators, including [presidential] elections, freedom from improper political influence, and equal treatment of minority groups.”
Repucci and Slipowitz explained that in the U.S. and elsewhere, “Undemocratic leaders and their supporters… have worked to reshape or manipulate political systems, in part by playing on voters’ fears of change in their way of life…. They have promoted the idea that, once in power, their responsibility is only to their own demographic or partisan base, disregarding other interests and segments of society and warping the institutions in their care so as to prolong their rule. Along the way, the democratic principles of pluralism, equality, and accountability—as well as basic stewardship and public service—have been lost, endangering the rights and well-being of all residents.”
To solidify their hold on power, they have spread distrust in elections, as former president Donald Trump famously did in the 2020 election season even before his loss to Democrat Joe Biden, claiming that he would only lose if there were fraud. National, state, and local officials lined up behind Trump to try to overturn the election results, spreading the Big Lie that Biden’s election was illegitimate. The result was the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
That failed, but those who backed it, as Repucci and Slipowitz note, “continue to exert significant influence on the US political system,” while those “who refused to display loyalty to the former leader faced political marginalization, severe intraparty pressure, and outright threats of violence.” They continue to push the lie that the Democrats stole the 2020 election and must be stopped before the 2022 midterms.
To that end, after Biden took office, 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting, and six states launched illegitimate partisan reviews of election results. The trend continues: according to the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization defending U.S. democracy and justice, as of January 14, 2022, lawmakers in at least 27 states have backed 250 bills with restrictive provisions. The Big Lie has also led to the replacement of nonpartisan election boards with partisans, changing systems in place for decades.
“It is now impossible to ignore the damage to democracy’s foundations and reputation,” Repucci and Slipowitz wrote in February.
But now, Putin’s war on Ukraine has clarified the contest between democracy and authoritarianism even as the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is uncovering just how close we came to our own authoritarian coup.
This confluence is uncomfortable for a number of Republicans, who see Putin’s declared support for traditional values and the implicit white supremacy in that support as part of a global conservative movement they like. Since the 1980s, U.S. evangelicals have embraced Russian Orthodox leaders concerned with the falling birthrate of white people. Since at least 2013, when Putin formally began an attack on LGBTQ rights, sparking outrage in liberal democracies, that embrace has become more widespread. With that attack, Putin claimed he was putting Russia at the forefront of conservative opposition to "genderless and fruitless so-called tolerance" which he said "equals good and evil," goals right-wing Americans applauded.
As Putin has come to represent to them an attack on the secular social norms and civil rights embraced by democracies, Republicans have increasingly openly admired his declared stand for “traditional values.” In 2014, shortly after the Ukrainians rose up and ousted Russian-allied president Viktor Yanukovych, who had been installed with the help of American political operative Paul Manafort, Republicans began to back Putin over then-president Barack Obama. Evangelical leader Franklin Graham praised Putin’s attack on gay rights for protecting children from “the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda,” while Obama and his attorney general “have turned their backs on God and His standards, and many in the Congress are following the administration’s lead. This is shameful.”
Trump’s pressure to shift U.S. foreign policy away from our traditional democratic allies and toward Russia was almost certainly a reflection of the financial benefits of dealing with oligarchs and illicit money, but others undoubtedly were willing to follow because they believed they were defending “traditional values” and children, especially as stories of pedophilia rings flooded the internet.
But now, Putin’s vicious attack on Ukraine has stripped away the unspoken link between “traditional values” and authoritarianism.
Some right-wing leaders nonetheless cannot quit him: Fox News personality Tucker Carlson’s monologues are so supportive of Putin they are being replayed on Russian state television, Representative Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has called Zelensky a thug and says democratic Ukraine is “incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies,” and Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) were part of a conference in which white nationalists cheered on Putin’s attack on Ukraine and chanted his name.
But others recognize that they have been caught on the wrong side of history. According to an Economist/YouGov poll, Americans believe by a margin of 70 to 11 that Putin is committing war crimes. At the same time, the findings of the January 6 committee reveal that the pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party appears to have been willing to overturn our own liberal democracy so long as it could get what it wanted.
A tape today revealed that Cawthorn called into a right-wing talk show on January 6th and said he had brought “multiple weapons” with him that day, suggesting he had known what was planned. Also today, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, appeared to be trying to get ahead of a story about her participation in the events of January 6 when she told her story to the right-wing Free Beacon. It reported: “She did not help organize the White House rally that preceded the riot at the Capitol. She did attend the rally, but got cold and left early. And most importantly, in her view, her involvement with the event has no bearing on the work of her husband, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.”
How will all this play out? Trump’s attorney general William Barr is currently trying to sell his new book on a tour trying to whitewash his own participation in the Big Lie, but while he blamed Trump for trying to overthrow our democracy, he nonetheless suggested he would vote for him if he were the Republican nominee in 2024, “because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party.”
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“I want to thank the Russian Academy for this Lifetime Achievement Award.”
That was former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s response to the news that her name was among those of the people Russia sanctioned today, forbidding their entry into Russia and freezing any Russian assets they might have. Clinton, of course, was the one who warned in 2016 that then-candidate Donald Trump would be “[Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s puppet” if he were elected.
What jumped out about that Russian announcement, though, was that it singled out not American lawmakers in general, but Democrats, and for that matter, Democrats who were targets of the right-wing propaganda machine. So the “sanctions” hit President Joe Biden (or, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted, his deceased father, since they missed that the current president is Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.), Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as well as Psaki. They also covered former secretary of state Clinton and Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, both of whom are private citizens and involved in present-day politics only in that they are targets of the modern right-wing media.
The list made it clear that Putin and his U.S. supporters are engaged in a propaganda campaign.
In contrast, the U.S. extended sanctions today to Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, who turned to Putin to shore up his own waning popularity before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and who is now stuck on Putin’s side. The administration also sanctioned Lukashenko’s wife, Halina, and a number of Russians targeted for human rights abuses, along with 11 military leaders.
That the tide is turning against Putin was indicated today by former president Trump’s new tone on the Russian president today. While it was notable that Trump would never criticize Putin, even after his invasion of Ukraine, tonight Trump told Washington Examiner reporter David M. Drucker, “I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.”
The leaders of Poland, Czechia, and Slovenia thumbed their noses at Putin today when they visited Kyiv itself by train to show their support for Ukraine. They traveled to the city despite ongoing Russian shelling that has taken countless lives, including those of five journalists documenting the atrocities.
Those atrocities convinced the U.S. Senate today to pass a resolution condemning Putin as a war criminal, while a new U.S. funding bill appropriated an additional $13.6 billion in aid to Ukraine.
The attack on democracy at home is not being as clearly condemned.
We are starting to see the effects of Russian money on our own political system. Today, we learned that Russian oligarch Andrey Muraviev has been indicted by a federal grand jury for funneling $1 million in political donations through Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, associates of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, to candidates in the 2018 election. A $50,000 donation apparently went to a political action committee called the “Friends of Ron DeSantis Political Action Committee” in June 2018. After DeSantis won the election, Muraviev and his partner texted congratulatons* to Parnas and Fruman on “victory in Florida.”
Today, the Republican National Committee sued its own email vendor, Salesforce, to try to block it from responding to a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The committee subpoenaed information about fundraising emails sent by Salesforce, soliciting money by lying that the 2020 election had been stolen. The committee is interested in seeing if any of that money actually went to the causes for which it was solicited, and in following how those emails, with their false, inflammatory messages, encouraged the attack on January 6. The RNC says it is suing “in order to protect the constitutional rights of the Republican Party and its millions of supporters.”
The Freedom to Vote Act would stop the flood of dark money into our elections by requiring the disclosure of the identities of any person or organization donating $10,000 or more to campaign activity. But while the Senate easily passed legislation today to make daylight saving time permanent beginning in 2023 by voice vote, it cannot pass voting rights legislation since all Republicans oppose it. (The daylight savings law will now go to the House.)
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky will speak to Congress tomorrow morning and is expected to ask for more help. Lawmakers have expressed frustration that the Biden administration is not, in their view, moving quickly enough to defend Ukraine, and his speech is expected to increase criticism of the Biden administration.
That criticism is coming primarily from Republican lawmakers who, of course, refused to remove Trump when he withheld support for Ukraine in 2019 in an attempt to get Zelensky to attack Joe Biden, but who are now saying that Biden is not defending Ukraine powerfully enough. Their insistence that the U.S. move unilaterally against Russia plays to our natural sympathies for the suffering country of Ukraine, but it is also a back-door attack on Biden’s extraordinarily successful multilateral approach to Russia’s aggression.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) makes decisions only through consensus. By moving without NATO, the U.S. would undercut NATO and the global consensus that Biden and Secretary of State Blinken have taken incredible care to create and that is now crushing the Russian economy and isolating Putin. The administration’s coalition against Putin is extraordinarily delicately balanced, and that balance will collapse if the U.S. heads off on its own in a resurrection of the unilateral action that the U.S. has embraced for the past forty years.
After Zelensky’s address, Biden is expected to announce another $800 million in security assistance from the U.S. to Ukraine, putting the total at $1 billion in the last week and $2 billion total since Biden took office. Biden announced today he will head to Brussels, Belgium, next week to meet with NATO leaders about Russia’s war on Ukraine. He is expected to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to NATO.
*I deliberately misspelled this word because it was triggering Facebook's usual red boldface for when the word is used.
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Today, Russia’s war on Ukraine gave us a penetrating snapshot of democracy and autocracy.
This morning, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress virtually; his speech was live streamed to the American people. Looking tired, he wore a green military tee shirt and was unshaven, sitting next to a large Ukrainian flag, a visual representation of his besieged country.
Speaking from Kyiv, Zelensky emphasized that he and Ukrainians were fighting to be free, to preserve their democracy, and he reminded Americans of our own declared principles.
“Russia has attacked not just us, not just our land, not just our cities. It went on a brutal offensive against our values, basic human values. It threw tanks and planes against our freedom, against our right to live freely in our own country, choosing our own future, against our desire for happiness, against our national dreams, just like the same dreams you have, you Americans.”
He urged Americans to remember our own darkest days, Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and begged for a no-fly zone. Knowing that is unlikely—it would initiate a world war—he asked for planes to protect the skies over Ukraine. He thanked the U.S. and President Joe Biden for their support, but asked for more. In addition to continuing economic sanctions, he called for new institutions and new alliances to respond to provocations more quickly than the world has done for Ukraine.
It is, indeed, unimaginable what destruction Putin has rained down on Ukraine in less than three weeks: just today we learned that Russians deliberately bombed a theater where more than 1000 people, including many children, had taken shelter, apparently revisiting the technique of targeting children and civilians he developed in Chechnya and Syria. Zelensky showed a six-minute video of the destruction in Ukraine, showing how a country that only three weeks ago was full of people just going about their lives has turned into a war zone.
“Peace in your country doesn’t depend anymore only on you and your people,” Zelensky said. “It depends on those next to you and those who are strong. Strong doesn’t mean big. Strong is brave and ready to fight for the life of his citizens and citizens of the world. For human rights, for freedom, for the right to live decently, and to die when your time comes, and not when it’s wanted by someone else, by your neighbor.”
“Today, the Ukrainian people are defending not only Ukraine,” Zelensky said, “we are fighting for the values of Europe and the world, sacrificing our lives in the name of the future. That’s why today the American people are helping not just Ukraine, but Europe and the world to give the planet the life to keep justice in history.” He called attention to how very young he is to be leading the global fight for self-determination, and the extraordinary weight he is bearing. “Now, I am almost 45 years old; today, my age stopped when the hearts of more than 100 children stopped beating. I see no sense in life if it cannot stop the deaths. And this is my main issue as the leader of my people, great Ukrainians.”
“And as the leader of my nation, I am addressing…President Biden, you are the leader of… your great nation. I wish you to be the leader of the world; being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace. Thank you. Glory to Ukraine. Thank you for your support. Thank you.”
In contrast, Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a public speech that Russia specialists saw as the launch of a fascist dictatorship. He continued to defend his invasion of Ukraine and claimed he was in an existential war for his country’s survival. He warned his people that the West was counting on “the so-called fifth column, on national traitors,” to destroy Russia. He identified those people as a culturally weak global elite who did not identify “with our people, not with Russia.” They believe they are better than Russians, he said, and would do anything to keep their lifestyle.
The West, he said, is trying to split Russians and is using that “fifth column” to achieve its goal of destroying Russia. He called for Russians to distinguish true patriots from “scum and traitors”—political opponents and dissidents—and to get rid of the latter like bugs. “I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges.”
Russia specialist Anne Applebaum tweeted: "Putin's call for a ‘self-purification’ of Russian society can have only one intention: To remind Russians of Stalin and his ‘purges.’ He wants them to be haunted by dark, ancestral memories, to remember their grandparents' stories and to be petrified with fear.” Indeed, Russian authorities promptly launched a crackdown against anyone who showed any sympathy for western culture, beginning with a popular lifestyle blogger who had expressed opposition to the war on Instagram.
Putin’s show of force internally may well reflect his weakness externally. The Pentagon estimates conservatively that the Russians have lost a staggering 7000 soldiers in less than three weeks in the invasion of Ukraine, more than the U.S. lost in 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Officials estimate they have an additional 14,000 to 21,000 injured, out of a deployed fighting force of 150,000. Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration, told New York Times reporters Helene Cooper, Julian E. Barnes, and Eric Schmitt, “Losses like this affect morale and unit cohesion, especially since these soldiers don’t understand why they’re fighting.”
Meanwhile, sanctions imposed by countries around the world are strangling the Russian economy. Reuters today reported that Russia is “on the brink of its first default on international debt since the Bolshevik revolution [of 1917].” A Russian political scientist tweeted: “I have collected some thoughts on the immediate impact of sanctions on the Russian economy.” The short version: “30 years of economic development thrown into the bin.” “All in all, no other economy in the world has experienced anything like this—extreme de-globalization in a matter of days.”
Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that sanctions would remain until there is no chance that Russia could ever again launch the sort of invasion Putin has launched against Ukraine. The U.S. Departments of Treasury and Justice launched a task force with Australia, Canada, the European Commission, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, and the U.K. to freeze and seize assets of sanctioned oligarchs. The Treasury Department also began today to offer bounties of up to $5 million for information leading to “seizure, restraint, or forfeiture of assets linked to foreign government corruption.”
All but about 40 American companies have pulled out of Russia, according to Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby of Popular Information. Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned business in America, is staying put. Political groups affiliated with right-wing billionaire CEO Charles Koch oppose broad sanctions and have suggested the U.S. should remain neutral in the crisis.
Meanwhile, a deepfake video of Zelensky calling for Ukrainians to surrender to Russia made the rounds on social media today. The false video used artificial intelligence to graft words onto Zelensky’s image.
Tonight, Russia specialist Julia Ioffe told MSNBC: “Every time I’m asked by Americans do Russians really believe this stuff… as if we don’t have the same thing happening here. You have 40% of the American population that was convinced in just one year that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election….”
And, indeed, Trump loyalists like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Fox News personality Tucker Carlson continue to echo Russian talking points to undercut Ukraine’s war effort. Media scholar Eric Boehlert noted that “the anti-democratic, authoritarian bonds are becoming tighter as the Trump movement now turns to the Kremlin for its messaging cues. The overlap is undeniable, and the implications are grave.”
Even more striking was white nationalist Nick Fuentes’s encouragement for people to pray for what he called the brave Russian soldiers fighting to "liberate Ukraine from the Great Satan and from the evil empire in the world, which is the United States." Fuentes is an extremist but not an isolated one; both Greene and Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) spoke at a recent conference he organized (Greene in person; Gosar virtually), and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) took no action to disavow their participation.
After Zelensky spoke today, Biden announced another $800 million in military equipment for Ukraine, including 800 anti-aircraft systems. “What’s at stake here are the principles that the United States and the united nations across the world stand for,” he said. “It’s about freedom. It’s about the right of people to determine their own future.”
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While Russia’s war on Ukraine continues in all its blistering horror, there are glimmerings that suggest Russia’s position in its assault on Ukraine is weakening. A senior U.S. defense official today told reporters that while there is significant fighting going on, the only major military news is that Russia has now launched more than 1000 missiles at Ukraine. Ukraine’s allies are working on supplying Ukraine with long-range air defense systems. The Pentagon also believes the airspace over Ukraine continues to be contested, and tentatively assesses that the morale of Russian soldiers is flagging.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned again today that Russia appears to be considering using chemical weapons and trying to blame the ensuing destruction on Ukraine. Yesterday, President Joe Biden called Putin a war criminal.
Today China, which was allied with Russia when the war began and initially refused to condemn the assault, today declined to co-sponsor a “humanitarian” resolution with Russia at the United Nations. At the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China joined Russia in vetoing resolutions. Then China abstained. Now it is refusing even to co-sponsor a “humanitarian” resolution.
While Chinese state media continues to indicate friendship for Russia, today it showed a video illustrating the story that Russian troops killed people standing in line for bread in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine.
A German newspaper today reported that Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was on a flight on its way to Beijing, but the plane turned around during the flight and returned to Moscow. President Joe Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping are scheduled to talk tomorrow for the first time since November after U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan met with top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi for seven hours in Rome on Monday.
China has not abandoned support for Russia, but it does appear to be rethinking its position as the world condemns the invasion and has acted in concert to isolate Russia effectively from the global economy. Today Russia did in fact make a $117 million interest payment on its debt, avoiding—for now—a default on its debt. For all Putin’s talk of not needing the international financial system, in the end, he chose to honor the debt, and in dollars rather than in the badly devalued rubles he had threatened.
Pieces continue to move elsewhere in the world, too. Uzbekistan today became the first Central Asian country to openly support the territorial integrity of Ukraine and condemn Russia’s "military actions and aggression." The Council of Europe, a human rights organization founded in 1949 and consisting of more than 45 member states, yesterday expelled Russia.
It appears that Putin is reacting to the crisis he has launched by turning on some of his key advisors, including military chief General Roman Gavrilov. Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul reacted to this news: “Putin looks like a panicked leader these days, hardly the smart, strong, savvy leader that others assumed he was.”
Today, the Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs Task Force, known as REPO, issued a joint statement committing to “prioritizing our resources and working together to take all available legal steps to find, restrain, freeze, seize, and, where appropriate, confiscate or forfeit the assets of those individuals and entities that have been sanctioned in connection with Russia’s premeditated, unjust, and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and the continuing aggression of the Russian regime.”
REPO includes Australia, Canada, the European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.
While a crackdown on illicit money should squeeze oligarchs, it also has the potential to alter our domestic politics. Recent reports show that politics in the U.K. has been awash in Russian money, and it seems likely that such cash has influenced the U.S. as well. This crackdown, along with new regulations about transparency in shell companies, might affect campaign finance.
The Freedom to Vote Act rejected by the Senate this year would have addressed this issue more effectively; it required any person or entity donating more than $10,000 to a campaign be identified. It would also have protected against the voter suppression laws passed last year in 19 Republican-dominated states, which the Texas primary revealed to be as discriminatory as opponents feared: about 13% of mail-in ballots, 23,000 of them, were rejected in a state that in the past rejected about 1%. Officials in counties that lean Democratic rejected mail-in ballots at a higher rate than officials in counties that lean Republican: 15.1% to 9.1%.
Today, the House of Representatives voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus, permitting the administration to raise tariffs against them. The measure passed by a vote of 424 to 8. The eight votes against the measure came from Republican members Andy Biggs (AZ), Dan Bishop (NC), Lauren Boebert (CO), Matt Gaetz (FL), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), Glenn Grothman (WI), Thomas Massie (KY), and Chip Roy (TX), all staunch Trump supporters.
Meanwhile, the support of certain U.S. lawmakers for Russia in this crisis has been a boon to the Russian president. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is openly pushing Russian talking points, claiming that NATO is supporting Nazis in Ukraine. Russian state TV is replaying Representative Madison Cawthorn’s (R-NC) remarks calling President Zelensky a “thug.”
Today’s other big news came from The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell: the report alleging that Trump lost the 2020 election because of Dominion Voting Systems—a report that Trump used to justify his attempt to overturn the election, including a plan to assume emergency powers—was not written by a volunteer lawyer after the election, as previously understood. In fact, it was written by a senior White House aide, Joanna Miller, who worked for key Trump advisor Peter Navarro. Navarro incorporated the Miller report into one of his own, which he and aides had begun to write two weeks before the election even happened.
That is, it was the White House itself that invented the “report” that the election was stolen, even before the election took place, and then used that report to justify the Big Lie that 19 state legislatures have relied on to restrict voting.
Ukraine’s people are trying to save their democracy from a criminal assault by an autocrat who has perverted his own country’s government, concentrating the nation’s wealth and power in the hands of his cronies, and silencing those who want a say in their government.
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This morning, President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping spoke about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, speaking personally for the first time since last November. In early February, before the invasion, Xi and Russian president Vladimir Putin met and issued a 5000-word statement pledging limitless “friendship.” But it is not clear Xi expected either the invasion or how badly it would go for Russia, as Ukraine has held its own against a military eight times its size and as countries across the globe have isolated Russia.
The White House readout of the call indicated that Biden explained the position of the U.S., and “described the implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians.” Xi called for a diplomatic solution and Biden agreed, but it is clear the two leaders mean very different things from that understanding: Xi blames the U.S. for supplying Ukraine with lethal weapons; the U.S. hopes for help putting pressure on Putin.
It does not appear that Xi indicated what China intended to do, and later in the day, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said it is a “concern” that China might provide military or financial support to Russia. Still, Xi is facing a historic election in October, and there is little indication that tying China to Russia right now would help his political position. Certainly, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who has relied on Russian support, appears now to be rethinking that reliance and is reaching out to rebuild former alliances. He has just visited the United Arab Emirates for the first time since 2011, when the Syrian war broke out.
Today’s update from the Pentagon did not suggest that Russia is winning its war of aggression. It began: “This is Day 23 of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Russians remain largely stalled across the country.”
Russia’s ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina warned that Russia could treat that Balkan country the same way it is treating Ukraine if Bosnia and Herzegovina decides to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The immediacy of the hot war in Ukraine has driven some important issues out of the news.
First, the war has affected not only Ukraine’s people and infrastructure, but also its ability to produce wheat, corn, and sunflower oil. Before the war, Ukraine was the world’s second biggest exporter of grains and biggest exporter of sunflower oil. It provided over half of the corn imports to the European Union, about a fifth of its soft wheat, and almost a quarter of its vegetable oil. (Soft wheat has less protein—gluten—than hard wheat, corn feeds Europe’s animals, and sunflower oil is in processed foods, including baby food, where it is hard to replace.)
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has urged farmers to plant as much as they possibly can, but Russians are moving into valuable farming land and killing farmers. Supply chains for fertilizer and animal feed are breaking down, causing prices to skyrocket just at planting season; roads and bridges are bombed out; and ships cannot leave ports in the Black Sea, meaning they cannot transport crops. Food prices in Europe are almost certainly going to spike this year.
More immediately, millions of the world’s poorest people, who are dependent on Ukrainian grains, are going to suffer. Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, and Turkey all depend on wheat from Ukraine. A disruption in grain supplies will send those countries into the market, driving up prices globally, especially as countries with their own grain slap controls on grain exports to make sure their people have enough. That will hurt the world’s least food-secure countries, like Bangladesh and Yemen. The U.N. World Food Programme has predicted 2022 will be “a year of catastrophic hunger.”
Second, here in the U.S., Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, announced on February 25, has been proceeding as Jackson meets with senators who will cast votes on her confirmation. The American Bar Association today rated Jackson, a 51-year-old graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School with an impressive career history including service as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, “well qualified” to serve on the court. This is its highest rating.
Republicans are opposing Jackson on the grounds that she has been easy on sex offenders who hurt children. This is easy to debunk—in fact, Jackson’s sentences were consistent with those of other judges—but it is enormously telling, since calling opponents sex predators is a common theme in today’s global right-wing movement as oligarchs or autocrats try to solidify their power by mobilizing an angry voter base.
In 2013, Putin shored up his waning popularity by passing legislation that banned allowing children to see “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” launching an attack on LGBTQ Russians. He said that Russia would defend “traditional” values against an assault of “genderless and fruitless so-called tolerance" that he said "equals good and evil.” He equated modern liberal democracies, with their defense of the rights of all, with pedophilia.
American evangelicals embraced that connection. Franklin Graham wrote: “In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues…. [H]e has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.” Since then, those opposed to modern liberal democracy have doubled down on the idea that they are opposing pedophilia, circulating stories about an underage sex ring in a Washington D.C., pizza parlor, for example.
That smear of liberal democracy with the stain of pedophilia covers over the destruction of democracy and covers up the concentration of power into the hands of a favored few. While Republicans are hinting that the well-respected Judge Jackson is soft on sex criminals, they are working to gather power into their own hands.
The third story that has flown under the radar is that the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Florida senator Rick Scott, has provided a blueprint for what the Republicans will do if they get a majority in the next election. In “An 11-point plan to rescue America,” produced by the group responsible for electing Republican senators, Scott promised that the Republicans “will protect, defend, and promote the American Family at all costs.” The plan continues: “The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science. The fanatical left seeks to devalue and redefine the traditional family, as they undermine parents and attempt to replace them with government programs. We will not allow Socialism to place the needs of the state ahead of the family.”
The plan promises that children will say the Pledge of Allegiance and “learn that America is a great country,” they will not learn critical race theory, and discussion of race will be banned from American society. The country will build former president Trump’s border wall and name it after him.
To protect the family, the Republican plan calls for destroying the business regulation, social safety net, federal promotion of infrastructure, and protection of civil rights that Americans have embraced since the 1930s and handing power over to the wealthy. It promises to “grow America’s economy, starve Washington’s economy, and stop socialism,” by which Republicans mean not international socialism in which the government owns the means of production—factories—for that is not on the table in the U.S. Instead, they mean a system in which voters can create a government that regulates business and uses tax dollars to provide services for all Americans.
Republicans, the plan says, will dramatically increase taxes on Americans earning less than $100,000, raising $1 trillion over ten years, although since they will also cut the Internal Revenue Service by 50%, the government might be hard pressed to collect those taxes. Since “government should not be doing anything that the private sector can do better and cheaper,” they will make sure all laws expire after five years, ending them with the idea that Congress will simply repass good laws. They would end Social Security (which, by the way, protects children as well as the elderly and disabled), Medicare, Medicaid, and so on. They will sell off all “non-essential” government assets, buildings, and land (are national parks essential?) and cut funding to states “other than disaster relief.”
This plan is “easily the most radical document put forward by a member of the leadership of a major political party in modern times,” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote.
“Americans deserve to know what we will do,” Scott said in his introduction to the plan.
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you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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This morning, President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping spoke about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, speaking personally for the first time since last November. In early February, before the invasion, Xi and Russian president Vladimir Putin met and issued a 5000-word statement pledging limitless “friendship.” But it is not clear Xi expected either the invasion or how badly it would go for Russia, as Ukraine has held its own against a military eight times its size and as countries across the globe have isolated Russia.
The White House readout of the call indicated that Biden explained the position of the U.S., and “described the implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians.” Xi called for a diplomatic solution and Biden agreed, but it is clear the two leaders mean very different things from that understanding: Xi blames the U.S. for supplying Ukraine with lethal weapons; the U.S. hopes for help putting pressure on Putin.
It does not appear that Xi indicated what China intended to do, and later in the day, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said it is a “concern” that China might provide military or financial support to Russia. Still, Xi is facing a historic election in October, and there is little indication that tying China to Russia right now would help his political position. Certainly, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who has relied on Russian support, appears now to be rethinking that reliance and is reaching out to rebuild former alliances. He has just visited the United Arab Emirates for the first time since 2011, when the Syrian war broke out.
Today’s update from the Pentagon did not suggest that Russia is winning its war of aggression. It began: “This is Day 23 of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Russians remain largely stalled across the country.”
Russia’s ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina warned that Russia could treat that Balkan country the same way it is treating Ukraine if Bosnia and Herzegovina decides to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The immediacy of the hot war in Ukraine has driven some important issues out of the news.
First, the war has affected not only Ukraine’s people and infrastructure, but also its ability to produce wheat, corn, and sunflower oil. Before the war, Ukraine was the world’s second biggest exporter of grains and biggest exporter of sunflower oil. It provided over half of the corn imports to the European Union, about a fifth of its soft wheat, and almost a quarter of its vegetable oil. (Soft wheat has less protein—gluten—than hard wheat, corn feeds Europe’s animals, and sunflower oil is in processed foods, including baby food, where it is hard to replace.)
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has urged farmers to plant as much as they possibly can, but Russians are moving into valuable farming land and killing farmers. Supply chains for fertilizer and animal feed are breaking down, causing prices to skyrocket just at planting season; roads and bridges are bombed out; and ships cannot leave ports in the Black Sea, meaning they cannot transport crops. Food prices in Europe are almost certainly going to spike this year.
More immediately, millions of the world’s poorest people, who are dependent on Ukrainian grains, are going to suffer. Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, and Turkey all depend on wheat from Ukraine. A disruption in grain supplies will send those countries into the market, driving up prices globally, especially as countries with their own grain slap controls on grain exports to make sure their people have enough. That will hurt the world’s least food-secure countries, like Bangladesh and Yemen. The U.N. World Food Programme has predicted 2022 will be “a year of catastrophic hunger.”
Second, here in the U.S., Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, announced on February 25, has been proceeding as Jackson meets with senators who will cast votes on her confirmation. The American Bar Association today rated Jackson, a 51-year-old graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School with an impressive career history including service as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, “well qualified” to serve on the court. This is its highest rating.
Republicans are opposing Jackson on the grounds that she has been easy on sex offenders who hurt children. This is easy to debunk—in fact, Jackson’s sentences were consistent with those of other judges—but it is enormously telling, since calling opponents sex predators is a common theme in today’s global right-wing movement as oligarchs or autocrats try to solidify their power by mobilizing an angry voter base.
In 2013, Putin shored up his waning popularity by passing legislation that banned allowing children to see “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” launching an attack on LGBTQ Russians. He said that Russia would defend “traditional” values against an assault of “genderless and fruitless so-called tolerance" that he said "equals good and evil.” He equated modern liberal democracies, with their defense of the rights of all, with pedophilia.
American evangelicals embraced that connection. Franklin Graham wrote: “In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues…. [H]e has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.” Since then, those opposed to modern liberal democracy have doubled down on the idea that they are opposing pedophilia, circulating stories about an underage sex ring in a Washington D.C., pizza parlor, for example.
That smear of liberal democracy with the stain of pedophilia covers over the destruction of democracy and covers up the concentration of power into the hands of a favored few. While Republicans are hinting that the well-respected Judge Jackson is soft on sex criminals, they are working to gather power into their own hands.
The third story that has flown under the radar is that the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Florida senator Rick Scott, has provided a blueprint for what the Republicans will do if they get a majority in the next election. In “An 11-point plan to rescue America,” produced by the group responsible for electing Republican senators, Scott promised that the Republicans “will protect, defend, and promote the American Family at all costs.” The plan continues: “The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science. The fanatical left seeks to devalue and redefine the traditional family, as they undermine parents and attempt to replace them with government programs. We will not allow Socialism to place the needs of the state ahead of the family.”
The plan promises that children will say the Pledge of Allegiance and “learn that America is a great country,” they will not learn critical race theory, and discussion of race will be banned from American society. The country will build former president Trump’s border wall and name it after him.
To protect the family, the Republican plan calls for destroying the business regulation, social safety net, federal promotion of infrastructure, and protection of civil rights that Americans have embraced since the 1930s and handing power over to the wealthy. It promises to “grow America’s economy, starve Washington’s economy, and stop socialism,” by which Republicans mean not international socialism in which the government owns the means of production—factories—for that is not on the table in the U.S. Instead, they mean a system in which voters can create a government that regulates business and uses tax dollars to provide services for all Americans.
Republicans, the plan says, will dramatically increase taxes on Americans earning less than $100,000, raising $1 trillion over ten years, although since they will also cut the Internal Revenue Service by 50%, the government might be hard pressed to collect those taxes. Since “government should not be doing anything that the private sector can do better and cheaper,” they will make sure all laws expire after five years, ending them with the idea that Congress will simply repass good laws. They would end Social Security (which, by the way, protects children as well as the elderly and disabled), Medicare, Medicaid, and so on. They will sell off all “non-essential” government assets, buildings, and land (are national parks essential?) and cut funding to states “other than disaster relief.”
This plan is “easily the most radical document put forward by a member of the leadership of a major political party in modern times,” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote.
“Americans deserve to know what we will do,” Scott said in his introduction to the plan.
Indeed, we do.
What was that about projection? Something about how every accusation is an admission of guilt? Again? I’m looking at you Matt Getts Off.
Sure, sign me up. Good fucking lord you know Senator Scott tissue on my shoe’s plan resonates with those deplorables, err I mean, mainstream repub voters.
Good luck ‘Murica. In the infamous words of Mr. T, “I pity da fool.”
Buddy is watching a classic movie involving old Boston and gangsters (with very long hair and lovely cars– I’m guessing the 1970s?) and I was intending to write a philosophical letter tonight about presidential patterns during inflection moments.
But about the time I sat down to write, my friend Peter sent me this image, offering me calm “in the midst of the current maelstrom(s),” and it suddenly hit me that I am very tired, and then it hit me that I can’t be the only one who is finding it exhausting to digest all the news these days.
Let’s take the night off, and regroup tomorrow with fresh energy and resolve.
[Photo Indian Morning Snow, by Peter Ralston. It's from last week's March snow, and is named for the island at the mouth of the harbor.]
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Tomorrow, the Senate will begin confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, nominated by President Joe Biden on February 25, 2022, to take a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. Judge Jackson is currently a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This small circuit is prominent and prestigious because its location in Washington, D.C., means that it decides cases concerning the U.S. government. It is often seen as a stepping stone to the Supreme Court. Three current members of the court—Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh—served previously as judges on the D.C. Circuit.
Judge Jackson has a wide range of experience, having both worked in private practice at corporate firms and served as a public defender, during which time she defended detainees at Guantanamo Bay. After earning her degrees from Harvard University and Harvard Law School, where she was a supervising editor on the prestigious Harvard Law Review, she served as a law clerk for three judges, including Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court, whose seat she has been nominated to fill.
Today, reporters are focusing on how she might decide on cases relating to hot-button issues like abortion and gun rights. But what is at stake with our current Supreme Court is far broader than the question of how a justice will vote on any one issue: it is whether the federal government can protect the rights of citizens from state laws taking away those rights.
This question comes from the 1940s. In the wake of World War II, the gap between America’s stated democratic principles and the abusive treatment of racial minorities and women, especially in the southern states, was so glaring that pressure built to reinforce the idea that our laws should apply to everyone equally. Media-grabbing stories, like that of the sheriff who was acquitted by an all-white jury after putting out the eyes of Black veteran Issac Woodard, made the United States look far more like Nazi Germany than Americans liked.
But the laws necessary to protect Black and Brown Americans, including returning veterans, could not pass Congress because of the resistance of segregationist Democrats. So, under the guidance of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the former Republican governor of California, the Supreme Court began to protect Black Americans from abuse by using the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states.
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 as former Confederates in charge of state legislatures passed laws relegating formerly enslaved Americans to a state of second-class citizenship. The amendment addressed that legal establishment of racial hierarchies by stating, “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.” The amendment gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment “by appropriate legislation.”
In the 1950s, the Supreme Court based civil rights decisions on the Fourteenth Amendment, and it continued that trajectory in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision protecting the right of married couples to contraception, the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision permitting interracial marriage, and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting a woman’s right to abortion without excessive government regulation all come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
But opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. These opponents began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level.
Those who embraced this literal version of the Constitution called themselves “originalists” or “textualists,” and their intellectual representative was Justice Antonin Scalia, whom President Ronald Reagan appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986. The following year, six Republicans joined Democrats to reject extremist Robert Bork, who had openly called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions.
At the time, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) warned that “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”
Kennedy’s words then seemed outlandish, but now, thanks to the three Supreme Court appointments by former president Donald Trump, six of the nine members of the court are originalists. They have indicated their willingness to permit state legislatures to act as they wish, overturning constitutional rights like abortion, outlawing “divisive” instruction in our classrooms, and suppressing the vote of minority voters.
Justice Stephen Breyer, under whom Jackson clerked, offered a new intellectual counterpoint to originalism that sought to move beyond the political lines of the post-Reagan era. He explained that we should approach constitutional questions by starting at the beginning: what did the Framers intend for the Constitution to do? Their central goal was not simply to protect liberties like free speech or gun ownership, he argued; their goal was to promote democracy. All court decisions, he said, should take into consideration what conclusion would best promote democracy.
The conviction that the point of the Constitution was to promote democracy meant that Breyer thought that the law should change based on what voters wanted, so long as the majority did not abuse the minority. Every decision was complicated, he told an audience in 2005—if the outcome were obvious, the Supreme Court wouldn’t take the case. But at the end of the day, justices should throw their weight behind whichever decision was more likely to promote democracy.
It is notable that in her decisions, Judge Jackson has argued for this approach, repeatedly focusing on democracy and the rules that preserve it. In her 118–page decision in Committee on the Judiciary v. McGahn (2019) concerning whether Congress could compel members of the executive branch to testify, she famously wrote: “Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.”
Her conclusion began: “The United States of America has a government of laws and not of men.”
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Today is the anniversary of Georgia Senator Alexander Stephens’s Cornerstone Speech, given in 1861 just after he became the provisional vice president of the Confederacy. All these years later, the themes of that speech are still with us.
Stephens spoke in Savannah, Georgia, to explain the difference between the United States and the fledgling Confederacy. That difference, he said, was slavery. The American Constitution was defective because it based the government on the principle that all men were created equal. Confederate leaders had corrected the Founding Fathers’ error by basing the Confederate government on the idea that some people were better than others.
In contrast to the government the Founding Fathers had created, the Confederacy rested on 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.”
Their determination to promote their new philosophy meant that the southern states insisted on states’ rights. The majority of Americans, speaking through the federal government, insisted on reining enslavement in, restricting it to the southern states where it already existed, while southern enslavers wanted to expand their “peculiar institution” to the nation’s newly acquired western lands. In white southerners’ view, federal oversight was tyranny, and true democracy meant that state legislatures should be able to do as their voters wished.
So long as a majority of voters in the southern states voted for human enslavement, democracy had been served. Those same states, of course, limited voting to a few wealthy white men.
The Republican Party had organized in the mid-1850s to stand against this version of American democracy. Those who joined the new party recognized that if enslavers were able to take control of new western states, they would use their votes in Congress and in the Electoral College to take over the federal government and make slavery national.
The government, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln warned, could not “endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided,” he told an audience in June 1858. “It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.”
For his part, Lincoln insisted on basing the nation on the idea that “all men are created equal,” as the Founders stated—however hypocritically—in the Declaration of Independence. I should like to know,” Lincoln said in July 1858, “if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop…. If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it!”
Less than a month after Stephens gave the Cornerstone Speech, the Confederates fired on a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the Civil War began. When it ended, almost exactly four years later, southern state legislatures again tried to circumscribe the lives of the Black Americans who lived within their state lines. The 1865 Black Codes said that Black people couldn’t own firearms, for example, or congregate. They had to treat their white neighbors with deference and were required to sign yearlong work contracts every January or be judged vagrants, punishable by arrest and imprisonment. White employers could get them out of jail by paying their fines, but then they would have to work off their debt.
To make the principle that all men are created equal and entitled to equality before the law a reality, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and sent it off to the states for ratification. The states added it to the Constitution in 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed that “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’s quite a sentence. It guarantees that no state can discriminate against any of its citizens. And then the amendment goes on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
This is what is at stake today, both in the Senate hearings on the confirmation of the Honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson, and more generally. Is our democratic system served so long as state legislatures can do what they wish without federal interference? Or should the federal government protect equality among all its citizens?
Ideally, of course, states would write fair laws without federal interference, and to create those circumstances after the Civil War, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, permitting Black men to vote, and then passed and sent off to the states for ratification the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing the right to vote to Black men. When the Fifteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1870, the system had been fixed, most American men believed: the right to vote should protect all interests in the states.
Quickly, though, southern states took away the vote of the Black voters they insisted were trying to redistribute wealth from hardworking white taxpayers into public works projects to benefit the states’ poorer inhabitants. With Black voters cut out of the system, state legislatures enacted harshly discriminatory laws, and law enforcement looked the other way when white people violated the rights of Black and Brown citizens.
After World War II, the Supreme Court used the due process and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to overrule state laws that favored certain citizens over others, and Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act to give Black and Brown Americans a say in the state governments under which they lived.
Now, the Republicans, at this point to a person, are echoing the pre–Civil War Democrats to say that democracy means that states should be able to do what they wish without interference from the federal government. So, for example, Texas—and now other states—should be able to ban abortion regardless of the fact that abortion is a constitutional right. States should be able to stop public school teachers from covering certain “divisive” topics: Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked an apparently nonplussed Judge Jackson, “Is it your personal hidden agenda to incorporate Critical Race Theory into our legal system?” And states should be able to restrict the vote, much as southern states did after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and as 19 Republican-dominated states have done since the 2020 election.
Members of the new Republican Party in the 1850s recognized that, in that era, the doctrine of states’ rights meant not only the continued enslavement of Black Americans in the South, but also the spread of enslavement across the nation as southern enslavers moved west to create new states that would overawe the free states in Congress and the Electoral College. The spread of their system was exactly what Stephens called for 161 years ago today.
Now, in 2022, as Republican-dominated states lock down into one-party systems, their electoral votes threaten to give them the presidency in 2024 regardless of what a majority of Americans want. At that point, the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection before the law will be vitally important, if only the Supreme Court will enforce it.
And that’s a key reason why, 161 years to the day after enslaver Alexander Stephens gave the Cornerstone Speech, the confirmation hearing of a Black woman, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court matters.
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I started reading Heather tonight (1:15 AM, 3/23 here in CA) and had to choose between breaking my computer (not because of Heather, but because of the topics) or going to bed.
Goodnight!
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Right on cue, Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana today told a reporter that states not only should decide the issue of abortion but should also be able to decide the issues of whether interracial marriage should be legal and whether couples should have access to contraception. He told a reporter: “Well, you can list a whole host of issues, when it comes down to whatever they are, I’m going to say that they’re not going to all make you happy within a given state, but we’re better off having states manifest their points of view rather than homogenizing it across the country as Roe v. Wade did.”
After an extraordinary backlash to his statements, Braun walked back what he had said, claiming he had misunderstood the question. “Earlier during a virtual press conference I misunderstood a line of questioning that ended up being about interracial marriage, let me be clear on that issue—there is no question the Constitution prohibits discrimination of any kind based on race, that is not something that is even up for debate, and I condemn racism in any form, at all levels and by any states, entities, or individuals,” he said.
But he had stated his position quite clearly, and as he originally stated it, that position was intellectually consistent.
After World War II, the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights in the states, imposing the government’s interest in protecting equality to overrule discriminatory legislation by the states.
Now, Republicans want to return power to the states, where those who are allowed to vote can impose discriminatory laws on minorities.
Senator Braun is correct: it is not possible to overrule the Supreme Court’s use of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights on just one issue. If you are going to say that the states should be able to do as they wish without the federal government protecting civil rights on, say, the issue of abortion, you must entertain the principle that the entire body of decisions in which the federal government protects civil rights, beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending segregation in the public schools, is illegitimate.
And that is off-the-charts huge.
It is, quite literally, the same argument that gave us the claimed right of states to enslave people within their borders before the Civil War, even as a majority of Americans objected to that system. More recently, it is the argument that made birth control illegal in many states, a restriction that endangered women’s lives and hampered their ability to participate in the workforce as unplanned pregnancies enabled employers to discriminate against them. It is the argument that prohibits abortion and gay marriage; in many states, laws with those restrictions are still on the books and will take effect just as soon as the Supreme Court decisions of Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges are overturned.
Braun’s willingness to abandon the right of Americans to marry across racial lines was pointed, since Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose confirmation hearing for her elevation to the Supreme Court is currently underway in the Senate, is Black and her husband is non-Black. The world Braun described would permit states to declare their 26-year marriage illegal, as it would have been in many states before the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision declared that states could not prohibit interracial marriages. This would also be a problem for sitting justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni.
But it is not just Braun talking about rolling back civil rights. This week, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has challenged the Griswold v. Connecticut decision legalizing contraception, and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) has questioned Obergefell.
Seventy percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. In 2012—the most recent poll I can find—89% of Americans thought birth control was morally acceptable, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that as of 2008, 99% of sexually active American women use birth control in their lifetimes. And even the right to abortion, that issue that has burned in American politics since 1972 when President Richard Nixon began to use it to attract Democratic Catholics to the Republican ticket, remains popular. According to a 2021 Pew poll, 59% of Americans believe it should be legal in most or all cases.
A full decade ago, in April 2012, respected scholars Thomas Mann, of the Brookings Institution, and Norm Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute, crunched the numbers and concluded: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream,” they wrote, “it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
And yet, in the last decade, the party has moved even further to the right. Now it is not only calling for an end to the civil rights protections that undergird modern America, but also lining up behind a leader who tried to overthrow our democracy. A column by Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post yesterday was titled: “Fringe Republicans are not the problem. It’s the party’s mainstream.”
Rubin points out that Republicans refused to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol, refused to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act (which as recently as 2006 enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support), and refused to impeach Trump for an attempt to overthrow our democracy. The party brought us to the brink of defaulting on the debt, and it tolerates white nationalists in its ranks.
At the state level, prominent Republicans spread covid disinformation, suppress voting, and harass LGBTQ young people. To end abortion, certain Republican-dominated states are offering bounties to anyone reporting women seeking abortions beyond six weeks in a pregnancy. Worse, Rubin notes, “a law in Idaho would force rape victims to endure nine months of pregnancy—while allowing their rapists to collect a bounty for turning them in if they seek an abortion.”
The confirmation hearings this week for the elevation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court have illustrated that Republican lawmakers are far more interested in creating sound bites for right-wing media and reelection campaigns than in governing. Led by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Republicans have tried to label Judge Jackson as soft on child pornographers, a smear that has been thoroughly discredited by, among others, the conservative National Review, which called it “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” Their attacks, though, will play well to their base on social media.
Similarly, Cruz made a big play of accusing Jackson of pushing Critical Race Theory in a private school on whose board she sits. “Do you agree…that babies are racist?” he asked, sitting in front of a poster with blown-up images from a book by African American studies scholar Ibram X. Kendi that the school has in its library.
On Twitter, the Republican National Committee cut right to the chase, showing a picture of Judge Jackson under her initials, which were crossed out and replaced with “CRT.”
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We are in what feels like a moment of paradigm shift.
On this, the third day of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it appears the invasion is not going the way Russian president Vladimir Putin hoped. The Russians do not control the airspace over the country, and, as of tonight, despite fierce fighting that has taken at least 198 Ukrainian lives, all major Ukrainian cities remain in Ukrainian hands. Now it appears that Russia’s plan for a quick win has made supply lines vulnerable because military planners did not anticipate needing to resupply fuel and ammunition. In a sign that Putin recognizes how unpopular this war is at home, the government is restricting access to information about it.
Russia needed to win before other countries had time to protest or organize and impose the severe economic repercussions they had threatened; the delay has given the world community time to put those repercussions into place.
Today, the U.S. and European allies announced they would block Russia’s access to its foreign currency reserves in the West, about $640 billion, essentially freezing its assets. They will also bar certain Russian banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication system, known as SWIFT, which essentially means they will not be able to participate in the international financial system. Lawmakers expect these measures to wreak havoc on Russia’s economy.
The Ukrainian people have done far more than hold off Putin’s horrific attack on their country. Their refusal to permit a corrupt oligarch to take over their homeland and replace their democracy with authoritarianism has inspired the people of democracies around the world.
The colors of the Ukrainian flag are lighting up buildings across North America and Europe and musical performances are beginning with the Ukrainian anthem. Protesters are marching and holding vigils for Ukraine. The answer of the soldier on Ukraine’s Snake Island to the Russian warship when it demanded that he and his 12 compatriots lay down their weapons became instantly iconic. He answered: “Russian warship: Go f**k yourself.”
That defiance against what seemed initially to be an overwhelming military assault has given Ukraine a psychological edge over the Russians, some of whom seem bewildered at what they are doing in Ukraine. It has also offered hope that the rising authoritarianism in the world is not destined to destroy democracy, that authoritarians are not as strong as they have projected.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has stepped into this moment as the hero of his nation and an answer to the bullying authoritarianism that in America has lately been mistaken for strength. Zelensky was an actor, after all, and clearly understands how to perform a role, especially such a vital one as fate has thrust on him.
Zelensky is the man former president Donald Trump tried in July 2019 to bully into helping him rig the 2020 U.S. election. Then, Trump threatened to withhold the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine resist Russian expansion until Zelensky announced an investigation of Joe Biden’s son Hunter.
Since the invasion, Zelensky has rallied his people by fighting for Kyiv both literally and metaphorically. He is releasing videos from the streets of Kyiv alongside his government officers, and has been photographed in military garb on the streets. Offered evacuation out of the country by the U.S., he answered, “I need ammunition, not a ride.” His courage and determination have boosted the morale of those defending their country against invaders and, in turn, captured the imagination of people around the world hoping to stem the recent growth of authoritarianism, who are now making him—and Ukraine—an icon of courage and principle.
In a sign of which way the wind is blowing, today Czech president Miloš Zeman and Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, both of whom have nurtured friendly relations with Putin, came out against the invasion. Zeman called for Russia to be thrown out of SWIFT; Orbán said he would not oppose sanctions. Even Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson has begun to backpedal on his enthusiasm for Russia’s side in this war.
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who was part of the scheme to get Zelensky to announce an investigation of Hunter Biden, today got in on the act of defending Ukraine. He tweeted: “The Ukrainian People are fighting for freedom from tyranny. Whether you realize or not, they are fighting for you and me.” But then he continued: “And our current administration is doing the minimum to support them, even though Biden’s colossal weakness and ineptitude helped to embolden Putin to do it.”
The right-wing talking point that Biden is weak and inept and therefore emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine is belied by the united front the western world is presenting. After the former president tried to weaken NATO and even discussed withdrawing from the treaty, Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have managed to strengthen the alliance again. They have brought the G7 (the seven wealthiest liberal democracies), the European Union, and other partners and allies behind extraordinary economic sanctions, acting in concert to make those sanctions much stronger than any one country could impose.
They have managed to get Germany behind stopping the certification of Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany that would have tied Europe more closely to Russia, and in what Marcel Dirsus, a German political scientist and fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University, told the Washington Post was possibly “one of the biggest shifts in German foreign policy since World War II,” Germany is now sending weapons to Ukraine and has agreed to impose economic sanctions.
Biden has facilitated this extraordinary international cooperation quietly, letting European leaders take credit for the measures his own administration has advocated. It is a major shift from the U.S.’s previous periods of unilateralism and militarism, and appears to be far more effective.
Asked tonight what he would do differently than Biden in Ukraine, former president Trump answered: “Well, I tell you what, I would do things, but the last thing I want to do is say it right now.”
For all the changes in the air, there is still a long way to go to restore democracy.
There is also a long way to go to restore Ukraine. Tonight the Russians are storming Kyiv.
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Southern novelist William Faulkner’s famous line saying “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” is usually interpreted as a reflection on how the evils of our history continue to shape the present. But Faulkner also argued, equally accurately, that the past is “not even past” because what happens in the present changes the way we remember the past.
Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the defiant and heroic response of the people of Ukraine to that new invasion are changing the way we remember the past.
Less than a week ago, Russian president Vladimir Putin launched an assault on Ukraine, and with his large military force, rebuilt after the military’s poor showing in its 2008 invasion of Georgia, it seemed to most observers that such an attack would be quick and deadly. He seemed unstoppable. For all that his position at home has been weakening for a while now as a slow economy and the political opposition of people like Alexei Navalny have turned people against him, his global influence seemed to be growing. That he believed an attack on Ukraine would be quick and successful was clear today when a number of Russian state media outlets published an essay, obviously written before the invasion, announcing Russia’s victory in Ukraine, saying ominously that “Putin solved the Ukrainian question forever…. Ukraine has returned to Russia.”
But Ukrainians changed the story line. While the war is still underway and deadly, and while Russia continues to escalate its attacks, no matter what happens the world will never go back to where it was a week ago. Suddenly, autocracy, rather than democracy, appears to be on the ropes.
In that new story, countries are organizing against Putin’s aggression and the authoritarianism behind it. Leaders of the world’s major economies, including Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Singapore, though not China, are working together to deny Putin’s access to the world’s financial markets.
As countries work together, international sanctions appear to be having an effect: a Russian bank this morning offered to exchange rubles for dollars at a rate of 171:1. Before the announcement that Europe and the U.S. would target Russia’s central bank, the rate was 83:1. Monday morning, Moscow time, the ruble plunged 30%. As Russia’s economy descends into chaos, investors are jumping out: today BP, Russia’s largest foreign investor, announced it is abandoning its investment in the Russian oil company Rosneft and pulling out of the country, at a loss of what is estimated to be about $25 billion.
The European Union has suddenly taken on a large military role in the world, announcing it would supply fighter jets to Ukraine. Sweden, which is a member of the E.U., will also send military aid to Ukraine. And German chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany, which has tended to underfund its military, would commit 100 billion euros, which is about $112.7 billion, to support its armed forces. The E.U. has also prohibited all Russian planes from its airspace, including Russian-chartered private jets.
Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, tweeted: “Russian elites fear Putin. But they no longer respect him. He has ruined their lives—damaged their fortunes, damaged the future of their kids, and may now have turned society away from them. They were living just fine until a week ago. Now, their lives will never be the same.”
Global power is different this week than last. Anti-authoritarian nations are pushing back on Russia and the techniques Putin has used to gain outsized influence. Today the E.U. banned media outlets operated by the Russian state. The White House and our allies also announced a new “transatlantic task force that will identify and freeze the assets of sanctioned individuals and companies—Russian officials and elites close to the Russian government, as well as their families, and their enablers.”
That word “enablers” seems an important one, for since 2016 there have been plenty of apologists for Putin here in the U.S. And yet now, with the weight of popular opinion shifting toward a defense of democracy, Republicans who previously cozied up to Putin are suddenly stating their support for Ukraine and trying to suggest that Putin has gotten out of line only because he sees Biden as weak. Under Trump, they say, Putin never would have invaded Ukraine, and they are praising Trump for providing aid to Ukraine in 2019.
They are hoping that their present support for Ukraine and democracy makes us forget their past support for Putin, even as former president Trump continues to call him “smart.” And yet, Republicans changed their party’s 2016 platform to favor Russia over Ukraine; accepted Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from northern Syria in October 2019, giving Russia a strategic foothold in the Middle East; and looked the other way when Trump withheld $391 million to help Ukraine resist Russian invasion until newly elected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to help rig the 2020 U.S. presidential election. (Trump did release the money after the story of the “perfect phone call” came out, but the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which investigated the withholding of funds, concluded that holding back the money at all was illegal.)
But rather than making us forget Republicans’ enabling of Putin’s expansion, the new story in which democracy has the upper hand might have the opposite effect. Now that people can clearly see exactly the man Republicans have supported, they will want to know why our leaders, who have taken an oath to our democratic Constitution, were willing to throw in their lot with a foreign autocrat. The answer to that question might well force us to rethink a lot of what we thought we knew about the last several years.
In today’s America, the past certainly is not past.
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It’s a picture night, folks. The news is a firehose, but too many late nights mean I simply must get some sleep.
The spot in this photo, the Angle, was the high-water mark of the Confederacy. It was here, on a battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 3, 1863, that United States soldiers stopped the Confederate soldiers of Pickett’s Charge, turning back the men who were fighting to establish a nation based on the proposition that men were created unequal and that some men should rule the rest.
Although the war would continue for well over another year, that moment broke the back of the Confederacy.
Four months later, on November 19, as the war was dragging on and Americans seemed ready to give up, President Abraham Lincoln reminded them why they were fighting. In a speech at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg, where more than 3000 U.S. soldiers were killed, he recalled the inspirational idea at the heart of the United States. “Four score and seven years ago,” he said, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure,” Lincoln said. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here” had “nobly advanced” the unfinished work of defending democracy, Lincoln said, but the task was not done. He urged the living to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
I happened to be at the Angle on Saturday, February 26, 2022, the third day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That was the day on which it became clear that Ukrainian resistance to Russian president Vladimir Putin, supported by the cooperation of the U.S. and European allies and partners in strangling Russia’s economic system, was forging a global alliance against the authoritarianism that has been growing in power around the world.
It was an odd thing to be walking the Gettysburg battlefield on that day, constantly checking Twitter to follow the news, seeing, perhaps, the modern-day echo of the Angle, as people dedicated to a government of the people, by the people, for the people, begin to repel those who would gather all power to themselves.
[Photo of The Angle by Buddy Poland.]
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In Ukraine, Russian troops escalated their bombing of cities, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Mariupol, in what Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky called a campaign of terror to break the will of the Ukrainians. Tonight (in U.S. time), airborne troops assaulted Kharviv, which is a city of about 1.5 million, and a forty-mile-long convoy of tanks and trucks is within 17 miles of Kyiv, although a shortage of gas means they’ll move very slowly.
About 660,000 refugees have fled the country.
But the war is not going well for Putin, either, as international sanctions are devastating the Russian economy and the invasion is going far more slowly than he had apparently hoped. The ruble has plummeted in value, and the Kremlin is trying to stave off a crisis in the stock market by refusing to open it. Both Exxon and the shipping giant Maersk have announced they are joining BP in cutting ties to Russia, Apple has announced it will not sell products in Russia, and the Swiss-based company building Nord Stream 2 today said it was considering filing for insolvency.
Ukraine’s military claimed it today destroyed a large Russian military convoy of up to 800 vehicles, and Ukrainian authorities claim to have stopped a plot to assassinate Zelensky and to have executed the assassins. The death toll for Russian troops will further undermine Putin’s military push. Russians are leaving dead soldiers where they lie, likely to avoid the spectacle of body bags coming home. It appears at least some of the invaders had no idea they were going to Ukraine, and some have allegedly been knocking holes in their vehicles’ gas tanks to enable them to stay out of the fight. Morale is low.
Associated Press correspondent Francesca Ebel reports from Russia: “Life in Russia is deteriorating extremely rapidly. So many of my friends are packing up & leaving the country. Their cards are blocking. Huge lines for ATMs etc. Rumours that borders will close soon. ‘What have we done? How did we not stop him earlier?’ said a friend to me y[ester]day.” The Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Andrew Roth, agreed. “Something has definitely shifted here in the last two days.”
According to the BBC, a local government body in Moscow's Gagarinsky District called the war a “disaster” that is impoverishing the country, and demanded the withdrawal of troops from Ukraine. Another, similar, body said the invasion was "insane" and "unjustified" and warned, "Our economy is going to hell."
Putin clearly did not expect the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the U.S. and other allies and partners around the world, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and others, to work together to stand against his aggression. Even traditionally neutral Switzerland is on board. The insistence of the U.S. on exposing Putin’s moves ahead of time, building a united opposition, and warning of false flag operations to justify an invasion meant that the anti-authoritarian world is working together now to stop the Russian advance. Today, Taiwan announced it sent more than 27 tons of medical supplies to Ukraine, claiming its own membership in the "democratic camp" in the international community.
This extraordinary international cooperation is a tribute to President Joe Biden, who has made defense of democracy at home and abroad the centerpiece of his presidency. Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and State Department officials have been calling, meeting, listening, and building alliances with allies since they took office, and by last Thanksgiving they were making a concerted push to bring the world together in anticipation of Putin’s aggression.
Their early warnings have rehabilitated the image of U.S. intelligence, badly damaged during the Trump years, when the president and his loyalists attacked U.S. intelligence and accepted the word of autocrats, including Putin.
It has also been a diplomatic triumph, but in his State of the Union address tonight, Biden quite correctly put it second to the “fearlessness,…courage,…and determination” of the Ukrainians who are resisting the Russian troops.
The theme of Biden’s speech tonight was unity. He worked to bring Americans from all political persuasions into a vision of the country we could all share, focusing on the measures—lower prescription drug costs, background checks for gun ownership, access to abortion, voting rights, immigration, civil rights, corporate taxation—that polls show enjoy enormous popular support.
“Last year COVID-19 kept us apart,” he began, addressing a vaccinated, boosted, and audience that was largely maskless, since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently eased mask recommendations according to risk level. “This year we are finally together again.”
Tonight, we meet as Democrats, Republicans and Independents. But most importantly as Americans. With a duty to one another, to the American people, to the Constitution. And with an unwavering resolve that freedom will always triumph over tyranny.” He urged people to “stop seeing each other as enemies, and start seeing each other for who we really are: Fellow Americans.”
Biden outlined the ways in which his administration has “helped working people—and left no one behind.” The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan helped us to fight Covid-19 and rebuilt the economy after the devastation of the pandemic. It helped the nation gain more than 6.5 million new jobs last year, more jobs created in one year than in any other time in our history.
The economy grew at an astonishing rate in Biden’s first year: 5.7%, the strongest growth in 40 years. Forty years of tax cuts, initiated in the belief that freeing up private capital would enable the wealthy to invest efficiently in the economy, have led to “weaker economic growth, lower wages, bigger deficits, and the widest gap between those at the top and everyone else in nearly a century,” Biden pointed out.
Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris believe instead that both the economy and the country do best when the government invests in ordinary people. The administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law will rebuild America, creating well-paying jobs. The administration has also brought home military contracts, using tax dollars to provide Americans good jobs and to bring manufacturing back home. Biden called on Congress to pass the Bipartisan Innovation Act, which invests in innovation and will spark additional investment in new technologies like electric vehicles.
Biden not only outlined the ways in which he plans to nurture his vision of government, he took on Republican criticisms.
Biden said he plans to combat the inflation that has plagued the recovery by cutting the cost of prescription drugs and letting Medicare negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs the way the VA already does. He called for cutting energy and child care costs. He called for avoiding supply chain issues by strengthening domestic manufacturing. He spoke up against the price gouging that has characterized the pandemic years, and he called for corporations and the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share of taxes through a minimum 15% tax rate for corporations.
Biden also undercut Republican accusations that Democrats want to “defund” the police by countering that we need to fund the police at even higher rates, an idea he talked about on the campaign trail when he urged better funding for social services to relieve law enforcement from the community policing issues for which they are currently ill prepared. At the same time, he noted that his Department of Justice has “required body cameras, banned chokeholds, and restricted no-knock warrants for its officers.”
To those complaining about the effect of this spending on the deficit—this has the name of Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) all over it—Biden noted that by the end of the year, “the deficit will be down to less than half what it was before I took office.” He is, he said, “the only president ever to cut the deficit by more than one trillion dollars in a single year.”
Biden offered a “Unity Agenda for the Nation.” He outlined “[f]our big things we can do together”: beat the opioid epidemic, make the way we address mental health equal to the way we address physical health, support our veterans, and end cancer as we know it.
Biden’s speech listed items that are very popular but that are nonetheless highly unlikely to pass the Senate, where Republicans use the filibuster to stop any programs that support Biden’s ideology of government. The speech subtly reminded listeners that it is Republican members of Congress who are standing between these popular programs and the American people.
Since the attack on Ukraine made the line between democracies and autocracies crystal clear, Republicans have tried desperately to backpedal their previous coziness with Putin (in 2018, eight Republican lawmakers spent July 4 in Moscow, for example) and to declare their solidarity with Ukraine. Whether that sudden shift toward democracy would affect their approach to U.S. politics has been unclear. Tonight’s speech had some clues: Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) said they wouldn’t attend because they didn’t have time to waste getting covid tests, and Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) actually turned their back on Biden’s cabinet members when they came in, then heckled the president as he spoke.
“In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security,” Biden said. And Americans “will meet the test. To protect freedom and liberty, to expand fairness and opportunity. We will save democracy.”
78% of voters polled by CBS said they approved of Biden’s speech.
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In the midst of all the news stories that have taken the headlines, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has continued its work. Today, in a lawsuit, it told a judge that the committee “has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
The filing also said that a “review of the materials may reveal that the president and members of his campaign engaged in common law fraud in connection with their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.” One of the emails it released to support the filing indicated that Trump legal advisor John Eastman knew those delaying the electoral count were breaking the law.
The January 6th committee is investigating the events of January 6, 2021, to see what changes in the law, if any, should be in place to make sure what happened on January 6 cannot happen again. It cannot charge anyone with a crime, although it can make a criminal referral to the Department of Justice, which the department will then consider. Today’s statement makes it seem likely that the committee will be making such a referral.
Former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal told MSNBC: "This is as deadly serious as it gets, seditious conspiracy."
The filing was in a case over whether Eastman, the author of the memo outlining how then–vice president Mike Pence could use his role in the counting of electoral votes to overturn the election, can refuse to turn over about 11,000 pages of emails and documents to the committee. Eastman wants to withhold them, saying they are covered by attorney-client privilege. But he has not been able to establish that Trump was his client, and, further, attorney-client privilege cannot be invoked to cover a crime.
Also today, in a case concerning whether the Oath Keepers, who stormed the Capitol on January 6, engaged in seditious conspiracy, Joshua James of Alabama pleaded guilty. According to CBS News congressional correspondent Scott MacFarlane, who is following all the January 6 cases, James agreed that he tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power and that Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes had a “plan” for accomplishing that disruption. In the plea deal, James said that “Rhodes instructed James &..conspirators to be prepared, if called upon, to report to the White House grounds to secure the perimeter & use lethal force if necessary against anyone who tried to remove President Trump."
Meanwhile, the Russian attack on Ukraine continues to escalate. Today, United States ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield confirmed that Russia has used cluster munitions and vacuum bombs, which are prohibited under the Geneva Conventions establishing limits to deadly weapons, in Ukraine.
A million refugees have now crossed the border to get out of Ukraine. People are also fleeing Russia as its economy collapses and Russian president Vladimir Putin persists in turning the country into a global outcast. Russian-American journalist Julia Ioffe wrote: “Friend after friend fleeing Russia. Five today alone. The best and the brightest, the journalists who were telling people the truth about their country—gone. Emigres, like the white Russians of a century ago. Putin is destroying two countries at once.” Russian authorities have started to crack down and refuse to let people leave.
In both the U.S. and Russia in the last several years, anti-democratic leaders have sought to impose their will on voters, and the similarities between those impulses make them unlikely to be independent of each other.
On July 27, 2016, even before the Republican National Committee changed the party’s platform to weaken the U.S. stance in favor of Ukraine in its struggle to fight off Russia’s 2014 invasion, U.S. News & World Report senior politics writer David Catanese noted that senior security officials were deeply concerned about then-candidate Trump’s ties to Russia.
July 27 was the day Trump referred at a news conference to his opponent and then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s emails that were not turned over for public disclosure from her private server and said: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” (We know now that Russian hackers did, in fact, begin to target her accounts on or around that day.)
Former secretary of defense Leon Panetta, who served under nine presidents, told Catanese that Trump was "a threat to national security,” not only because of his call for help from Russia, but because of his suggestion that he would abandon the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) if he were elected and, as Catanese put it, “his coziness toward Russian President Vladimir Putin.”
Former National Security Advisor Thomas E. Donilon also expressed concern over the hack of the Democratic National Committee by Russian operatives, and said that such an attack mirrored similar attacks in Estonia, Georgia, and, most prominently, Ukraine. He called on officials to confront Russian leaders publicly.
Cybersecurity expert Alan Silberberg told Catanese that Trump looked like an ally of Putin. "The Twitter trail, if you dig into it over the last year, the Russian media is mirroring him, putting out the same tweets at almost the same time," Silberberg said.
"You get the sense that people think it's a joke,” Panetta said. “The fact is what he has said has already represented a threat to our national security."
Putin’s attempt to destroy democracy in Ukraine militarily has invited a reexamination of the cyberattacks, disinformation, division, attacks on opponents, and installation of puppet leaders he used to gain control of Ukraine before finally turning to bombs. This reexamination, in turn, has led journalists to note that those same techniques have poisoned politics in countries other than Ukraine.
Over the weekend, British investigative journalist Carol Cadwalladr warned that we are 8 years into “The first Great Information War,” a war sparked by Putin’s fury at the removal of his puppet Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 from the presidency of Ukraine. Putin set out to warp reality to confuse both Ukrainians & the world. The “meddling” we saw in the 2016 election was not an attempt to elect Trump simply so he would end the sanctions former president Barack Obama had imposed on Russia in 2014 after it invaded Ukraine. It was an attempt to destabilize democracy. “And it's absolutely crucial that we now understand that Putin's attack on Ukraine & the West was a JOINT attack on both,” she wrote.
Today in The Guardian, political and cultural observer Rebecca Solnit wrote a piece titled “It’s time to confront the Trump-Putin network.”
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As Russia’s war on Ukraine enters its second week, the lines are clear.
This morning—in America’s time—Russian president Vladimir Putin called French president Emmanuel Macron and talked for an hour and a half. Putin warned that he aimed to take “full control” of Ukraine by diplomatic or military means. He said that he was “prepared to go all the way.”
Tonight, Russian troops shelled the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power complex in southeast Ukraine. A fire broke out at the plant but, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, did not affect essential equipment. What the attack did do, though, was sow fear of nuclear meltdown, giving Putin a psychological win in his war.
Standing against Putin and his vision of freedom to act as he wishes against sovereign countries are countries around the world that are exerting financial pressure on Russia, cutting it off from the rest of the world. It is a new moment in global history, one in which businesses and economic pressure are being enlisted to protect democracy, rather than undermine it.
That economic pressure in the form of sanctions is working not just on large financial transactions, but also on things like simple maintenance of airplanes. Airplane manufacturers Boeing and Airbus have suspended the shipping of parts, maintenance, and technical support for the Russian airplane fleet. Russia is huge. Downing the whole airplane fleet though economic pressure will severely affect the ability of goods and people to move throughout the country.
The Biden administration increased pressure on 8 more oligarchs close to Putin, along with their families, and restricted the visas of 19 oligarchs and 47 members of their families in hopes that that pressure would lead them to undermine the president. The sanctioned Russians include Yevgeny Prigozhin and his wife, daughter, and son. In addition to being close to Putin, Prigozhin is the owner of the Wagner Group, an infamous paramilitary organization that has been accused of war crimes. Prigozhin is also wanted by the FBI for his role in attacking the 2016 U.S. election.
Concerns that Putin might continue to invade sovereign nations have led countries to turn to European democracies for protection. Moldova has officially applied for membership in the European Union. “We want to live in peace, prosperity, be part of the free world,” said Moldova’s president, Maia Sandu. “While some decisions take time, others must be made quickly and decisively, and taking advantage of the opportunities that come with a changing world.”
The U.S., and other countries that belong to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, are supporting Ukraine from outside its borders. For NATO to take on the fight against Putin’s armies directly in Ukraine runs the risk of uniting the currently demoralized Russian people behind their leader, and enables him to start a war against NATO, which would engulf all of Europe.
Tonight, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham crossed that line when, on Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s television show, he called for someone to assassinate Putin. He then repeated his comment on Twitter. This was an astonishing propaganda coup for Putin, enabling him to argue that he is indeed in a war with America, rather than engaging in an unprovoked attack on neighboring Ukraine. This is exactly what the Biden administration has gone out of its way to avoid.
It was an astonishing moment…and also an interesting one. It undermines the position of the U.S. and our partners and allies, but in whose service? After initially opposing Trump’s reach for the presidency, Graham threw in his lot utterly with the former president, who has many possible reasons both to undermine Biden and to keep Putin in power. Perhaps Graham’s comment was intended to help Trump. Or perhaps Graham might have simply made a colossally stupid mistake. Whatever the case, the enormous implications of his statement make it one that would be a mistake to ignore.
Graham was not the only one to bolster Putin’s position today. Tucker Carlson tonight told his audience that indeed he was wrong in his earlier defense of the Russian president but then continued to stoke the same racist and sexist fires he has fed all along, blaming his misreading of the situation on Vice President Kamala Harris.
Today the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian media outlets, as well as some of those involved with them, that worked to “spread Russian disinformation and influence perceptions as a part of their invasion of Ukraine.”
Closer to home, a federal court in the Southern District of New York charged John Hanick with violating U.S. sanctions and making false statements concerning his years of work for sanctioned Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev. Malofeyev was key to destabilizing Ukraine in order to support a Russian takeover. Hanick worked for him from 2013 until at least 2017, establishing TV networks in Russia, Bulgaria, and Greece to spread destabilizing messages.
Hanick was one of the founding producers of the Fox News Channel. He became an admirer of Putin because of the Russian leader’s anti-LGBTQ stance and his belief that Putin was a devout Christian. Apparently, he turned that enthusiasm into an attempt to undermine democracy in favor of Putin’s authoritarianism.
Yesterday, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a new interagency law enforcement task force, KleptoCapture, dedicated to enforcing sanctions, export restrictions, and economic countermeasures the U.S. and its allies and partners have imposed to respond to Russian aggression. In a statement, about the Hanick indictment, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damien Williams said, “The indictment unsealed today shows this office’s commitment to the enforcement of laws intended to hamstring those who would use their wealth to undermine fundamental democratic processes.”
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Just a few quick markers tonight because I need some sleep.
Russia’s war against Ukraine continues. Fourteen wide-bodied aircraft from the U.S. and the European Union delivered anti-tank missiles, rocket launchers, guns, and ammunition to Ukraine today to help it hold on against Russia. The extra aid was approved less than a week ago, and the munitions began flowing two days later.
Russia’s economy continues to nosedive. The Russian stock market has been closed all week, and yesterday, a Russian stock market analyst took out a bottle and drank to the death of the stock market on live television. According to CNN’s global affairs analyst Bianna Golodryga, the Moscow Stock Exchange will remain closed through next Wednesday, and possibly beyond. Russians are fleeing their country into Finland.
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, who is bound to be strictly neutral on political matters, withdrew invitations for a diplomatic reception issued to Russian and Belarusian diplomats to show her disapproval of the attack on Ukraine. She also gave from her private funds a “generous donation” to Ukraine humanitarian aid.
The U.S. has swung against Russia after years in which members of the Republican Party in particular have spoken admiringly of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s strength and commitment to so-called conservative values. Former vice president Mike Pence was expected to try to open up some space between Putin and the Republicans, telling a gathering of Republican donors tonight, “There is no room in this party for apologists for Putin. There is only room for champions of freedom.”
Former president Trump, who still commands loyalty from party members, has spoken admiringly of Putin’s attack on Ukraine. Pence’s statement appears to be an attempt to recenter the party away from Trump.
And, speaking of Trump, a legal filing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday said that advisors repeatedly told the former president that he had lost the 2020 election and that he nonetheless insisted on pursuing the lie that he had won. In Salon, Amanda Marcotte pointed out that Trump apparently felt comfortable pursuing the lie because he did not believe there would be any consequences for his illegal behavior.
That conviction that the former president and his cronies were above the law clearly influenced Trump advisor Roger Stone, who permitted a Danish film crew to follow him around for more than two years, including during the days before January 6, 2021.
A stunning exposé in the Washington Post today by Dalton Bennett and Jon Swaine shows that Stone helped to coordinate the “Stop the Steal” protests and met before the January 6 riot with a member of the far-right Oath Keepers group who has since pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy. Stone refused to let the filmmakers see him for about 90 minutes during the height of the violence on January 6—an aide said he was napping—but when the extent of the crisis became clear, he slipped out of Washington on a private plane, claiming he was afraid incoming attorney general Merrick Garland would prosecute him.
Stone then lobbied hard for a presidential pardon for himself and a number of Trump supporters in Congress for trying to overturn the election. When White House counsel Pat Cipollone opposed the requests, Stone texted a friend, “See you in prison.”
Stone has categorically denied all the conclusions drawn from the film footage.
On this date in 1789, the first U.S. Congress met for the first time, operating under the U.S. Constitution and cementing it into existence.
Pretty cool we’ve kept it going for 234 years.
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Russia’s war on Ukraine continues.
If the broader patterns of war apply, Russian president Vladimir Putin is making the war as senselessly brutal as possible, likely hoping to force Ukraine to give in quickly before global sanctions completely crush Russia and the return of warm weather eases Europe’s need for Russian oil and gas.
Russian shelling has created a humanitarian crisis in urban areas, and last night, a brief ceasefire designed to let residents of Mariupol and Volnovakha escape the cities through “humanitarian corridors” broke down as Russian troops resumed firing, forcing the people back to shelter. This morning, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to more than 280 members of the U.S. Congress to describe Ukraine’s “urgent need” for more support, both military and humanitarian.
Today, Putin said that the continued resistance of President Zelensky and his government threatens Ukraine’s existence. He also said that the sanctions imposed against Russia, Russian companies, Russian oligarchs and their families, and himself by the global alliance arrayed against him are “akin to a declaration of war.” (Remember, saying things doesn’t make them so; words are often a posture.)
The global economic pressure on Russia and the Russian oligarchs is already crushing the Russian economy—today Mastercard and Visa suspended operations in the country—while other countries’ refusal to sell airplane parts, for example, will soon render Russian planes useless, a major crisis for a country the size of Russia. Meanwhile, support is pouring into Ukraine: aside from the military support coming, yesterday the World Bank said it was preparing ways to transfer immediate financial support.
There are suggestions, too, among those who study military strategy that the Russian invasion has been far weaker than they expected. The Russian forces on paper are significantly stronger than those of Ukraine, and by now they should have established control of the airspace. Ground forces are also not moving as efficiently as it seems they should be.
Today, Phillips P. O’Brien, Professor of Strategic Studies at University of St Andrews, outlined how the Russian military, so impressive on paper, might in fact have continued the terrible logistics problems of the Soviet Union. On the ground, they appear to have too few trucks, too little tire maintenance, out-of-date food, and too little fuel. In the air, they are showing signs that they cannot plan or execute complicated maneuvers, in which they have had little practice.
Russia expert Tom Nichols appeared to agree, tweeting: “Ukrainian resistance has been amazing, but I am astonished—despite already low expectations—at how utter Russian military incompetence has made a giant clusterf**k out of an invasion against a much weaker neighbor.”
Meanwhile, Russians are now aware that they are at war—something that Putin had apparently hidden at first—and a number are protesting. The government has cracked down on critics, and rumors are flying that Putin is about to declare martial law. It appears he is already turning to mercenaries to fight his war. The U.S. government has urged all Americans to leave Russia.
And so, time is a key factor in this war: will Russian forces pound Ukraine into submission before their own country can no longer support a war effort?
Closer to home, the Russian war on Ukraine has created a crisis for the Republican Party here in the U.S.
Aaron Blake of the Washington Post reported on Thursday that after Trump won the 2016 election and we learned that Russia had interfered to help him, Republicans’ approval of Putin jumped from about 14% to 37%.
In the Des Moines Register today, columnist Rekha Basu explained how the American right then swung behind Putin because they saw him as a moral crusader, defending religion and “traditional values,” from modern secularism and "decadence," using a strong hand to silence those who would, for example, defend LGBTQ rights.
Now, popular support has swung strongly against the Russian leader—even among Republicans, 61% of whom now strongly dislike the man. This is widening the split in the Republican Party between Trump supporters and those who would like to move the party away from the former president.
In a tweet today, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) referred to the “Putin wing” of the Republican Party when she shared a video clip of Douglas Macgregor, whom Trump nominated for ambassador to Germany and then appointed as senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense, telling a Fox News Channel host that Russian forces have been “too gentle” and “I don’t see anything heroic” about Zelensky.
Possibly eager to show their participation in Ukraine’s defense, when Zelensky spoke to Congress this morning, two Republican senators—Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Steve Daines (R-MT)—shared screenshots of his Zoom call while it was going on, despite the explicit request of Ukraine’s ambassador not to share details of the meeting until it was over, out of concern for Zelensky’s safety.
In an appearance on Newsmax, Trump’s secretary of state John Bolton pushed back when the host suggested that the Trump administration was “pretty tough on Russia, in a lot of ways.” Bolton said that Trump “barely knew where Ukraine was” and repeatedly complained about Russian sanctions. Bolton said Trump should have sanctioned the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany, rather than letting it proceed, and concluded: “It’s just not accurate to say that Trump's behavior somehow deterred the Russians.”
Still, the sudden attempt of the Republicans to rewrite history cannot erase the fact that every Republican in the House of Representatives voted against impeaching Trump when he withheld $391 million in aid for Ukraine that Congress had appropriated, offering to release it only on the condition that President Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That is, they were willing to look the other way as Trump weakened Ukraine in an attempt to rig the 2020 election by creating a scandal he hoped would sink his chief opponent.
Democrats supported impeachment, though, and the case went to the Senate to be tried. And there, every single Republican senator except Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT), who voted to convict him for abuse of power, acquitted Trump of the charges stemming from his attempt to hamstring Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.
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It was a beautiful sunny day today in Selma, Alabama, where thousands of people, including Vice President Kamala Harris and five other senior White House officials, met to honor the 57th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when law enforcement officers tried to beat into silence those Black Americans marching for their right to have a say in the government under which they lived.
The story of March 7 in Selma is the story of Americans determined to bring to life the principle articulated in the Declaration of Independence that a government’s claim to authority comes from the consent of the governed. It is also a story of how hard local authorities, entrenched in power and backed by angry white voters, made that process.
In the 1960s, despite the fact Black Americans outnumbered white Americans among the 29,500 people who lived in Selma, Alabama, the city’s voting rolls were 99% white. So, in 1963, local Black organizers launched a voter registration drive.
It was hard going. White Selma residents had no intention of permitting their Black neighbors to have a say in their government. Indeed, white southerners in general were taking a stand against the equal right of Black Americans to vote. During the 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration drive in neighboring Mississippi, Ku Klux Klan members worked with local law enforcement officers to murder three voting rights organizers and dispose of their bodies.
To try to hold back the white supremacists, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, designed in part to make it possible for Black Americans to register to vote. In Selma, a judge stopped voter registration meetings by prohibiting public gatherings of more than two people.
To call attention to the crisis in her city, voting rights activist Amelia Boynton traveled to Birmingham to invite the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to the city. King had become a household name after the 1963 March on Washington where he delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech, and his presence would bring national attention to Selma’s struggle.
King and other prominent Black leaders arrived in January 1965, and for seven weeks, Black residents made a new push to register to vote. County Sheriff James Clark arrested almost 2000 of them for a variety of charges, including contempt of court and parading without a permit. A federal court ordered Clark not to interfere with orderly registration, so he forced Black applicants to stand in line for hours before taking a “literacy” test. Not a single person passed.
Then, on February 18, white police officers, including local police, sheriff’s deputies, and Alabama state troopers, beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights at a demonstration in his hometown of Marion, Alabama, about 25 miles northwest of Selma. Jackson had run into a restaurant for shelter along with his mother when the police started rioting, but they chased him and shot him in the restaurant’s kitchen.
Jackson died eight days later, on February 26. Black leaders in Selma decided to defuse the community’s anger by planning a long march—54 miles—from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and voter suppression.
On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bull whips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis, and beat Amelia Boynton unconscious. A newspaper photograph of the 54-year-old Boynton, seemingly dead in the arms of another marcher, illustrated the depravity of those determined to stop Black voting.
Images of “Bloody Sunday” on the national news mesmerized the nation, and supporters began to converge on Selma. King, who had been in Atlanta when the marchers first set off, returned to the fray.
Two days later, the marchers set out again. Once again, the troopers and police met them at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but this time, King led the marchers in prayer and then took them back to Selma. That night, a white mob beat to death a Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who had come from Massachusetts to join the marchers.
On March 15, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a nationally televised joint session of Congress to ask for the passage of a national voting rights act. “Their cause must be our cause too,” he said. “[A]ll of us…must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” Two days later, he submitted to Congress proposed voting rights legislation.
The marchers were determined to complete their trip to Montgomery, and when Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, refused to protect them, President Johnson stepped in. When the marchers set off for a third time on March 21, 1965 members of the nationalized Alabama National Guard, FBI agents, and federal marshals protected them. Covering about ten miles a day, they camped in the yards of well-wishers until they arrived at the Alabama state capitol on March 25. Their ranks had grown as they walked until they numbered about 25,000 people.
On the steps of the capitol, speaking under a Confederate flag, Dr. King said: “The end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”
That night, Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who had arrived from Michigan to help after Bloody Sunday, was murdered by four Ku Klux Klan members who tailed her as she ferried demonstrators out of the city.
On August 6, Dr. King and Mrs. Boynton were guests of honor as President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Johnson recalled “the outrage of Selma” when he said "This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies."
The Voting Rights Act authorized federal supervision of voter registration in districts where Black Americans were historically underrepresented. Johnson promised that the government would strike down “regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote.” He called the right to vote “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men,” and pledged that “we will not delay, or we will not hesitate, or we will not turn aside until Americans of every race and color and origin in this country have the same right as all others to share in the process of democracy.”
But less than 50 years later, in 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. The Shelby County v. Holder decision opened the door, once again, for voter suppression. Since then, states have made it harder to vote. In the wake of the 2020 election, in which voters handed control of the government to Democrats, Republican-dominated legislatures in at least 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting. As legislatures start their 2022 sessions, those in at least 27 states are considering more than 250 bills with restrictive provisions.
On this 57th anniversary of the Selma march, President Joe Biden vowed to continue to promote voting access through last year’s executive order and with the help of the Department of Justice, and he called, again, for Congress to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the young man on the Pettus Bridge who went on to serve 17 terms in Congress. Together, these acts would protect the right to vote.
“I will continue to use every tool at my disposal to strengthen our democracy and keep alive the promise of America for all Americans,” Biden said in a statement. “The battle for the soul of America has many fronts. The right to vote is the most fundamental.”
In Selma today, Vice President Harris told the people gathered: “Today, the eyes of the world are on Ukraine, and the brave people who are fighting to protect their country and their democracy. And, their bravery is a reminder that freedom and democracy can never be taken for granted by any of us.”
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Every day, people write to me and say they feel helpless to change the direction of our future.
I always answer that we change the future by changing the way people think, and that we change the way people think by changing the way we talk about things. To that end, I have encouraged people to speak up about what they think is important, to take up oxygen that otherwise feeds the hatred and division that have had far too much influence in our country of late.
Have any of your efforts mattered?
Well, apparently some people think they have. Last week, President Biden’s team reached out to ask if I would like some time with him to have a conversation to share with you all.
On Friday, February 25, I sat down with the president in the China Room of the White House to talk about American democracy and the struggles we face.
It was an amazing time to be able to talk to the President. Russian president Vladimir Putin had just attacked Ukraine, Biden was preparing to give his first State of the Union address, and the president had just made the historic announcement of the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for a seat on the Supreme Court.
But I didn’t want to ask the president about anything I could learn from other publicly available sources—I already read those every day to write my Letters from an American. I wanted to hear from a historic figure in a historic time about how he thinks about America in this pivotal moment, to put the specifics of what he does in a larger context.
In my books, I have argued that throughout our history, America has swung between the defense of equality outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the defense of private property outlined in the Constitution.
Our peculiar history of racism has meant that every time it seems we are approaching equality before the law, those determined to prevent that equality have turned people against it by insisting that government protection of equality will cost tax dollars, thus amounting to a redistribution of wealth from those with property to those without. That is, if Black and Brown Americans, and poor people, are permitted to vote, they will demand roads and schools and hospitals, and those can be paid for only by taxes on people with money. In this argument, an equal say in our government for all people amounts to socialism.
With this argument, those defending their property turn ordinary Americans against each other and take control of our political system. Once in power, they rig the system for their own benefit. Money flows upward until there is a dramatic split between ordinary people and those very few wealthy Americans who, by then, control the economy, the government, and society.
This point in the cycle came about in the 1850s, the 1890s, the 1920s, and now, again, in our present.
In the past, just when it seemed we were approaching the end of democracy and replacing it with oligarchy—and in each of these periods, elites literally talked about how they alone should lead the country—the American people turned to leaders who helped them reclaim democracy.
We know these leaders from our history. Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt all have entered the pantheon of our leaders because of their defense of democracy in the face of entrenched power. But all of those presidents became who they were because they rose to the challenge of the pivotal moments in which they lived. They worked to reflect the increasingly loud voices of the majority of the American people.
James Buchanan, William McKinley, Herbert Hoover, and Donald Trump did not.
And now President Biden stands at another pivotal moment in our history. What he does in this moment will reflect what the American people demand from his leadership.
So do your voices matter? He wouldn’t have taken the time in the midst of such an important day in America to talk to you if they didn’t.
Here is what he has to say:
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For all the breathless reports of Russia’s war on Ukraine, it is unclear who is gaining advantage. This is in part because both sides are fighting the war with propaganda as well as with missiles, and it is hard to sort out what is real and what is not. Indeed, image and reality may merge, since images often shape what later becomes real. So, for example, the many stories of Ukrainian resistance feed that resistance, while the stories of Russian failures hurt morale.
One thing that is absolutely clear is that Russia is firing on civilian areas indiscriminately, creating horrific damage and humanitarian crises in urban areas that two weeks ago were normal city blocks. More than 1.7 million Ukrainians have had to flee their homes.
But the war is not proceeding according to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s plans. To control Ukraine, Russia needed to take it quickly, and although its military is 8 times the size of Ukraine’s, it has not managed to do so. The Russian government has admitted the loss of 498 soldiers; U.S. officials say the number is conservatively more than 3000, and Ukrainian officials estimate the Russian troop deaths at over 10,000.
According to a briefing by a senior U.S. defense official reported by Washington Post military reporter Dan Lamothe, the U.S. assesses that the Russian combat power massed at the Ukrainian border before the war is now fully committed, and there is no evidence they are moving in more troops, although there are reports that Russia is trying to recruit soldiers accustomed to urban combat from Syria. Without the troop power it needs or an effective air assault, Russia is using long-range, inaccurate weapons that create widespread devastation.
In the short term, the Russian invasion is going far more slowly than expected and economic sanctions are biting the Russian economy hard. Officials warn that Russia will continue to grind Ukraine down, but how much Putin can afford to do over time as the sanctions hurt more and more is not clear.
Outside of the horror that is happening within Ukraine, Russia’s apparent weakness and Ukraine’s strength will almost certainly rework geopolitics.
At the very least, the underperformance of the Russian military will enable opponents to exploit the holes it now sees (today, for example, it appeared that Russia’s boasted encrypted battlefield communications system doesn’t actually work).
More, though, the missteps of the Russian army have significantly weakened the country. Estonia’s chief of defense, Lieutenant General Martin Herem, told reporters “Today what I have seen is that even this huge army or military is not so huge.” Brigadier General Rauno Sirk, commander of Estonia’s air force, said of the Russian air force: “If you look at what’s on the other side, you’ll see that there isn’t really an opponent anymore.”
Andrei Kozyrev, Russia’s foreign minister from 1990 to 1996, tweeted: “The Kremlin spent the last 20 years trying to modernize its military. Much of that budget was stolen and spent on mega-yachts in Cyprus. But as a military advisor you cannot report that to the President. So they reported lies to him instead. Potemkin military[.]”
Perhaps the actions of Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, who is facing an election on April 3, reveal how that weakness might change political alliances. Orbán had brought his country close to Russia but now opposes the invasion.
If Putin’s authoritarian government has turned out to be weaker militarily than was expected, democracies have proved stronger.
Max Bergman, a senior fellow for Europe and Russia at the Center for American Progress, noted that U.S. security assistance to Ukraine appears to have been unusually effective because it did not focus on high-tech gadgets and bells and whistles, but rather on reforming what was in 2014 a corrupt military and on helping the Ukrainian forces with basic systems, like secure cell phones, stockpiles, and resupply. It wasn’t flashy, but it appears to have been effective, helping the Ukrainians to hold their own against the Russians. If this observation holds up, it could lead to a reassessment of foreign military aid.
Logistics seem to have been key to addressing the humanitarian crisis outside Ukraine as well, as 1.7 million Ukrainians have fled their country. In two weeks, that astonishing number of refugees has been absorbed by Poland (1,028,000), Hungary (180,000), Moldova (83,000), Slovakia (128,000), Romania (79,000), Russia (53,000), and Belarus (406), and others, according to the United Nations. The communications and plans necessary simply to move that many people, let alone feed and shelter them, show an astonishing level of cooperation. Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday was in Moldova, the small former Soviet state that borders Ukraine, where he pledged America’s support.
The ability of European countries to come together to stand against Russia, as well as the global cooperation in cutting Russia off from the world economy, has offered an illustration of how countries can enforce a rules-based world and showed the strength of democracies.
The widespread crackdown on illicit Russian money will have an equally important long-term effect. A recent study revealed that Russian money has corrupted British politics; now we are beginning to learn just how much of it has done the same in the U.S. A piece today in the Washington Post by Peter Whoriskey explained that, according to the Anti-Corruption Data Collective, oligarchs associated with Putin have donated millions of dollars to U.S. philanthropies, museums, and universities since Putin rose to power, using their money to buy access to elite circles. Also today, a former campaign staffer for Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has been charged with funneling Russian money into the 2016 election.
Also clear over the past month is that the U.S. seems to have finally begun to take on Russian propaganda. The administration was ahead of every Russian false flag operation and warned the world what our intelligence community believed was going to happen. This took away the element of surprise that has worked so well for Putin in the past.
Even more, though, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky and his administration have replaced Putin’s popular vision of an invincible Russia with one in which the Russians seem weak and Ukraine strong, its success inevitable. They have turned Russian propaganda on its head.
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This morning, President Joe Biden announced an executive order that will ban the import of Russian oil, liquified natural gas, and coal to the United States, as part of a plan to cut Russia off from the world economy.
Biden did this under pressure from Congress, which was preparing its own bill for this outcome. The administration hesitated to take this step independently from other allies and partners. In 2021, the U.S. imported only 3% of its oil from Russia, and that number has been dropping in 2022, while Europe is not in a position to cut off Russian oil, although the European Union did offer a plan to cut Russian gas imports by two thirds this year, and Britain declared it would stop importing Russian oil in 2023.
According to a new Reuters poll, 63% of Americans approve of cutting off Russian oil despite expected price hikes. Still, rising gasoline prices are a big problem, and the optics of cutting off any oil supplies right now will hurt the administration.
The government has little to do with the cost of gasoline. Since our oil companies are privately owned, the cost of oil goes up and down according to supply and demand. That, in turn, can depend on disruptions to crude oil supplies, refinery operations, or pipeline problems, or even on what people think will be future demands. Last year, in the midst of the pandemic, the economic recession meant there was little demand for oil, and prices were very low. That meant producers reduced production, and they have not yet fully ramped it up again.
Even before Russia invaded Ukraine, the booming U.S. economy meant increased demand for oil and thus increased prices. U.S. companies increased their production, but perhaps not enough to address the imbalance between supply and demand that would address soaring gasoline prices. And in that gap, oil companies made huge profits.
On February 20, 2022, Tom Wilson of Financial Times reported that the seven top oil companies, including BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron, would return a near-record $38 to $41 billion to shareholders through stock buybacks, after distributing $50 billion in dividends. The Wall Street Journal in January noted, “While that is good for investors in the company, there are mounting concerns that there isn’t enough investment in new fossil-fuel supply to meet growing demand.”
Low supplies are driving prices up, but Republicans are trying to turn those high gas prices into a culture war, blaming Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline for the nation’s high gas prices. Representative Jake LaTurner (R-KS), for example, has launched a paid ad on Facebook and Twitter saying that the Keystone XL pipeline “would have produced 830,000 barrels of oil per day, more than enough to offset what we import from Russia.” Others blame Biden’s cancellation of new oil permits in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for high prices.
In fact, both of these points are misleading.
The Keystone Pipeline, which runs from oil sand fields in Alberta, Canada, into the United States and to Cushing, Oklahoma, exists and is fully operational. The XL Pipeline consists of two new additions to the original pipeline, together adding up to 1700 new miles. One addition was designed to connect Cushing to oil refineries in Texas, on the Gulf Coast. That section was built and went into operation in January 2017.
The second extension is the one that caused such a fuss. It was to carry crude oil from Alberta to Kansas, traveling through Montana and North Dakota, where it would pick up U.S. crude oil to deliver it to the Gulf Coast of Texas. (This would have had the effect of raising oil prices in the middle of the country.) This leg crossed an international border, and thus the Canadian company building it needed approval from the State Department. The proposed pipeline would threaten water supplies in the Northwest if it leaked, for it would run over a huge aquifer, and the people who lived downstream from the proposed route, including Lakotas and members of other Indigenous tribes, protested the pipeline’s construction.
The Trump administration approved this construction, and the opposition of environmentalists, Indigenous Americans, and Democrats to the pipeline enabled Republicans to turn it into a cultural symbol, suggesting that the opposition of these groups was hobbling the economy. In fact, the company behind the project was Canadian and wanted the extension to shorten transportation routes for its oil. The winners on the American side were the refinery owners; the jobs the project would create were primarily in the construction of the project.
As soon as he took office, Biden halted the construction. But blaming today’s high prices on the cancellation of this spur of the Keystone Pipeline is a resort to that culture war. Even if Biden had not overturned Trump’s approval of the project, it would not be completed yet, and even if it were completed, there is no guarantee that it would have delivered more oil to the U.S., rather than to the ports for export elsewhere. The U.S. exports about half of its oil production to other countries, both because the crude we produce is hard for us to refine and because of the demand for it overseas. The Keystone pipeline was designed for export.
The argument that Biden’s cancellation of new oil drilling leases on public property has driven prices up is similarly misleading. On November 17, 2020, after he lost the election, former president Trump abruptly allowed oil and gas companies to pick out land for drilling rights on about 1.6 million acres of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Biden froze those permits as soon as he took office. Only about 10% of drilling takes place on public land, and there are currently about 9000 permits already issued that have not been developed.
But oil drilling on public land returns huge sums of money to the states in whose boundaries the drilling occurs; at the hearing for the confirmation of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said that his state collects more than a billion dollars a year in royalties and taxes from the oil, gas, and coal produced on federal lands in the state, and warned that the Biden administration’s opposition to oil permits is “taking a sledgehammer to Western states’ economies.”
Oil prices are skyrocketing because of the dislocation of the pandemic, the Russian invasion, and the disinclination of countries to buy from Russia, even though oil sales have not yet been sanctioned.
To combat those prices, the Biden administration asked Saudi Arabia to increase production; the Saudis declined. On Saturday, U.S. officials met Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, who has run a brutal regime, is accused of human rights violations, and is aligned with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Venezuelan oil has been under U.S. sanctions since 2019, and with Russian assets frozen, Maduro needs financial support, while the U.S. and its allies need oil. After Saturday’s talks, the Venezuela government released two of six U.S. citizens from custody, apparently as a gesture of goodwill as talks go forward.
For all the fighting over oil, Biden pointed out today that we have an interest in stopping Putin’s aggression, and that the best way to reduce the price of oil is to shift to renewable energy. “[T]ransforming our economy to run on [electric vehicles], powered by clean energy, will mean that in the future, no one has to worry about gas prices.”
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Yesterday, the Department of Justice indicted Henry “Enrique” Tarrio on a conspiracy charge in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Tarrio is a leader of the far-right extremist Proud Boys, the white supremacists that former president Trump told to stand back and stand by in his September 2020 debate with Joe Biden. Tarrio was not at the Capitol itself on January 6th because a court had ordered him to leave the city the day before after destroying a Black Lives Matter banner at an earlier protest.
The indictment charges that before leaving the city, Tarrio met with Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and others in a parking garage. He also texted with someone who talked about “revolution” and sent a plan called “1776 Returns″ that called for occupying “crucial buildings” in Washington with “as many people as possible.” Tarrio allegedly agreed with the texter and added “ I’m not playing games.”
The indictment of someone who was not physically present at the riot expands the circle of those identified as part of the conspiracy. Violating the law the indictment identifies carries a sentence of up to 20 years.
Also yesterday, the Justice Department prevailed in the first case against a January 6 defendant as a jury unanimously found Guy Reffitt guilty of obstructing an official proceeding. Prosecutors produced what the New York Times called “exhaustive” evidence, illustrating just how extensive their investigations have been.
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has also been busy. It has been engaged in a legal fight with John Eastman, the lawyer who wrote the Eastman memo outlining a plan for then–vice president Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election. Eastman has been fighting desperately to stop the committee from seeing his emails around the time of the insurrection, claiming that they are covered by attorney-client privilege and that former president Trump was his client. But the committee noted that there is no evidence there was such a relationship between the two of them, and that privilege doesn’t hold if it is covering up a crime or fraud.
Each time the court has sided with the committee, Eastman has thrown more sand in the gears to slow down or stop the document review. Today, a federal judge decided he would personally review 111 emails sent between January 4 and January 7, 2021, to see if they should be protected or given to the committee.
Also today, the January 6 committee issued a subpoena to an email fundraising vendor whose ads pushed the lie that the election was stolen. The committee wants to learn more about the ads and how they motivated rioters, as well as “the flow of funds, and whether contributions were actually directed to the purpose indicated.”
Trump advisor Stephen Miller today sued to block the January 6th committee’s November subpoena for his phone records. Miller is on a cell phone plan with his parents and says that the subpoena might pick up the other numbers on the account. He also says it violates his privacy rights because there are personal communications about his wife and newborn daughter.
On March 3, the January 6 committee subpoenaed Kimberly Guilfoyle, the fiancée of Donald Trump, Jr., since she was in “direct contact with key individuals, raised funds for the rally immediately preceding the violent attack on the United States Capitol, and participated in that event.” Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) noted that Guilfoyle had “backed out of her original commitment to provide a voluntary interview.”
Other people involved in the attempt to overturn the election are in more immediate trouble. Tina Peters, the Republican clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, along with her deputy, Belinda Knisley, has been indicted by a Colorado grand jury on a number of charges stemming from the release of confidential information from the county’s election systems. That information apparently got turned over to those “investigating” the election numbers. Peters says she is simply exposing the criminality of voting machine manufacturers and politicians. She is currently running for the office of secretary of state in Colorado.
Trump’s former lawyer Sidney Powell is also in the news, this time because a committee of the State Bar of Texas asked a district court to judge Powell for professional misconduct with regard to overturning the 2020 election and to “determine and impose an appropriate sanction.”
BuzzFeed broke the story tonight that Powell, whose nonprofit has raised significantly more than $15 million, has been paying the legal expenses for members of the Oath Keepers.
Another person pushing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, paradoxically strengthened a lawsuit against the network. Smartmatic, a company that makes voting machines, has sued FNC over the many instances of FNC personalities falsely claiming that the voting machines had been part of a massive voter fraud in 2020. FNC says the lawsuit is “baseless” and an assault upon the First Amendment.
Today, New York Supreme Court Judge David B. Cohen ruled that the case against FNC can go forward because the statements of its personalities were baseless and reckless. One of the key points in the decision was Carlson’s own initial dismissal of Powell’s outrageous claims. Carlson’s repeated demands for proof of her claims and her inability to provide any suggest that FNC knew, or should have known, that Powell was lying.
And yet, for all the mounting evidence that there was a conspiracy surrounding Trump to overturn the will of the voters—the centerpiece of our governmental system—in the 2020 election, key Republicans are doubling down on him.
Trump’s attorney general William Barr has just published a book detailing how Trump lied about the election and threatened democracy. And yet, on a tour to sell the book, Barr on Monday told NBC's Savannah Guthrie that he would nonetheless vote for Trump if he were the Republican nominee in 2024. "Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it's inconceivable to me that I wouldn't vote for the Republican nominee," he said.
This same conviction that Democrats must be stopped at all costs is pushing the drive to destroy democracy by concentrating political power in state legislatures. In a dissent this week, four right-wing Supreme Court justices indicated they support a further step in that concentration, backing a legal argument that state legislatures have ultimate power to determine their own voting procedures, including the selection of presidential electors, regardless of what a majority of voters want.
Under the dressing of new legal terminology, this is, at heart, the old state’s rights argument. If a state’s legislature can determine who gets to vote, a minority can control that legislature and entrench itself in power, passing laws that keep the majority subservient to those in control. It was this very concept Congress overrode in 1868 with the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, saying that no state could deprive a citizen of the equal protection of the laws.
Resurrecting it now would pave the way for a January 6th–type coup through the law, rather than through the plots of a ragtag mess of insurrectionists.
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On June 5, 1944, in his 29th Fireside Chat, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told the American people that Rome had fallen to American and Allied troops the previous day. He used the talk not only to announce this important milestone in the deadly war, but also to remind Americans they were engaged in a war between democracy and fascism. And while fascists insisted their ideology made countries more efficient and able to serve their people, the Allies’ victory in Rome illustrated that the ideology of fascism, which maintained that a few men should rule over the majority of the population, was hollow.
Rome was the seat of fascism, FDR told his listeners, and under that government, “the Italian people were enslaved.” He explained: “In Italy the people had lived so long under the corrupt rule of Mussolini that, in spite of the tinsel at the top—you have seen the pictures of him—their economic condition had grown steadily worse. Our troops have found starvation, malnutrition, disease, a deteriorating education and lowered public health—all by-products of the Fascist misrule.”
FDR continued: “We and the British will do and are doing everything we can to bring them relief. Anticipating the fall of Rome, we made preparations to ship food supplies to the city…we have already begun to save the lives of the men, women and children of Rome…. This, I think, is an example of the magnificent ability and energy of the American people in growing the crops, building the merchant ships, in making and collecting the cargoes, in getting the supplies over thousands of miles of water, and thinking ahead to meet emergencies—all this spells, I think, an amazing efficiency on the part of our armed forces, all the various agencies working with them, and American industry and labor as a whole.”
“No great effort like this can be a hundred percent perfect,” he said, “but the batting average is very, very high.”
That speech highlighting logistics as a key difference between democracy and fascism comes to mind these days as we watch democracy and authoritarianism clash in Ukraine.
A report last month by Washington, D.C., nonprofit Freedom House, which studies democracy, political freedom, and human rights, painted a bleak picture. “Global freedom faces a dire threat,” authors Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz wrote. “Around the world, the enemies of liberal democracy—a form of self-government in which human rights are recognized and every individual is entitled to equal treatment under law—are accelerating their attacks.”
In 2019, Russian president Vladimir Putin told the Financial Times that the ideology of liberalism on which democracy is based has “outlived its purpose.” Multiculturalism, freedom, and human rights must give way to “the culture, traditions, and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core population.”
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has been open about his determination to replace western-style democracy with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy,” ending the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture and rejecting “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.”
According to President Joe Biden, Chinese president Xi Jinping believes that autocracies are “the wave of the future—democracy can’t function in an ever complex world.”
Freedom House documents that for sixteen years, global freedom has declined. Authoritarians are undermining basic liberties, abusing power, and violating human rights, and their growing global influence is shifting global incentives toward autocratic governments and away from democracy, “jeopardizing the consensus that democracy is the only viable path to prosperity and security, while encouraging more authoritarian approaches to governance.” Over the past year, 60 countries became less free, while only 25 improved.
“They're going to write about this point in history," Biden told a group of news anchors in April 2021, shortly after he took office. "Not about any of us in here, but about whether or not democracy can function in the 21st century…. Things are changing so rapidly in the world, in science and technology and a whole range of other issues, that—the question is: In a democracy that's such a genius as ours, can you get consensus in the timeframe that can compete with autocracy?"
The last few weeks have demonstrated the same advantage of democracy over authoritarianism that FDR saw in the fall of Rome. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was supposed to demonstrate the efficient juggernaut of authoritarianism. But Putin’s lightning attack on a neighboring state did not go as planned. Ukrainians have insisted on their right to self-determination, demonstrating the power of democracy with their lives.
At the same time, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown the weakness of modern authoritarianism. Putin expected to overrun a democratic neighbor quickly, but his failure to do so has revealed that his army’s perceived power was FDR’s “tinsel at the top”: lots of bells and whistles but outdated food, a lack of support vehicles, conscripted and confused soldiers, and compromised communications. The corruption inherent in a one-party state of loyalists, unafflicted by oversight, has hollowed out the Russian military, making it unable to feed or supply its troops.
That authoritarian government, it turns out, depended on democracies. As businesses pull out of Russia, the economy has collapsed. The ruble is worth less than a penny, and the Russian stock market remains closed. Today, the Russian economic ministry announced it would take the property of businesses leaving the country. Notably, it claimed the right to take about $10 billion of jets that had been leased to Russian airlines, quite possibly a way to get spare parts for the airplanes the huge country needs and can no longer get.
Putin is trying to prop up his power by insisting his people believe lies: on Friday, he signed a law making it a crime for media to produce any coverage the government says is “false information” about the invasion. He is now pushing the false claim that the U.S. is developing biological weapons in Ukraine, and has requested a meeting of the U.N. Security Council tomorrow to discuss this issue. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby called the story “classic Russian propaganda.”
In contrast, democracies and allies, marshaled into a unified force in large part by Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and the U.S. State Department, have done the boring, complicated, hard work of logistics, diplomacy, and intelligence, a combination that has crushed the Russian economy and is enabling the Ukrainian army to hold off an army 8 times its size. While there is a horrific humanitarian crisis inside Ukraine, those over the borders have managed the extraordinary logistics of processing and moving 2 million refugees from Ukraine in two weeks.
In 1944, FDR pointed out that democratic government was messy but it freed its people to work and think and fight in ways that authoritarian governments could not. In Fireside Chat 29, he warned his listeners not to read too much into the fall of Rome, because fascism had “not yet been driven to the point where [it] will be unable to recommence world conquest a generation hence…. Therefore, the victory still lies some distance ahead." But, he added, "That distance will be covered in due time—have no fear of that."
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If I took a night off last weekend, I don't remember it, and I am tired, tired, tired.
So I'm turning tonight's letter over to my friend Nadia Povalinska, who has recently fled her home in Ukraine, and who has graciously shared her love of her country with me over the years.
I love Nadia's images of Ukraine, and this one especially. It is from before the war, just a few weeks and a lifetime ago.
I'll see you tomorrow.
[Photo by Nadia Povalinska]
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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In our history, the United States has gone through turning points when we have had to adjust our democratic principles to new circumstances. The alternative is to lose those principles to a small group of people who insist that democracy is outdated and must be replaced by a government run by a few leaders or, now, by a single man.
The Declaration of Independence asserted as “self-evident” that all people are created equal and that God and the laws of nature have given them certain fundamental rights. Those include—but are not limited to—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The role of government was to make sure people enjoyed these rights, and thus governments are legitimate only if those they rule consent to that government.
The Founders’ concept that all men were created equal and had a right to consent to the government under which they lived, the heart of the Declaration of Independence, was revolutionary. For all that it excluded Indigenous Americans, Black colonists, and all women, the very idea that men were not born into a certain place in a hierarchy and could create a government that reflected such an idea upended traditional western beliefs.
From the beginning, though, there were plenty of Americans who doubled down on the idea of human hierarchies in which a few superior men should rule the rest. They argued that the Constitution was designed to protect property alone and that as a few men accumulated wealth, they should run things. Permitting those without property to have a say in their government would mean they could demand that the government provide things that might infringe on the rights of property-owners.
These undercurrents have always tossed our republic, but four times in our history, new pressures have brought these two ideas into open conflict. In the 1850s, 1890s, and 1930s and in the present, we have had to fit our democracy to new circumstances.
In the 1850s, the pressures of western expansion forced Americans to figure out what, exactly, they wanted the nation to stand for. Northern states, whose mixed economy needed educated workers, and thus widely shared economic and political power, opposed the hierarchical system of human enslavement. Southern states, whose economy rested on the production of raw materials by enslaved workers, opposed equality. Aside from occasional flare-ups, the two systems had muddled along together for sixty years, despite the reality that the enslavers were shrinking farther and farther into the minority as population in the North boomed.
The U.S. acquisition of western land with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo opened the opportunity for enslavers to address their weakening position by dominating the national government. If they could spread enslavement into the new territories, they could overawe the North in Congress and pass laws to make their system national. As South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond put it: "I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson that ‘all men are born equal.”’
When Congress, under extraordinary pressure from the pro-southern administration, passed the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, overturning the Missouri Compromise and letting slavery spread into the West, northerners of all parties woke up to the looming loss of their democratic government. A railroad lawyer from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, remembered how northerners were “thunderstruck and stunned; 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” to push back against the slaveowning oligarchy. And while they came from different parties, he said, they were “still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
Slavery apologists urged white voters not to worry about Black Americans held in slavery, but Lincoln urged Americans to come together to protect the Declaration of Independence. "I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop?... If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!”
When voters agreed with Lincoln and elected him to the presidency in 1860, southerners tried to create their own nation based on human inequality. As Georgia Senator Alexander Stephens, soon to be the vice president of the Confederacy, explained in March 1861: “Our new government is founded…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.”
In office, Lincoln reached back to the Declaration—written “four score and seven years ago”— and charged Americans to “resolve that…this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The victory of the United States government in the Civil War ended the power of enslavers in the government, but new crises in the future would revive the conflict between the idea of equality and a nation of hierarchies.
In the 1890s, the rise of industrialism led to the concentration of wealth at the top of the economy. Steel baron Andrew Carnegie celebrated the “contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer,” for although industrialization created “castes,” it created “wonderful material development,” and “while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department.” Those at the top were there because of their “special ability,” and anyone seeking a fairer distribution of wealth was a “Socialist or Anarchist…attacking the foundation upon which civilization rests.” Instead, he said, society worked best when a few wealthy men ran the world, for “wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves.”
Once again, people of all political parties came together to reclaim American democracy. Although Democrat Grover Cleveland was the first to complain that “corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters,” it was Republican Theodore Roosevelt who is now popularly associated with the development of a government that regulated the excesses of big business. He complained about that “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” and ushered in the Progressive Era with government regulation of business to protect the ability of individuals to participate in American society as equals.
The rise of a global economy in the twentieth century repeated the pattern. After socialists took control of Russia in 1917, American men of property insisted that any restrictions on their control of resources or the government were a form of “Bolshevism,” but in the 1930s a worldwide depression brought voters of all parties behind President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who used the government to provide a “New Deal for the American people.” His government regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure. Then, after Black and Brown veterans coming home from World War II demanded equality, that New Deal government, under Democratic president Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, worked to end racial and, later, gender hierarchies in American society.
Now, once again, we are at an inflection point. The rise of global oligarchs and the internet, which enables those oligarchs to spread disinformation, has made significant numbers of American voters once again slide away from democracy to embrace the idea that the country would work better with a few leaders making the rules for the rest of us. In nineteen states, Republican-dominated legislatures have passed laws that restrict the vote and entrench minority rule, even up to allowing state legislatures to overturn election results. If that is permitted to stand, that minority can choose our president, and it is increasingly backing one single man, one individual, to rule over the rest of us.
If history is any guide, we are at the point when voters of all parties must push back, to say that we do, in fact, believe in the principles stated in the Declaration of Independence, that all people are created equal, and that our government is legitimate only if we have a say in it.
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Russian president Vladimir Putin has asked China for help in his war against Ukraine, according to U.S. officials. Observers see this as a defining moment for China and the direction it wants to take in the twenty-first century. In what might be a sign of how China will react to that request, the spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said he had never heard of it. "The high priority now is to prevent the tense situation from escalating or even getting out of control,” he said.
Meanwhile, Russian forces struck a military facility in Ukraine about 15 miles from the Polish border. Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and by the terms of the treaty establishing NATO, “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all,” and the parties will retaliate accordingly.
Biden has repeatedly warned that NATO will respond to any attack on a member country, but Russian state TV continues to insist that no NATO country will actually help another. This assertion has observers concerned that Putin might widen the war to involve NATO, which would give him the legitimacy he needs to justify his war of aggression.
Others say that these events indicate weakness and frustration on Putin’s part. As the Russian invasion has gone more slowly than he had apparently anticipated, the Russian military is firing indiscriminately at civilian targets, evidently trying to terrorize the country into submission. But the troops are underfed and undersupplied, and there appear to be too few of them to subdue Ukraine. Ukraine’s Euromaidan Press says that Russia has opened 14 recruitment centers in Syria.
The strike in western Ukraine near the Polish border killed at least 35 people and wounded more than 100. The facility received western arms shipments. National security adviser Jake Sullivan said the strike “does not come as a surprise” but “shows…that Vladimir Putin is frustrated by the fact that his forces are not making the kind of progress that he thought that they would make against major cities including Kyiv, that he’s expanding the number of targets, that he’s lashing out and he’s trying to cause damage in every part of the country.”
Sullivan also said that the U.S. is very concerned that Russia will use chemical weapons. It has falsely accused Ukraine and the U.S. of preparing chemical weapons, which might well be a warning that Putin intends to use them himself.
Putin, of course, has used chemical weapons before, most recently against opposition leader Alexei Navalny. His goons also did so on March 4, 2018, in the U.K, in a poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. That poisoning seemed to be a sign that Putin was confident enough in his power that he was willing to kill someone in England and dare then–prime minister Theresa May to do something about it.
What happened next seemed to illustrate Putin’s growing security in the face of weak U.S. and European resistance. May condemned the attack, as did U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. But May couldn’t do much because Brexit had isolated England and then-president Trump refused to back her. He promptly fired Tillerson, along with one of Tillerson’s deputies who contradicted the White House version of why Tillerson was out. Russian state TV then warned May not to threaten a country armed with nuclear warheads. And, just about then, Republicans in the House exonerated Trump from “colluding” with Russia in the 2016 election, outright rejecting the evidence and findings of our own intelligence community.
There remains a lot to learn not only about why former president Trump allowed such aggression, but also about why members of the Republican Party were willing to look the other way when U.S. policy under Trump benefited Russia—when the U.S. abruptly withdrew from northern Syria in October 2019, for example, or when Trump withheld money appropriated for Ukraine’s defense to pressure Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky into helping him rig the 2020 election.
At least part of the answer to that question is the disinformation campaign launched by Russia to undermine our democracy. False stories in the media have divided us and convinced many people in the U.S. of things that are simply lies.
Former representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) released a video today echoing Russia’s false story of “25 to 30 U.S. funded bio labs in Ukraine,” and demanded a ceasefire to secure them.
Later this afternoon, White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted: "This is preposterous. It's the kind of disinformation operation we've seen repeatedly from the Russians over the years in Ukraine and in other countries, which have been debunked, and an example of the types of false pretexts we have been warning the Russians would invent.” Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) slammed Gabbard for “parroting false Russian propaganda.”
David Corn of Mother Jones today broke another news story: a Russian government agency distributed a 12-page document to media outlets telling them, “It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally….”
The call to feature Carlson is in the section titled “Victory in Information War.”
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Today, Russia continued its offensive against Ukraine, striking hard at civilians in Kyiv and Mariupol. The Russian army is gaining ground, but it appears to be sustaining massive losses of personnel and equipment which, in turn, is making leaders focus on grinding Ukraine into submission through sheer brutality.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky will speak virtually to Congress on Wednesday morning. They said: “The Congress remains unwavering in our commitment to supporting Ukraine as they face [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s cruel and diabolical aggression, and to passing legislation to cripple and isolate the Russian economy as well as deliver humanitarian, security and economic assistance to Ukraine. We look forward to the privilege of welcoming President Zelenskyy’s address to the House and Senate and to convey our support to the people of Ukraine as they bravely defend democracy.”
American focus on the horrors unleashed on Ukraine has clarified our own struggle between democracy and authoritarianism here at home.
In the Freedom House 2022 report on the dire threat to global freedom, released last month, authors Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz noted that “democracies are being harmed from within by illiberal forces, including unscrupulous politicians willing to corrupt and shatter the very institutions that brought them to power.” Their primary example was that of the United States, which “has fallen below its traditional peers on key democratic indicators, including [presidential] elections, freedom from improper political influence, and equal treatment of minority groups.”
Repucci and Slipowitz explained that in the U.S. and elsewhere, “Undemocratic leaders and their supporters… have worked to reshape or manipulate political systems, in part by playing on voters’ fears of change in their way of life…. They have promoted the idea that, once in power, their responsibility is only to their own demographic or partisan base, disregarding other interests and segments of society and warping the institutions in their care so as to prolong their rule. Along the way, the democratic principles of pluralism, equality, and accountability—as well as basic stewardship and public service—have been lost, endangering the rights and well-being of all residents.”
To solidify their hold on power, they have spread distrust in elections, as former president Donald Trump famously did in the 2020 election season even before his loss to Democrat Joe Biden, claiming that he would only lose if there were fraud. National, state, and local officials lined up behind Trump to try to overturn the election results, spreading the Big Lie that Biden’s election was illegitimate. The result was the assault on the U.S. Capitol.
That failed, but those who backed it, as Repucci and Slipowitz note, “continue to exert significant influence on the US political system,” while those “who refused to display loyalty to the former leader faced political marginalization, severe intraparty pressure, and outright threats of violence.” They continue to push the lie that the Democrats stole the 2020 election and must be stopped before the 2022 midterms.
To that end, after Biden took office, 19 states passed 34 laws restricting access to voting, and six states launched illegitimate partisan reviews of election results. The trend continues: according to the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization defending U.S. democracy and justice, as of January 14, 2022, lawmakers in at least 27 states have backed 250 bills with restrictive provisions. The Big Lie has also led to the replacement of nonpartisan election boards with partisans, changing systems in place for decades.
“It is now impossible to ignore the damage to democracy’s foundations and reputation,” Repucci and Slipowitz wrote in February.
But now, Putin’s war on Ukraine has clarified the contest between democracy and authoritarianism even as the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is uncovering just how close we came to our own authoritarian coup.
This confluence is uncomfortable for a number of Republicans, who see Putin’s declared support for traditional values and the implicit white supremacy in that support as part of a global conservative movement they like. Since the 1980s, U.S. evangelicals have embraced Russian Orthodox leaders concerned with the falling birthrate of white people. Since at least 2013, when Putin formally began an attack on LGBTQ rights, sparking outrage in liberal democracies, that embrace has become more widespread. With that attack, Putin claimed he was putting Russia at the forefront of conservative opposition to "genderless and fruitless so-called tolerance" which he said "equals good and evil," goals right-wing Americans applauded.
As Putin has come to represent to them an attack on the secular social norms and civil rights embraced by democracies, Republicans have increasingly openly admired his declared stand for “traditional values.” In 2014, shortly after the Ukrainians rose up and ousted Russian-allied president Viktor Yanukovych, who had been installed with the help of American political operative Paul Manafort, Republicans began to back Putin over then-president Barack Obama. Evangelical leader Franklin Graham praised Putin’s attack on gay rights for protecting children from “the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda,” while Obama and his attorney general “have turned their backs on God and His standards, and many in the Congress are following the administration’s lead. This is shameful.”
Trump’s pressure to shift U.S. foreign policy away from our traditional democratic allies and toward Russia was almost certainly a reflection of the financial benefits of dealing with oligarchs and illicit money, but others undoubtedly were willing to follow because they believed they were defending “traditional values” and children, especially as stories of pedophilia rings flooded the internet.
But now, Putin’s vicious attack on Ukraine has stripped away the unspoken link between “traditional values” and authoritarianism.
Some right-wing leaders nonetheless cannot quit him: Fox News personality Tucker Carlson’s monologues are so supportive of Putin they are being replayed on Russian state television, Representative Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has called Zelensky a thug and says democratic Ukraine is “incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies,” and Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) were part of a conference in which white nationalists cheered on Putin’s attack on Ukraine and chanted his name.
But others recognize that they have been caught on the wrong side of history. According to an Economist/YouGov poll, Americans believe by a margin of 70 to 11 that Putin is committing war crimes. At the same time, the findings of the January 6 committee reveal that the pro-Putin wing of the Republican Party appears to have been willing to overturn our own liberal democracy so long as it could get what it wanted.
A tape today revealed that Cawthorn called into a right-wing talk show on January 6th and said he had brought “multiple weapons” with him that day, suggesting he had known what was planned. Also today, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, appeared to be trying to get ahead of a story about her participation in the events of January 6 when she told her story to the right-wing Free Beacon. It reported: “She did not help organize the White House rally that preceded the riot at the Capitol. She did attend the rally, but got cold and left early. And most importantly, in her view, her involvement with the event has no bearing on the work of her husband, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.”
How will all this play out? Trump’s attorney general William Barr is currently trying to sell his new book on a tour trying to whitewash his own participation in the Big Lie, but while he blamed Trump for trying to overthrow our democracy, he nonetheless suggested he would vote for him if he were the Republican nominee in 2024, “because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party.”
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“I want to thank the Russian Academy for this Lifetime Achievement Award.”
That was former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s response to the news that her name was among those of the people Russia sanctioned today, forbidding their entry into Russia and freezing any Russian assets they might have. Clinton, of course, was the one who warned in 2016 that then-candidate Donald Trump would be “[Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s puppet” if he were elected.
What jumped out about that Russian announcement, though, was that it singled out not American lawmakers in general, but Democrats, and for that matter, Democrats who were targets of the right-wing propaganda machine. So the “sanctions” hit President Joe Biden (or, as White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted, his deceased father, since they missed that the current president is Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.), Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as well as Psaki. They also covered former secretary of state Clinton and Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden, both of whom are private citizens and involved in present-day politics only in that they are targets of the modern right-wing media.
The list made it clear that Putin and his U.S. supporters are engaged in a propaganda campaign.
In contrast, the U.S. extended sanctions today to Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, who turned to Putin to shore up his own waning popularity before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and who is now stuck on Putin’s side. The administration also sanctioned Lukashenko’s wife, Halina, and a number of Russians targeted for human rights abuses, along with 11 military leaders.
That the tide is turning against Putin was indicated today by former president Trump’s new tone on the Russian president today. While it was notable that Trump would never criticize Putin, even after his invasion of Ukraine, tonight Trump told Washington Examiner reporter David M. Drucker, “I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.”
The leaders of Poland, Czechia, and Slovenia thumbed their noses at Putin today when they visited Kyiv itself by train to show their support for Ukraine. They traveled to the city despite ongoing Russian shelling that has taken countless lives, including those of five journalists documenting the atrocities.
Those atrocities convinced the U.S. Senate today to pass a resolution condemning Putin as a war criminal, while a new U.S. funding bill appropriated an additional $13.6 billion in aid to Ukraine.
The attack on democracy at home is not being as clearly condemned.
We are starting to see the effects of Russian money on our own political system. Today, we learned that Russian oligarch Andrey Muraviev has been indicted by a federal grand jury for funneling $1 million in political donations through Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, associates of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, to candidates in the 2018 election. A $50,000 donation apparently went to a political action committee called the “Friends of Ron DeSantis Political Action Committee” in June 2018. After DeSantis won the election, Muraviev and his partner texted congratulatons* to Parnas and Fruman on “victory in Florida.”
Today, the Republican National Committee sued its own email vendor, Salesforce, to try to block it from responding to a subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The committee subpoenaed information about fundraising emails sent by Salesforce, soliciting money by lying that the 2020 election had been stolen. The committee is interested in seeing if any of that money actually went to the causes for which it was solicited, and in following how those emails, with their false, inflammatory messages, encouraged the attack on January 6. The RNC says it is suing “in order to protect the constitutional rights of the Republican Party and its millions of supporters.”
The Freedom to Vote Act would stop the flood of dark money into our elections by requiring the disclosure of the identities of any person or organization donating $10,000 or more to campaign activity. But while the Senate easily passed legislation today to make daylight saving time permanent beginning in 2023 by voice vote, it cannot pass voting rights legislation since all Republicans oppose it. (The daylight savings law will now go to the House.)
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky will speak to Congress tomorrow morning and is expected to ask for more help. Lawmakers have expressed frustration that the Biden administration is not, in their view, moving quickly enough to defend Ukraine, and his speech is expected to increase criticism of the Biden administration.
That criticism is coming primarily from Republican lawmakers who, of course, refused to remove Trump when he withheld support for Ukraine in 2019 in an attempt to get Zelensky to attack Joe Biden, but who are now saying that Biden is not defending Ukraine powerfully enough. Their insistence that the U.S. move unilaterally against Russia plays to our natural sympathies for the suffering country of Ukraine, but it is also a back-door attack on Biden’s extraordinarily successful multilateral approach to Russia’s aggression.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) makes decisions only through consensus. By moving without NATO, the U.S. would undercut NATO and the global consensus that Biden and Secretary of State Blinken have taken incredible care to create and that is now crushing the Russian economy and isolating Putin. The administration’s coalition against Putin is extraordinarily delicately balanced, and that balance will collapse if the U.S. heads off on its own in a resurrection of the unilateral action that the U.S. has embraced for the past forty years.
After Zelensky’s address, Biden is expected to announce another $800 million in security assistance from the U.S. to Ukraine, putting the total at $1 billion in the last week and $2 billion total since Biden took office. Biden announced today he will head to Brussels, Belgium, next week to meet with NATO leaders about Russia’s war on Ukraine. He is expected to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to NATO.
*I deliberately misspelled this word because it was triggering Facebook's usual red boldface for when the word is used.
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Today, Russia’s war on Ukraine gave us a penetrating snapshot of democracy and autocracy.
This morning, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky addressed a joint session of Congress virtually; his speech was live streamed to the American people. Looking tired, he wore a green military tee shirt and was unshaven, sitting next to a large Ukrainian flag, a visual representation of his besieged country.
Speaking from Kyiv, Zelensky emphasized that he and Ukrainians were fighting to be free, to preserve their democracy, and he reminded Americans of our own declared principles.
“Russia has attacked not just us, not just our land, not just our cities. It went on a brutal offensive against our values, basic human values. It threw tanks and planes against our freedom, against our right to live freely in our own country, choosing our own future, against our desire for happiness, against our national dreams, just like the same dreams you have, you Americans.”
He urged Americans to remember our own darkest days, Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and begged for a no-fly zone. Knowing that is unlikely—it would initiate a world war—he asked for planes to protect the skies over Ukraine. He thanked the U.S. and President Joe Biden for their support, but asked for more. In addition to continuing economic sanctions, he called for new institutions and new alliances to respond to provocations more quickly than the world has done for Ukraine.
It is, indeed, unimaginable what destruction Putin has rained down on Ukraine in less than three weeks: just today we learned that Russians deliberately bombed a theater where more than 1000 people, including many children, had taken shelter, apparently revisiting the technique of targeting children and civilians he developed in Chechnya and Syria. Zelensky showed a six-minute video of the destruction in Ukraine, showing how a country that only three weeks ago was full of people just going about their lives has turned into a war zone.
“Peace in your country doesn’t depend anymore only on you and your people,” Zelensky said. “It depends on those next to you and those who are strong. Strong doesn’t mean big. Strong is brave and ready to fight for the life of his citizens and citizens of the world. For human rights, for freedom, for the right to live decently, and to die when your time comes, and not when it’s wanted by someone else, by your neighbor.”
“Today, the Ukrainian people are defending not only Ukraine,” Zelensky said, “we are fighting for the values of Europe and the world, sacrificing our lives in the name of the future. That’s why today the American people are helping not just Ukraine, but Europe and the world to give the planet the life to keep justice in history.” He called attention to how very young he is to be leading the global fight for self-determination, and the extraordinary weight he is bearing. “Now, I am almost 45 years old; today, my age stopped when the hearts of more than 100 children stopped beating. I see no sense in life if it cannot stop the deaths. And this is my main issue as the leader of my people, great Ukrainians.”
“And as the leader of my nation, I am addressing…President Biden, you are the leader of… your great nation. I wish you to be the leader of the world; being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace. Thank you. Glory to Ukraine. Thank you for your support. Thank you.”
In contrast, Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a public speech that Russia specialists saw as the launch of a fascist dictatorship. He continued to defend his invasion of Ukraine and claimed he was in an existential war for his country’s survival. He warned his people that the West was counting on “the so-called fifth column, on national traitors,” to destroy Russia. He identified those people as a culturally weak global elite who did not identify “with our people, not with Russia.” They believe they are better than Russians, he said, and would do anything to keep their lifestyle.
The West, he said, is trying to split Russians and is using that “fifth column” to achieve its goal of destroying Russia. He called for Russians to distinguish true patriots from “scum and traitors”—political opponents and dissidents—and to get rid of the latter like bugs. “I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges.”
Russia specialist Anne Applebaum tweeted: "Putin's call for a ‘self-purification’ of Russian society can have only one intention: To remind Russians of Stalin and his ‘purges.’ He wants them to be haunted by dark, ancestral memories, to remember their grandparents' stories and to be petrified with fear.” Indeed, Russian authorities promptly launched a crackdown against anyone who showed any sympathy for western culture, beginning with a popular lifestyle blogger who had expressed opposition to the war on Instagram.
Putin’s show of force internally may well reflect his weakness externally. The Pentagon estimates conservatively that the Russians have lost a staggering 7000 soldiers in less than three weeks in the invasion of Ukraine, more than the U.S. lost in 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Officials estimate they have an additional 14,000 to 21,000 injured, out of a deployed fighting force of 150,000. Evelyn Farkas, the top Pentagon official for Russia and Ukraine during the Obama administration, told New York Times reporters Helene Cooper, Julian E. Barnes, and Eric Schmitt, “Losses like this affect morale and unit cohesion, especially since these soldiers don’t understand why they’re fighting.”
Meanwhile, sanctions imposed by countries around the world are strangling the Russian economy. Reuters today reported that Russia is “on the brink of its first default on international debt since the Bolshevik revolution [of 1917].” A Russian political scientist tweeted: “I have collected some thoughts on the immediate impact of sanctions on the Russian economy.” The short version: “30 years of economic development thrown into the bin.” “All in all, no other economy in the world has experienced anything like this—extreme de-globalization in a matter of days.”
Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that sanctions would remain until there is no chance that Russia could ever again launch the sort of invasion Putin has launched against Ukraine. The U.S. Departments of Treasury and Justice launched a task force with Australia, Canada, the European Commission, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, and the U.K. to freeze and seize assets of sanctioned oligarchs. The Treasury Department also began today to offer bounties of up to $5 million for information leading to “seizure, restraint, or forfeiture of assets linked to foreign government corruption.”
All but about 40 American companies have pulled out of Russia, according to Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby of Popular Information. Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned business in America, is staying put. Political groups affiliated with right-wing billionaire CEO Charles Koch oppose broad sanctions and have suggested the U.S. should remain neutral in the crisis.
Meanwhile, a deepfake video of Zelensky calling for Ukrainians to surrender to Russia made the rounds on social media today. The false video used artificial intelligence to graft words onto Zelensky’s image.
Tonight, Russia specialist Julia Ioffe told MSNBC: “Every time I’m asked by Americans do Russians really believe this stuff… as if we don’t have the same thing happening here. You have 40% of the American population that was convinced in just one year that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election….”
And, indeed, Trump loyalists like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Fox News personality Tucker Carlson continue to echo Russian talking points to undercut Ukraine’s war effort. Media scholar Eric Boehlert noted that “the anti-democratic, authoritarian bonds are becoming tighter as the Trump movement now turns to the Kremlin for its messaging cues. The overlap is undeniable, and the implications are grave.”
Even more striking was white nationalist Nick Fuentes’s encouragement for people to pray for what he called the brave Russian soldiers fighting to "liberate Ukraine from the Great Satan and from the evil empire in the world, which is the United States." Fuentes is an extremist but not an isolated one; both Greene and Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) spoke at a recent conference he organized (Greene in person; Gosar virtually), and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) took no action to disavow their participation.
After Zelensky spoke today, Biden announced another $800 million in military equipment for Ukraine, including 800 anti-aircraft systems. “What’s at stake here are the principles that the United States and the united nations across the world stand for,” he said. “It’s about freedom. It’s about the right of people to determine their own future.”
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While Russia’s war on Ukraine continues in all its blistering horror, there are glimmerings that suggest Russia’s position in its assault on Ukraine is weakening. A senior U.S. defense official today told reporters that while there is significant fighting going on, the only major military news is that Russia has now launched more than 1000 missiles at Ukraine. Ukraine’s allies are working on supplying Ukraine with long-range air defense systems. The Pentagon also believes the airspace over Ukraine continues to be contested, and tentatively assesses that the morale of Russian soldiers is flagging.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned again today that Russia appears to be considering using chemical weapons and trying to blame the ensuing destruction on Ukraine. Yesterday, President Joe Biden called Putin a war criminal.
Today China, which was allied with Russia when the war began and initially refused to condemn the assault, today declined to co-sponsor a “humanitarian” resolution with Russia at the United Nations. At the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China joined Russia in vetoing resolutions. Then China abstained. Now it is refusing even to co-sponsor a “humanitarian” resolution.
While Chinese state media continues to indicate friendship for Russia, today it showed a video illustrating the story that Russian troops killed people standing in line for bread in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine.
A German newspaper today reported that Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov was on a flight on its way to Beijing, but the plane turned around during the flight and returned to Moscow. President Joe Biden and Chinese president Xi Jinping are scheduled to talk tomorrow for the first time since November after U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan met with top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi for seven hours in Rome on Monday.
China has not abandoned support for Russia, but it does appear to be rethinking its position as the world condemns the invasion and has acted in concert to isolate Russia effectively from the global economy. Today Russia did in fact make a $117 million interest payment on its debt, avoiding—for now—a default on its debt. For all Putin’s talk of not needing the international financial system, in the end, he chose to honor the debt, and in dollars rather than in the badly devalued rubles he had threatened.
Pieces continue to move elsewhere in the world, too. Uzbekistan today became the first Central Asian country to openly support the territorial integrity of Ukraine and condemn Russia’s "military actions and aggression." The Council of Europe, a human rights organization founded in 1949 and consisting of more than 45 member states, yesterday expelled Russia.
It appears that Putin is reacting to the crisis he has launched by turning on some of his key advisors, including military chief General Roman Gavrilov. Former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul reacted to this news: “Putin looks like a panicked leader these days, hardly the smart, strong, savvy leader that others assumed he was.”
Today, the Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs Task Force, known as REPO, issued a joint statement committing to “prioritizing our resources and working together to take all available legal steps to find, restrain, freeze, seize, and, where appropriate, confiscate or forfeit the assets of those individuals and entities that have been sanctioned in connection with Russia’s premeditated, unjust, and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and the continuing aggression of the Russian regime.”
REPO includes Australia, Canada, the European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S.
While a crackdown on illicit money should squeeze oligarchs, it also has the potential to alter our domestic politics. Recent reports show that politics in the U.K. has been awash in Russian money, and it seems likely that such cash has influenced the U.S. as well. This crackdown, along with new regulations about transparency in shell companies, might affect campaign finance.
The Freedom to Vote Act rejected by the Senate this year would have addressed this issue more effectively; it required any person or entity donating more than $10,000 to a campaign be identified. It would also have protected against the voter suppression laws passed last year in 19 Republican-dominated states, which the Texas primary revealed to be as discriminatory as opponents feared: about 13% of mail-in ballots, 23,000 of them, were rejected in a state that in the past rejected about 1%. Officials in counties that lean Democratic rejected mail-in ballots at a higher rate than officials in counties that lean Republican: 15.1% to 9.1%.
Today, the House of Representatives voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus, permitting the administration to raise tariffs against them. The measure passed by a vote of 424 to 8. The eight votes against the measure came from Republican members Andy Biggs (AZ), Dan Bishop (NC), Lauren Boebert (CO), Matt Gaetz (FL), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), Glenn Grothman (WI), Thomas Massie (KY), and Chip Roy (TX), all staunch Trump supporters.
Meanwhile, the support of certain U.S. lawmakers for Russia in this crisis has been a boon to the Russian president. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is openly pushing Russian talking points, claiming that NATO is supporting Nazis in Ukraine. Russian state TV is replaying Representative Madison Cawthorn’s (R-NC) remarks calling President Zelensky a “thug.”
Today’s other big news came from The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell: the report alleging that Trump lost the 2020 election because of Dominion Voting Systems—a report that Trump used to justify his attempt to overturn the election, including a plan to assume emergency powers—was not written by a volunteer lawyer after the election, as previously understood. In fact, it was written by a senior White House aide, Joanna Miller, who worked for key Trump advisor Peter Navarro. Navarro incorporated the Miller report into one of his own, which he and aides had begun to write two weeks before the election even happened.
That is, it was the White House itself that invented the “report” that the election was stolen, even before the election took place, and then used that report to justify the Big Lie that 19 state legislatures have relied on to restrict voting.
Ukraine’s people are trying to save their democracy from a criminal assault by an autocrat who has perverted his own country’s government, concentrating the nation’s wealth and power in the hands of his cronies, and silencing those who want a say in their government.
That fight is not limited to Ukraine.
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This morning, President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping spoke about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, speaking personally for the first time since last November. In early February, before the invasion, Xi and Russian president Vladimir Putin met and issued a 5000-word statement pledging limitless “friendship.” But it is not clear Xi expected either the invasion or how badly it would go for Russia, as Ukraine has held its own against a military eight times its size and as countries across the globe have isolated Russia.
The White House readout of the call indicated that Biden explained the position of the U.S., and “described the implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians.” Xi called for a diplomatic solution and Biden agreed, but it is clear the two leaders mean very different things from that understanding: Xi blames the U.S. for supplying Ukraine with lethal weapons; the U.S. hopes for help putting pressure on Putin.
It does not appear that Xi indicated what China intended to do, and later in the day, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said it is a “concern” that China might provide military or financial support to Russia. Still, Xi is facing a historic election in October, and there is little indication that tying China to Russia right now would help his political position. Certainly, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, who has relied on Russian support, appears now to be rethinking that reliance and is reaching out to rebuild former alliances. He has just visited the United Arab Emirates for the first time since 2011, when the Syrian war broke out.
Today’s update from the Pentagon did not suggest that Russia is winning its war of aggression. It began: “This is Day 23 of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Russians remain largely stalled across the country.”
Russia’s ambassador to Bosnia and Herzegovina warned that Russia could treat that Balkan country the same way it is treating Ukraine if Bosnia and Herzegovina decides to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The immediacy of the hot war in Ukraine has driven some important issues out of the news.
First, the war has affected not only Ukraine’s people and infrastructure, but also its ability to produce wheat, corn, and sunflower oil. Before the war, Ukraine was the world’s second biggest exporter of grains and biggest exporter of sunflower oil. It provided over half of the corn imports to the European Union, about a fifth of its soft wheat, and almost a quarter of its vegetable oil. (Soft wheat has less protein—gluten—than hard wheat, corn feeds Europe’s animals, and sunflower oil is in processed foods, including baby food, where it is hard to replace.)
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has urged farmers to plant as much as they possibly can, but Russians are moving into valuable farming land and killing farmers. Supply chains for fertilizer and animal feed are breaking down, causing prices to skyrocket just at planting season; roads and bridges are bombed out; and ships cannot leave ports in the Black Sea, meaning they cannot transport crops. Food prices in Europe are almost certainly going to spike this year.
More immediately, millions of the world’s poorest people, who are dependent on Ukrainian grains, are going to suffer. Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, and Turkey all depend on wheat from Ukraine. A disruption in grain supplies will send those countries into the market, driving up prices globally, especially as countries with their own grain slap controls on grain exports to make sure their people have enough. That will hurt the world’s least food-secure countries, like Bangladesh and Yemen. The U.N. World Food Programme has predicted 2022 will be “a year of catastrophic hunger.”
Second, here in the U.S., Biden’s nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, announced on February 25, has been proceeding as Jackson meets with senators who will cast votes on her confirmation. The American Bar Association today rated Jackson, a 51-year-old graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School with an impressive career history including service as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, “well qualified” to serve on the court. This is its highest rating.
Republicans are opposing Jackson on the grounds that she has been easy on sex offenders who hurt children. This is easy to debunk—in fact, Jackson’s sentences were consistent with those of other judges—but it is enormously telling, since calling opponents sex predators is a common theme in today’s global right-wing movement as oligarchs or autocrats try to solidify their power by mobilizing an angry voter base.
In 2013, Putin shored up his waning popularity by passing legislation that banned allowing children to see “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations,” launching an attack on LGBTQ Russians. He said that Russia would defend “traditional” values against an assault of “genderless and fruitless so-called tolerance" that he said "equals good and evil.” He equated modern liberal democracies, with their defense of the rights of all, with pedophilia.
American evangelicals embraced that connection. Franklin Graham wrote: “In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues…. [H]e has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.” Since then, those opposed to modern liberal democracy have doubled down on the idea that they are opposing pedophilia, circulating stories about an underage sex ring in a Washington D.C., pizza parlor, for example.
That smear of liberal democracy with the stain of pedophilia covers over the destruction of democracy and covers up the concentration of power into the hands of a favored few. While Republicans are hinting that the well-respected Judge Jackson is soft on sex criminals, they are working to gather power into their own hands.
The third story that has flown under the radar is that the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Florida senator Rick Scott, has provided a blueprint for what the Republicans will do if they get a majority in the next election. In “An 11-point plan to rescue America,” produced by the group responsible for electing Republican senators, Scott promised that the Republicans “will protect, defend, and promote the American Family at all costs.” The plan continues: “The nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated. To say otherwise is to deny science. The fanatical left seeks to devalue and redefine the traditional family, as they undermine parents and attempt to replace them with government programs. We will not allow Socialism to place the needs of the state ahead of the family.”
The plan promises that children will say the Pledge of Allegiance and “learn that America is a great country,” they will not learn critical race theory, and discussion of race will be banned from American society. The country will build former president Trump’s border wall and name it after him.
To protect the family, the Republican plan calls for destroying the business regulation, social safety net, federal promotion of infrastructure, and protection of civil rights that Americans have embraced since the 1930s and handing power over to the wealthy. It promises to “grow America’s economy, starve Washington’s economy, and stop socialism,” by which Republicans mean not international socialism in which the government owns the means of production—factories—for that is not on the table in the U.S. Instead, they mean a system in which voters can create a government that regulates business and uses tax dollars to provide services for all Americans.
Republicans, the plan says, will dramatically increase taxes on Americans earning less than $100,000, raising $1 trillion over ten years, although since they will also cut the Internal Revenue Service by 50%, the government might be hard pressed to collect those taxes. Since “government should not be doing anything that the private sector can do better and cheaper,” they will make sure all laws expire after five years, ending them with the idea that Congress will simply repass good laws. They would end Social Security (which, by the way, protects children as well as the elderly and disabled), Medicare, Medicaid, and so on. They will sell off all “non-essential” government assets, buildings, and land (are national parks essential?) and cut funding to states “other than disaster relief.”
This plan is “easily the most radical document put forward by a member of the leadership of a major political party in modern times,” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote.
“Americans deserve to know what we will do,” Scott said in his introduction to the plan.
Indeed, we do.
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Sure, sign me up. Good fucking lord you know Senator Scott tissue on my shoe’s plan resonates with those deplorables, err I mean, mainstream repub voters.
Good luck ‘Murica. In the infamous words of Mr. T, “I pity da fool.”
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Buddy is watching a classic movie involving old Boston and gangsters (with very long hair and lovely cars– I’m guessing the 1970s?) and I was intending to write a philosophical letter tonight about presidential patterns during inflection moments.
But about the time I sat down to write, my friend Peter sent me this image, offering me calm “in the midst of the current maelstrom(s),” and it suddenly hit me that I am very tired, and then it hit me that I can’t be the only one who is finding it exhausting to digest all the news these days.
Let’s take the night off, and regroup tomorrow with fresh energy and resolve.
[Photo Indian Morning Snow, by Peter Ralston. It's from last week's March snow, and is named for the island at the mouth of the harbor.]
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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Tomorrow, the Senate will begin confirmation hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, nominated by President Joe Biden on February 25, 2022, to take a seat on the Supreme Court of the United States. Judge Jackson is currently a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. This small circuit is prominent and prestigious because its location in Washington, D.C., means that it decides cases concerning the U.S. government. It is often seen as a stepping stone to the Supreme Court. Three current members of the court—Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Clarence Thomas, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh—served previously as judges on the D.C. Circuit.
Judge Jackson has a wide range of experience, having both worked in private practice at corporate firms and served as a public defender, during which time she defended detainees at Guantanamo Bay. After earning her degrees from Harvard University and Harvard Law School, where she was a supervising editor on the prestigious Harvard Law Review, she served as a law clerk for three judges, including Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court, whose seat she has been nominated to fill.
Today, reporters are focusing on how she might decide on cases relating to hot-button issues like abortion and gun rights. But what is at stake with our current Supreme Court is far broader than the question of how a justice will vote on any one issue: it is whether the federal government can protect the rights of citizens from state laws taking away those rights.
This question comes from the 1940s. In the wake of World War II, the gap between America’s stated democratic principles and the abusive treatment of racial minorities and women, especially in the southern states, was so glaring that pressure built to reinforce the idea that our laws should apply to everyone equally. Media-grabbing stories, like that of the sheriff who was acquitted by an all-white jury after putting out the eyes of Black veteran Issac Woodard, made the United States look far more like Nazi Germany than Americans liked.
But the laws necessary to protect Black and Brown Americans, including returning veterans, could not pass Congress because of the resistance of segregationist Democrats. So, under the guidance of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the former Republican governor of California, the Supreme Court began to protect Black Americans from abuse by using the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states.
The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868 as former Confederates in charge of state legislatures passed laws relegating formerly enslaved Americans to a state of second-class citizenship. The amendment addressed that legal establishment of racial hierarchies by stating, “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.” The amendment gave Congress the power to enforce the amendment “by appropriate legislation.”
In the 1950s, the Supreme Court based civil rights decisions on the Fourteenth Amendment, and it continued that trajectory in the 1960s and 1970s. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut decision protecting the right of married couples to contraception, the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision permitting interracial marriage, and the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting a woman’s right to abortion without excessive government regulation all come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
But opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. These opponents began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level.
Those who embraced this literal version of the Constitution called themselves “originalists” or “textualists,” and their intellectual representative was Justice Antonin Scalia, whom President Ronald Reagan appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986. The following year, six Republicans joined Democrats to reject extremist Robert Bork, who had openly called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions.
At the time, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) warned that “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”
Kennedy’s words then seemed outlandish, but now, thanks to the three Supreme Court appointments by former president Donald Trump, six of the nine members of the court are originalists. They have indicated their willingness to permit state legislatures to act as they wish, overturning constitutional rights like abortion, outlawing “divisive” instruction in our classrooms, and suppressing the vote of minority voters.
Justice Stephen Breyer, under whom Jackson clerked, offered a new intellectual counterpoint to originalism that sought to move beyond the political lines of the post-Reagan era. He explained that we should approach constitutional questions by starting at the beginning: what did the Framers intend for the Constitution to do? Their central goal was not simply to protect liberties like free speech or gun ownership, he argued; their goal was to promote democracy. All court decisions, he said, should take into consideration what conclusion would best promote democracy.
The conviction that the point of the Constitution was to promote democracy meant that Breyer thought that the law should change based on what voters wanted, so long as the majority did not abuse the minority. Every decision was complicated, he told an audience in 2005—if the outcome were obvious, the Supreme Court wouldn’t take the case. But at the end of the day, justices should throw their weight behind whichever decision was more likely to promote democracy.
It is notable that in her decisions, Judge Jackson has argued for this approach, repeatedly focusing on democracy and the rules that preserve it. In her 118–page decision in Committee on the Judiciary v. McGahn (2019) concerning whether Congress could compel members of the executive branch to testify, she famously wrote: “Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.”
Her conclusion began: “The United States of America has a government of laws and not of men.”
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Today is the anniversary of Georgia Senator Alexander Stephens’s Cornerstone Speech, given in 1861 just after he became the provisional vice president of the Confederacy. All these years later, the themes of that speech are still with us.
Stephens spoke in Savannah, Georgia, to explain the difference between the United States and the fledgling Confederacy. That difference, he said, was slavery. The American Constitution was defective because it based the government on the principle that all men were created equal. Confederate leaders had corrected the Founding Fathers’ error by basing the Confederate government on the idea that some people were better than others.
In contrast to the government the Founding Fathers had created, the Confederacy rested on 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.”
Their determination to promote their new philosophy meant that the southern states insisted on states’ rights. The majority of Americans, speaking through the federal government, insisted on reining enslavement in, restricting it to the southern states where it already existed, while southern enslavers wanted to expand their “peculiar institution” to the nation’s newly acquired western lands. In white southerners’ view, federal oversight was tyranny, and true democracy meant that state legislatures should be able to do as their voters wished.
So long as a majority of voters in the southern states voted for human enslavement, democracy had been served. Those same states, of course, limited voting to a few wealthy white men.
The Republican Party had organized in the mid-1850s to stand against this version of American democracy. Those who joined the new party recognized that if enslavers were able to take control of new western states, they would use their votes in Congress and in the Electoral College to take over the federal government and make slavery national.
The government, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln warned, could not “endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided,” he told an audience in June 1858. “It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.”
For his part, Lincoln insisted on basing the nation on the idea that “all men are created equal,” as the Founders stated—however hypocritically—in the Declaration of Independence. I should like to know,” Lincoln said in July 1858, “if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop…. If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it!”
Less than a month after Stephens gave the Cornerstone Speech, the Confederates fired on a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the Civil War began. When it ended, almost exactly four years later, southern state legislatures again tried to circumscribe the lives of the Black Americans who lived within their state lines. The 1865 Black Codes said that Black people couldn’t own firearms, for example, or congregate. They had to treat their white neighbors with deference and were required to sign yearlong work contracts every January or be judged vagrants, punishable by arrest and imprisonment. White employers could get them out of jail by paying their fines, but then they would have to work off their debt.
To make the principle that all men are created equal and entitled to equality before the law a reality, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and sent it off to the states for ratification. The states added it to the Constitution in 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed that “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’s quite a sentence. It guarantees that no state can discriminate against any of its citizens. And then the amendment goes on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
This is what is at stake today, both in the Senate hearings on the confirmation of the Honorable Ketanji Brown Jackson, and more generally. Is our democratic system served so long as state legislatures can do what they wish without federal interference? Or should the federal government protect equality among all its citizens?
Ideally, of course, states would write fair laws without federal interference, and to create those circumstances after the Civil War, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, permitting Black men to vote, and then passed and sent off to the states for ratification the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing the right to vote to Black men. When the Fifteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1870, the system had been fixed, most American men believed: the right to vote should protect all interests in the states.
Quickly, though, southern states took away the vote of the Black voters they insisted were trying to redistribute wealth from hardworking white taxpayers into public works projects to benefit the states’ poorer inhabitants. With Black voters cut out of the system, state legislatures enacted harshly discriminatory laws, and law enforcement looked the other way when white people violated the rights of Black and Brown citizens.
After World War II, the Supreme Court used the due process and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to overrule state laws that favored certain citizens over others, and Congress passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act to give Black and Brown Americans a say in the state governments under which they lived.
Now, the Republicans, at this point to a person, are echoing the pre–Civil War Democrats to say that democracy means that states should be able to do what they wish without interference from the federal government. So, for example, Texas—and now other states—should be able to ban abortion regardless of the fact that abortion is a constitutional right. States should be able to stop public school teachers from covering certain “divisive” topics: Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) asked an apparently nonplussed Judge Jackson, “Is it your personal hidden agenda to incorporate Critical Race Theory into our legal system?” And states should be able to restrict the vote, much as southern states did after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and as 19 Republican-dominated states have done since the 2020 election.
Members of the new Republican Party in the 1850s recognized that, in that era, the doctrine of states’ rights meant not only the continued enslavement of Black Americans in the South, but also the spread of enslavement across the nation as southern enslavers moved west to create new states that would overawe the free states in Congress and the Electoral College. The spread of their system was exactly what Stephens called for 161 years ago today.
Now, in 2022, as Republican-dominated states lock down into one-party systems, their electoral votes threaten to give them the presidency in 2024 regardless of what a majority of Americans want. At that point, the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection before the law will be vitally important, if only the Supreme Court will enforce it.
And that’s a key reason why, 161 years to the day after enslaver Alexander Stephens gave the Cornerstone Speech, the confirmation hearing of a Black woman, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the Supreme Court matters.
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Right on cue, Republican Senator Mike Braun of Indiana today told a reporter that states not only should decide the issue of abortion but should also be able to decide the issues of whether interracial marriage should be legal and whether couples should have access to contraception. He told a reporter: “Well, you can list a whole host of issues, when it comes down to whatever they are, I’m going to say that they’re not going to all make you happy within a given state, but we’re better off having states manifest their points of view rather than homogenizing it across the country as Roe v. Wade did.”
After an extraordinary backlash to his statements, Braun walked back what he had said, claiming he had misunderstood the question. “Earlier during a virtual press conference I misunderstood a line of questioning that ended up being about interracial marriage, let me be clear on that issue—there is no question the Constitution prohibits discrimination of any kind based on race, that is not something that is even up for debate, and I condemn racism in any form, at all levels and by any states, entities, or individuals,” he said.
But he had stated his position quite clearly, and as he originally stated it, that position was intellectually consistent.
After World War II, the Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights in the states, imposing the government’s interest in protecting equality to overrule discriminatory legislation by the states.
Now, Republicans want to return power to the states, where those who are allowed to vote can impose discriminatory laws on minorities.
Senator Braun is correct: it is not possible to overrule the Supreme Court’s use of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights on just one issue. If you are going to say that the states should be able to do as they wish without the federal government protecting civil rights on, say, the issue of abortion, you must entertain the principle that the entire body of decisions in which the federal government protects civil rights, beginning with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending segregation in the public schools, is illegitimate.
And that is off-the-charts huge.
It is, quite literally, the same argument that gave us the claimed right of states to enslave people within their borders before the Civil War, even as a majority of Americans objected to that system. More recently, it is the argument that made birth control illegal in many states, a restriction that endangered women’s lives and hampered their ability to participate in the workforce as unplanned pregnancies enabled employers to discriminate against them. It is the argument that prohibits abortion and gay marriage; in many states, laws with those restrictions are still on the books and will take effect just as soon as the Supreme Court decisions of Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges are overturned.
Braun’s willingness to abandon the right of Americans to marry across racial lines was pointed, since Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose confirmation hearing for her elevation to the Supreme Court is currently underway in the Senate, is Black and her husband is non-Black. The world Braun described would permit states to declare their 26-year marriage illegal, as it would have been in many states before the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision declared that states could not prohibit interracial marriages. This would also be a problem for sitting justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni.
But it is not just Braun talking about rolling back civil rights. This week, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has challenged the Griswold v. Connecticut decision legalizing contraception, and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) has questioned Obergefell.
Seventy percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. In 2012—the most recent poll I can find—89% of Americans thought birth control was morally acceptable, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that as of 2008, 99% of sexually active American women use birth control in their lifetimes. And even the right to abortion, that issue that has burned in American politics since 1972 when President Richard Nixon began to use it to attract Democratic Catholics to the Republican ticket, remains popular. According to a 2021 Pew poll, 59% of Americans believe it should be legal in most or all cases.
A full decade ago, in April 2012, respected scholars Thomas Mann, of the Brookings Institution, and Norm Ornstein, of the American Enterprise Institute, crunched the numbers and concluded: “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream,” they wrote, “it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
And yet, in the last decade, the party has moved even further to the right. Now it is not only calling for an end to the civil rights protections that undergird modern America, but also lining up behind a leader who tried to overthrow our democracy. A column by Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post yesterday was titled: “Fringe Republicans are not the problem. It’s the party’s mainstream.”
Rubin points out that Republicans refused to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol, refused to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act (which as recently as 2006 enjoyed overwhelming bipartisan support), and refused to impeach Trump for an attempt to overthrow our democracy. The party brought us to the brink of defaulting on the debt, and it tolerates white nationalists in its ranks.
At the state level, prominent Republicans spread covid disinformation, suppress voting, and harass LGBTQ young people. To end abortion, certain Republican-dominated states are offering bounties to anyone reporting women seeking abortions beyond six weeks in a pregnancy. Worse, Rubin notes, “a law in Idaho would force rape victims to endure nine months of pregnancy—while allowing their rapists to collect a bounty for turning them in if they seek an abortion.”
The confirmation hearings this week for the elevation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court have illustrated that Republican lawmakers are far more interested in creating sound bites for right-wing media and reelection campaigns than in governing. Led by Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Republicans have tried to label Judge Jackson as soft on child pornographers, a smear that has been thoroughly discredited by, among others, the conservative National Review, which called it “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” Their attacks, though, will play well to their base on social media.
Similarly, Cruz made a big play of accusing Jackson of pushing Critical Race Theory in a private school on whose board she sits. “Do you agree…that babies are racist?” he asked, sitting in front of a poster with blown-up images from a book by African American studies scholar Ibram X. Kendi that the school has in its library.
On Twitter, the Republican National Committee cut right to the chase, showing a picture of Judge Jackson under her initials, which were crossed out and replaced with “CRT.”
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