Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat

  March 23, 2022 (Wednesday)

“O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land where every man is free.”

Langston Hughes wrote these words in a poem published in 1936. He wrote as the Dust Bowl baked in the heat, Louisiana senator Huey Long died by gunfire, the Supreme Court invalidated much of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, a serial killer terrorized Cleveland, workers finished Hoover Dam, the Depression dragged on, and Black and Brown Americans fell even farther behind their white neighbors.

Today, at the Senate confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) recited some of Hughes’s poem, and the choppy era in which we are living made Hughes’s words apt.

Russia’s war on Ukraine is four weeks old. The State Department announced today that “the U.S. government assesses that members of Russia’s forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine” and that the government is committed to bringing the perpetrators to account. President Joe Biden today flew to Brussels, where he will meet tomorrow with leaders of the 29 other NATO nations to discuss the conflict. Biden is expected to unveil a plan to replace the Russian oil and gas cut off by sanctions with supplies from the U.S., helping Europe to avoid a crisis even as the U.S. imposes still harsher sanctions on Russia. The meeting is also expected to discuss contingency plans in case Russian president Vladimir Putin deploys chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

At home, former president Trump is in the news.

The New York Times today published the resignation letter of former prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, who quit his job after the new Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, stopped the process of seeking an indictment against the former president. In his letter, Pomerantz wrote, “I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the Penal Law in connection with the preparation and use of his annual Statements of Financial Condition. His financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people. The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes—he did.”

Pomerantz suggested that Bragg stopped the forward motion of the case out of concern about “the legal and factual sufficiency of our case and the likelihood that a prosecution would succeed.” Pomerantz countered that “a failure to prosecute will pose much greater risks in terms of public confidence in the fair administration of justice.”

Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has been under investigation in North Carolina for claiming a false residence for purposes of voting, a deception that might constitute voter fraud. News broke today that his wife, Debra Meadows, filled out two official forms claiming the couple lives in a trailer in rural North Carolina, although they actually live in a condo in Old Town Alexandria in Virginia. One of the forms she signed reads: “Fraudulently or falsely completing this form” is a Class I felony.

Paul Manafort, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and a convicted felon, was taken off a plane in Miami because his passport had been revoked. The plane was headed for Dubai.

Today, Trump withdrew his endorsement of Alabama Representative Mo Brooks, such a staunch supporter he spoke at the January 6 rally at the Ellipse, for suggesting that the party needs to move on past the rehashing of the 2020 election. Brooks has been trailing in the polls.

After Trump’s announcement, Brooks said that Trump had “asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency,” all of which would have been an illegal attempt to overturn the legitimate results of the election. Brooks said Trump was pushing this plan as late as September 2021.

Today, at the third day of the Senate confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, Trump Republicans turned in a performance for right-wing media, expressing outrage over their manufactured concern that certain of Judge Jackson’s sentences for child pornography were too short and that she is a secret warrior for Critical Race Theory in the schools.

This is such a transparent reach for base votes that will score an interview on right-wing media that immediately after Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) spoke about Critical Race Theory, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) said, "I think we should recognize that the jackassery we often see around here is partly because of people mugging for short-term camera opportunities." Sasse’s point was borne out when a camera then apparently caught Cruz checking Twitter for his own name.

Certain Republican senators badgered and bullied Jackson, who could not fight back without endangering her chances of confirmation. It was an abusive dynamic that spoke ill of the process and of the senators themselves: the abusive Republicans, but also the many Democrats who, as legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick pointed out, did little to remind viewers that the Republicans have stacked the court with extremists who are poised to take away our fundamental rights, and instead just let the Republicans beat up on Jackson.

Tonight Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) illustrated the profound difference between Jackson, who demonstrated a profound understanding of our founding documents and our legal system, and those browbeating her when she tweeted: “The Constitution grants us rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—not abortions.”

It is, of course, not the U.S. Constitution but the Declaration of Independence that declares: “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It goes on to say “[t]hat to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”  

Senator Booker, though, pushed back against the Republicans as Jackson could not. In an impassioned speech, quoting Langston Hughes’s vow that “America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath—America will be!” Booker said “There is a love in this country that is extraordinary.”

He spoke of Jackson’s parents and how they “didn’t stop loving this country even though this country didn’t love them back.” Jackson has talked of how the life of civil rights attorney Constance Baker Motley inspired her; Booker said: “Did she become bitter” when no one would hire her after law school? “Did she try to create a revolution? No, she used the very Constitution of this nation. She loved it so much she wanted America to be America….”

“That is the story of how you got to this desk,” he told Jackson. “You and I and everyone here: generations of folk who came here and said, ‘America, I’m Irish. You may say no Irish or dogs need apply, but I’m going to show this country that I can be free here. I can make this country love me as much as I love it.’ Chinese Americans forced into mere slave labor building our railroads connecting our country saw the ugliest of America, but they were going to build their home here and say, ‘America, you may not love me yet, but I’m going to make this nation live up to its promise and hope.’ LGBTQ Americans from Stonewall women to Seneca…. All of these people loved America.”

“And so you faced insults here that were shocking to me—well, actually not shocking. But you are here because of that kind of love.”

Finally, today brought the passing of Madeleine K. Albright, whose parents were Czech refugees from the Nazis and the Communists, at 84. Albright served the United States as a diplomat and then as Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, the first woman to serve in that role. Her most recent op-ed, published by the New York Times just a month ago, illustrated just how deeply she still engaged with the nation’s interests. She warned that invading Ukraine “would ensure Mr. Putin’s infamy by leaving his country diplomatically isolated, economically crippled and strategically vulnerable in the face of a stronger, more united Western alliance.”

Her extraordinary career was a fitting backdrop today to Booker’s illumination of Judge Jackson. “The act of striving,” Albright once said, “is in itself the only way to keep faith with life.”

mickeyrat

 March 24, 2022 (Thursday)

“We are very pleased, dear President, dear Joe, to welcome you again in Brussels,” European Council president Charles Michel of Belgium told President Joe Biden today. “Your presence here and your participation in this European Council meeting is a very strong signal.”
 
The European Council is made up of the heads of states of the European Union states, along with the President of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. “Our unity is rock solid, and we are very, very pleased to coordinate, to cooperate with you. These are difficult times, challenging times, and we need to take the right and the intelligent decisions for the future and for the security, for the stability,” Michel said.
 
“And thank you for this excellent cooperation and coordination,” he concluded.

Michel was referring to the joint statement made today by Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, of Germany, condemning Russia’s “unjustified and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine,” which is now four weeks old. They declared that “we are united in our resolve to defend our shared values, including democracy, respect for human rights, global peace and stability, and the rules-based international order.”

They announced more sanctions—the U.S. announced sanctions on more than 400 additional individuals and entities today—as well as $1 billion in humanitarian aid from the U.S. for Ukraine in addition to the more than $2 billion in military equipment the U.S. has pledged. They announced cooperation to reduce dependence on Russian oil and gas, a focus on food security to prevent food shortages as Russian and Ukrainian grain production slows, and additional cybersecurity. To help resettlement, the U.S. has agreed to take up to 100,000 Ukrainians fleeing their homes.

They also announced joint efforts to strengthen democracies in and around Ukraine. The U.S. will launch the European Democratic Resilience Initiative (EDRI) to provide at least $320 million in new funding to “support media freedom and counter disinformation, benefit the safety and security of activists and vulnerable groups, strengthen institutions and the region’s rule of law, and help ensure accountability for human rights abuses and violations of international law.” The European Commission will “reallocate funds from EU programmes to support civil society organizations, human rights defenders, journalists, and pro-democracy activists in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova,” in addition to providing emergency grants to save civic activism and open media in Ukraine. The statement also demanded accountability for any war crimes Russians commit in Ukraine.

Biden responded to Michel by reiterating that “from the very beginning, I was of the view: The single most important thing that we have to do in the West is be united.” Russian president Vladimir Putin’s overwhelming objective, Biden said, “is to demonstrate that democracies cannot function in the 21st century—because things are moving so rapidly, they require consensus, and it’s too difficult to get consensus—and autocracies are going to rule.” Putin has tried for years to break up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), so he could face 30 individual countries rather than one united front. The single most important thing we can do is to be united.   

That impressive unity abroad has not translated to the United States.

Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson continues to promote pro-Russian, anti-Biden propaganda. Today the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed that Biden’s son Hunter’s foundation had financed biological labs in Ukraine (which earlier propaganda said were developing biological weapons); less than 12 hours later, Carlson made the same claim.

More explosively, tonight Bob Woodward of the Washington Post and Robert Costa of CBS broke the story that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia, a right-wing activist who goes by the name Ginni, exchanged at least 29 texts with Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows about the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, 21 from her, 8 from Meadows.

The messages were among the 2320 messages Meadows provided to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol; the aides and committee members to whom Woodward and Costa spoke indicated their belief that there were more messages between Ms. Thomas and Meadows than just the 29.

The messages show that Ms. Thomas bought into the conspiracy theories that the election was stolen, including the extreme theories pushed by QAnon. “Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!” she urged Meadows on November 10, after the results were in. “The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.” (Biden won the election by more than 7 million votes, and by a vote of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College.) On November 24, Meadows wrote, “This is a fight of good versus evil…. Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues….”

In January 2022, Ms. Thomas’s husband, Justice Thomas, was the only member of the Supreme Court to vote against permitting the January 6 committee to see a different cache of documents concerning the fight to overturn the election. Trump had claimed executive privilege over documents stored as part of the presidential records archive at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); by a vote of 8 to 1, the Supreme Court agreed that the committee’s subpoena must be enforced.

Considering that his wife might have communications in that NARA cache, it was likely a conflict of interest for him to participate in that decision.

Neither Thomas responded to requests for comment. The Supreme Court announced Sunday that Justice Thomas, 73, had been hospitalized with an infection that is not Covid-19 and that he was expected to be released Monday or Tuesday. Thomas was not in court Wednesday, and the court has provided no further updates.

That Thomas is now at the center of this scandal suggests another dimension to the extraordinarily vicious attacks on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at this week’s Senate hearing for confirmation to the Supreme Court.

The former president himself is also trying to keep his name in the news and his base angry. Today his lawyers filed a federal lawsuit against Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, Christopher Steele (who produced the Steele Dossier suggesting that Trump had concerning ties with Russia), and so on—a laundry list of 47 people and companies he claims were part of a conspiracy against him after the 2016 election—claiming that “Clinton and her cohorts orchestrated an unthinkable plot…. Acting in concert, the[y]... maliciously conspired to weave a false narrative that their Republican opponent, Donald J. Trump, was colluding with a hostile foreign sovereignty.” Their actions were “so outrageous, subversive and incendiary that even the events of Watergate pale in comparison.”

It is a mess, full of debunked claims, misspellings, and outright lies; Aaron Blake of the Washington Post called it a press release. It is impossible to imagine Trump intends to continue the case until it gets to discovery, when the defendants’ lawyers could request his testimony under oath. The complaint asks for a trial, and it appears to be designed to rile up his base with familiar stories—possibly for 2024, as Blake suggests, but, if history is any guide, primarily to encourage donations.

mickeyrat

  March 25, 2022 (Friday)

In confirmation hearings this week for her elevation to a Supreme Court seat, the highly qualified and well-respected Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson endured vicious attacks from Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who vow to reject her confirmation despite the fact that her record is stronger than those of recent Republican nominees and that 58% of Americans want her to be confirmed. (In contrast, only 42% of Americans wanted Justice Amy Coney Barrett confirmed.)

Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) explained: "Judge Jackson has impeccable credentials and a deep knowledge of the law,” but she “refused to embrace” the judicial philosophy of originalism, which would unravel the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting abortion rights, as well as most of the other civil rights protected since the 1950s.

Indeed, the hearings inspired Republicans to challenge many of the civil rights decisions that most Americans believe are settled law, that is, something so deeply woven into our legal system that it is no longer reasonably open to argument. The rights Republicans challenged this week included the right to use birth control, access abortion, marry across racial lines, and marry a same-sex partner.

These rights, which previous Supreme Courts said are guaranteed by our Constitution, are enormously popular. Seventy percent of Americans support same-sex marriage. Eighty-nine percent of Americans in 2012 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. Even the right to abortion remains popular. According to a 2021 Pew poll, 59% of Americans believe it should be legal in most or all cases.

So how do today’s Republicans square overturning these established rights with the fact that we live in a democracy, in which the majority should rule, so long as it does not crush a minority?

A 2019 speech by then–attorney general William Barr at the University of Notre Dame offers an explanation.

In that speech, Barr presented a profound rewriting of the meaning of American democracy. He argued that by “self-government,” the Framers did not mean the ability of people to vote for representatives of their choice. Rather, he said, they meant individual morality: the ability to govern oneself. And, since people are inherently wicked, that self-government requires the authority of a religion: Christianity.

Barr quoted the leading author of the Constitution, James Madison, to prove his argument. “In the words of Madison,” he said, “‘We have staked our future on the ability of each of us to govern ourselves…’.”

This has been a popular quotation on the political and religious right since the 1950s, and Barr used it to lament how the modern, secular world has removed moral restraints, making Americans unable to tell right from wrong and, in turn, creating “immense suffering, wreckage, and misery.” “Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’” he said, “have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.” The law, Barr said, “is being used as a battering ram to break down traditional moral values” through judicial interpretation, and he called for saving America by centering religion.

Madison never actually said the quotation on which Barr based his argument. It’s a fake version of what Madison did say in Federalist #39, in 1788, which was something entirely different. In Federalist #39, Madison explained how the new government, the one under which we still live, worked.

Answering the question of whether the new government the Framers had just proposed would enable people to vote for their representatives, he said yes. “No other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.” Madison said nothing about personal morality when he talked about self-government, though. Instead, he focused on the mechanics of the new national government, explaining that such a government “derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior.”

He went on to say (and the capitalization is his, not mine): “It is ESSENTIAL to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an [small] proportion [of people], or a favored class of it….”

In his 2019 speech, Barr also expressed concern that people in the United States misunderstood the First Amendment to the Constitution, which expressly forbids the government from establishing a national religion or stopping anyone from worshiping a deity—or not—however they choose. In Barr’s hands, the First Amendment “reflects the Framers’ belief that religion was indispensable to sustaining our free system of government.” To support that argument, he cites a few lines from Madison’s 1785 pamphlet objecting to religious assessments that talk about how Madison defined religion.

In reality, that pamphlet was Madison’s passionate stand against any sort of religious establishment by the government. He explained that what was at stake was not just religion, but also representative government itself. The establishment of religion attacked a fundamental human right—an unalienable right—of conscience. If lawmakers could destroy the right of freedom of conscience, they could destroy all other unalienable rights. Madison warned specifically that they could control the press, abolish trial by jury, take over the executive and judicial powers, take away the right to vote, and set themselves up in power forever.

Madison was on to something when he warned that there was a connection between establishing a religion and destroying American democracy. At the same time Republican lawmakers are now talking about rolling back popular civil rights in order to serve Christianity, they are also taking away the right to vote and appear to be looking to set a minority into power over the majority.

“This is a fight of good versus evil,” Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows wrote to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginni, on November 24, 2020, in a text about overthrowing the will of the voters after Joe Biden had won the presidential election by more than 7 million votes and by 306 to 232 votes in the Electoral College. Referring to Jesus Christ, Meadows continued: “Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs. Do not grow weary in well doing. The fight continues….”

mickeyrat

  March 26, 2022 (Saturday)

Today, President Joe Biden ended four days in Europe with a landmark speech. After meeting with world leaders in Brussels, he traveled to Poland, where he visited American troops stationed there, met with humanitarian workers and refugees, talked with Polish president Andrzej Duda, and, finally, addressed an assembled crowd.

Biden spoke at the historic Royal Castle in the Polish capital of Warsaw, a building that was destroyed by the Nazis after the failed Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when the Polish resistance tried to throw off German occupation. The Polish government rebuilt the castle in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is now a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site, considered to be of “outstanding value to humanity.”  

There, Biden began with the words of the first Polish Pope, John Paul II, after his election in October 1978: “Be not afraid.” Biden explained that those words were “a message about the power—the power of faith, the power of resilience, and the power of the people.”

Biden briefly retraced Poland’s struggle and ultimate victory against Soviet repression and tied that story to the history of the United States by nodding to former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who passed away this week, and who had, he said, “fought her whole life for essential democratic principles.”

With this backdrop, Biden warned that we are again “in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” Ukraine is at the frontlines of that battle.

“[T]heir brave resistance is part of a larger fight for essential democratic principles that unite all free people: the rule of law; free and fair elections; the freedom to speak, to write, and to assemble; the freedom to worship as one chooses; freedom of the press.”

“These principles are essential in a free society,” he said to applause. “But they have always…been under siege.” He noted that “[o]ver the last 30 years, the forces of autocracy have revived all across the globe,” showing “contempt for the rule of law, contempt for democratic freedom, contempt for the truth itself.” He called for democratic countries to work to stop autocracy.

Biden reiterated that Russia’s war on Ukraine is a war of choice that had “no justification or provocation. It was, he said, an example of using “brute force and disinformation to satisfy a craving for absolute power and control.” That is, he said, “nothing less than a direct challenge to the rule-based international order established since the end of World War Two,” and it threatens to throw Europe back into the old world of wars that the international rule-based order ended.

Biden outlined how the West has come together to try to stop Putin’s aggression. It has sanctioned oligarchs, lawmakers, and businesses to hurt the Russian economy. It has blocked Russia’s Central Bank from the global financial systems, even as more than 400 private companies have stopped doing business in Russia.

These economic sanctions, he said, “are a new kind of economic statecraft with the power to inflict damage that rivals military might,” and they are weakening Russia’s power to make war and to “project power.”

At the same time, the West has supported Ukraine “with incredible levels of military, economic, and humanitarian assistance,” that the Ukrainian people have used “to devastating effect.”

Biden reiterated that U.S. troops are in Europe not to fight Russia, but to defend our North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies. “Don’t even think about moving on one single inch of NATO territory,” he warned. NATO nations will defend “each and every inch of NATO territory with the full force of our collective power.”

He called on all the world’s democracies to help the Ukrainian refugees, and pledged that the U.S. would do its part.

The war has already been a strategic failure for Russia, he said. “The democracies of the world are revitalized with purpose and unity found in months that we’d once taken years to accomplish.” And people are fleeing Russia as President Vladimir Putin cracks down on protesters and shuts down the media.

Biden reassured the Russian people that they are not our enemies, noting that they, too, have reason to hate the war. Just days ago they were “a 21st century nation with hopes and dreams that people all over the world have for themselves and their family,” and now “Vladimir Putin’s aggression has cut you, the Russian people, off from the rest of the world, and it’s taking Russia back to the 19th century.” “This war is not worthy of you, the Russian people,” he said, and reminded them that “Putin can and must end this war.”

Turning to Europe, Biden said that turning to clean and renewable energy is a matter of economic and national security, as well as vital for the planet. He urged democracies to fight the corruption that has fueled Putin’s power. And finally, he said that the world’s democracies must maintain “absolute unity.”

“It’s not enough to speak with rhetorical flourish, of ennobling words of democracy, of freedom, equality, and liberty,” he said. “All of us…must do the hard work of democracy each and every day. My country as well.” His message “for all freedom-loving nations,” he said, is that “we must commit now to be in this fight for the long haul.” In the end, though, “the darkness that drives autocracy is ultimately no match for the flame of liberty that lights the souls of free people everywhere.” “We will have a different future—a brighter future rooted in democracy and principle, hope and light, of decency and dignity, of freedom and possibilities.”

“For God’s sake,” he said, “this man cannot remain in power.”

That last line seemed a logical conclusion to the argument Biden has been making about the struggle between democracy and autocracy, rallying democratic countries to stay unified against Putin as his troops smash Ukraine. But it prompted a flurry of media stories saying Biden had made a gaffe, changing his long-standing insistence that the U.S. is not engaging in regime change but rather is trying to defend Ukraine’s right to exist independently of Russia. A White House official clarified that “[t]he president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region…. He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.” Michael D. Shear and David E. Sanger of the New York Times noted that, however Biden meant the line, it underscored the difficulty of holding allies together against Putin while also avoiding an escalation of the war.

After the speech, the White House dropped on social media a cut of its section addressed to the Russian people… with Russian subtitles.

mickeyrat

 March 27, 2022 (Sunday)

People write to me to ask why I have hope in our future despite all the trouble in the world, and the answer is always: I have faith because of you.

The biggest miracle about these Letters from an American is the community that has gathered around them. It is made up of decent, principled, smart, creative, and thoughtful people from all around the world, and it is a never ending source of wonder to me that I have the extraordinary opportunity to meet many of you and to eavesdrop on your conversations as you work together to move our country, and our world, forward.

I’m going to go to sleep tonight instead of writing, so am sharing this image from my friend Peter for my friend Nadia, from Maine to Ukraine, because we are all in this together.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

[Photo, "Beyond," by Peter Ralston]

mickeyrat

 March 28, 2022 (Monday)

Today, United States District Judge David O. Carter of the United States District Court for the Central District of California ordered John Eastman to disclose 101 documents to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Eastman is a former law school dean at Chapman University and author of the Eastman memo outlining a plan for Vice President Mike Pence to throw the 2020 election to Donald Trump. He also spoke at Trump’s January 6 rally on the Ellipse, lying to the crowd: “We know there was fraud…. We know that dead people voted.” Now he will have to share his communications about the events of January 6 with the January 6th Committee.

The backstory to this lawsuit is that on November 8, 2021, the January 6 Committee subpoenaed Eastman’s testimony and disclosure of documents and emails sent or received by Eastman between November 3, 2020, and January 20, 2021, related to the Capitol attack. Eastman testified before the committee on December 3, 2021, but asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 146 times. He also refused to produce any documents, again asserting his Fifth Amendment rights.

So on January 18, 2022, the January 6 Committee subpoenaed Eastman’s emails from Chapman University—it had parted ways with Eastman by then—which initially collected 30,000 documents off its servers. The January 6 Committee then worked with Chapman to winnow down those results, ending up with just under 19,000 documents.

Eastman then tried to stop that document production. The court refused to agree. When Eastman appeared to be delaying disclosure, the court ordered him to focus on emails from January 4–7. On February 22, 2022, Eastman sued Representative Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS), chair of the January 6 Committee, and Chapman University to prevent disclosure of certain emails, claiming that 111 of them from January 4–7 should not be disclosed because they are covered by attorney-client privilege, with the “client” being Trump. The committee disagreed.

So Judge Carter personally examined the contested documents to decide if they should be disclosed or kept private. He concluded that 10 were indeed covered by attorney-client privilege because they did not involve Trump or involved litigation that was not covered by the subpoena. The other 101 must be disclosed.

That disclosure is important. But far more important is what is in Carter’s decision. It lays out, point by point, what depositions have now told us about the actions of former president Trump in the days before January 6, and explains what those actions mean.

Judge Carter explains how Trump and Eastman fostered the public belief that the 2020 presidential election was tainted by fraud, despite the lack of evidence for that claim. They urged state legislators to question the results of the election. On January 2, 2021, Trump and Eastman hosted a briefing urging several hundred state legislators from states Biden won to “decertify” the electors.

The same day, January 2, 2021, Trump called Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to get him to throw the election to Trump. Raffensperger refuted all of Trump’s arguments, “point by point,” and told him “the data you have is wrong.” Trump insisted he just wanted to find 11,780 votes, one more than Biden received to win the state.

The next day, January 3, Trump tried to remove the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, who had replaced Attorney General William Barr when he resigned on December 23, 2020, and replace him with Jeffrey Clark, who planned to write a letter to certain states Biden won, telling them that the election might have been stolen and urging them to decertify the electors. Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general at the time, told the January 6 Committee that the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, described Clark’s proposed letter as a “murder-suicide pact” that would “damage everyone who touches it” and said “we should have nothing to do with that letter.” When high-ranking officials in the Department of Justice warned they would resign together if Trump appointed Clark, he did not do so.

Judge Carter outlined how in the months after the election, sources from members of Trump’s inner circle to statisticians told Trump and Eastman that there was no evidence of election fraud. Christopher Krebs of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said that “[t]he November 3rd election [was] the most secure in American history,” and that it found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” An internal memo from the Trump campaign said the fraud claims about Dominion voting machines were baseless. In early December, Barr said publicly there was no evidence of fraud, and on December 27, Donoghue told Trump that after “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews,” the Justice Department had concluded that there was no evidence of voter fraud that had changed the election results.

Still, Trump insisted that the Department of Justice should say that the election was fraudulent.

By early January, courts had rejected more than 60 cases relating to accusations of fraud, owing to lack of evidence or lack of standing.

By late December, Eastman wrote a memo proposing to reinstate Trump by getting Pence to reject the certified electoral votes from states Trump claimed to have won. If Pence rejected the votes from those states, Trump would win. Alternatively, Pence could send the election to the House of Representatives, where Republicans had a majority, and elect Trump that way. Eastman wrote: “[t]he main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission—either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court.”

Eastman expanded on this a few days later, saying that the plan was “BOLD, Certainly. But this Election was Stolen by a strategic Democrat plan to systematically flout existing election laws for partisan advantage; we’re no longer playing by Queensbury Rules.”

On January 4, Trump and Eastman pressed Pence, Pence’s lawyer Greg Jacob, and Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short to reject the electors or delay the count. Pence insisted he did not have the authority to do either of those things.

The next day, Eastman again pressed Jacob and Short to follow his plan. Jacob has testified that Eastman admitted his plan was “contrary to consistent historical practice, would likely be unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court, and violated the Electoral Count Act on four separate grounds.” Nonetheless, Eastman and Trump continued to pressure Pence to follow it.

At 1:00 am on January 6, Trump tweeted, “If Vice President [Pence] comes through for us, we will win the Presidency…. Mike can send it back!” At 8:17 am, he tweeted, “States want to correct their votes…. All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!” Then Trump called Pence twice, reaching him on the second attempt and berating him for “not [being] tough enough to make the call” to reject or delay the electoral votes.

At the January 6 rally on the Ellipse, Eastman and Trump spoke to explain the plan to the attendees and those watching at home. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani introduced Eastman as the professor who would explain how the Democrats cheated. Eastman told the crowd that they just wanted Pence to “let the legislators of the state look into this so we get to the bottom of it, and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government, or not. We no longer live in a self-governing republic if we can’t get the answer to this question. This is bigger than President Trump. It is a very essence of our republican form of government, and it has to be done. And anybody that is not willing to stand up to do it, does not deserve to be in the office. It is that simple.”

Following him, Trump praised Eastman as “one of the most brilliant lawyers in the country” who looked at this and he said, ‘What an absolute disgrace that this can be happening to our Constitution.’... Because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election….”

Pence rejected the plan publicly, and at 1:00, members of Congress, gathered in joint session, began to count the electoral votes. Trump urged his supporters to walk with him up to the Capitol, saying: “[I]t is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down….  [W]e’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help. We’re going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country. So let’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue.”

After the speech, Trump went back to the White House while several hundred protesters stormed the Capitol. Even after he had been informed of the violence, Trump tweeted at 2:24 pm: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

During the riot, Pence’s lawyer Greg Jacob emailed Eastman that the rioters “believed with all their hearts the theory they were sold about the powers that could legitimately be exercised at the Capitol on this day….  [a]nd thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.” Eastman responded: “The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so the American people can see for themselves what happened.”

Trump eventually released a video asking the rioters to leave the Capitol but saying “We love you, you’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel.” At 6:00 pm, he tweeted: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

Eastman continued to press Pence to delay the count until almost midnight on January 6.

Judge Carter concluded that Trump’s actions “more likely than not constitute attempts to obstruct an official proceeding.” He also concluded that “Trump likely knew the electoral count plan had no factual justification.” The plan, Carter wrote, “was a last-ditch attempt to secure the Presidency by any means.” He also found that “it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”

Eastman and Trump “launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history,” Carter wrote. “Their campaign was…a coup in search of a legal theory….  If [the] plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself.”

mickeyrat

  March 29, 2022 (Tuesday)

Yesterday, a decision by Judge David Carter said that Trump had likely committed a federal crime when he was part of a conspiracy to obstruct Congress’s count of the votes of the Electoral College on January 6, 2021. Today, a Trump spokesperson called yesterday’s decision “absurd and baseless.”

But the investigation into the events of January 6 is producing more and more evidence about the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and it is neither absurd nor baseless.

Today, journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa broke a story about the internal White House records turned over to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Those records show previously unreported brief calls on the morning of January 6 between then-president Trump and unofficial advisor Stephen Bannon and between Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. They also show a ten-minute phone call with Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who was, as Woodward and Costa note, “a key figure in pushing fellow [Republican] lawmakers to object to the certification of Biden’s election.”

Trump also talked for 26 minutes with senior advisor Stephen Miller, who had publicly pushed the idea that alternative electors from contested states would replace the official electors who cast ballots for Biden. Trump then talked, cryptically, “to an unidentified person.”

And that was the last call identified before a seven hour and 37 minute gap in Trump’s phone logs. This blackout includes the crucial hours in which the Capitol was under attack. There is no record of any calls to or from Trump for 457 minutes, from 11:17 am to 6:54 pm.

Since there have already been reports of a number of phone calls during that time, including calls to Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), the committee is now investigating whether Trump hid his calls or communicated through the phones of his aides, or perhaps through unsecure “burner” phones, cheap prepaid mobile phones that are untraceable and are thrown out when no longer needed. Trump tried to kill this idea by saying in a statement: “I have no idea what a burner phone is, to the best of my knowledge I have never even heard the term.”

But former national security advisor John Bolton contradicted that, saying he personally heard Trump using the term “burner phones” in several discussions and had discussed with him how burner phones helped people keep phone calls secret. In November 2021, Hunter Walker of Rolling Stone reported that the organizers of the January 6 events used burner phones to communicate with the White House and the Trump family, including Eric Trump, his wife Lara Trump, and chief of staff Mark Meadows.

The news of this gap in the record is significant because Trump and his allies have maintained that they were challenging the election results because they honestly believed the results were false, and that they believed they were operating within the law.

If so, why the seven-hour blackout?

The missing logs might not, in the end, obscure any phone calls made in that time, though, not only because witnesses can fill in some of the holes, but also because last summer, the January 6 Committee instructed 35 telecom and social media companies to preserve records of calls. When news broke today of the missing records, Crooked Media editor in chief Brian Beutler recalled McCarthy’s threat to punish telecom companies that cooperate with the January 6 Committee.

The ten-minute phone call with Jordan suggests that the 139 members of the House of Representatives who objected to the counting of the certified ballots were perhaps not simply making a protest vote, but rather were part of a larger organized Republican effort to steal the election. That story dovetails with yesterday’s story by Michael Kranish in the Washington Post about Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who worked hard to keep Trump in power despite the will of the American voters, intending to lay the groundwork for his own presidential bid in 2024.

Cruz and John Eastman, the author of the Eastman memo outlining a strategy for then–vice president Mike Pence to throw the election to Trump, have been friends for close to 30 years, since they clerked together for then–U.S. Appeals Court judge J. Michael Luttig. While Eastman presented a plan by which Pence could refuse to count Biden’s electors, Cruz wrote a plan for congress members to object to the results in six critical states that Biden won, establishing a 10-day “audit” that would have enabled Republican-dominated state legislatures to overturn the election results in their states. Ten other senators backed Cruz’s plan, offering a path to create enough chaos to keep Trump in power.

Luttig told Kranish that Cruz was central to the events of January 6. Contesting the states’ electoral votes required one senator and one representative for each state. Then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made an effort to keep his caucus from working with representatives who planned to challenge the count. But junior senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) broke ranks and said he would join the challenges. Not to be outflanked by Hawley on the right, Cruz immediately stepped aboard the train and brought 10 senators with him. “Once Ted Cruz promised to object,” Luttig said, “January 6 was all but foreordained, because Cruz was the most influential figure in the Congress willing to force a vote on Trump’s claim that the election was stolen.”

Along with Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Cruz was the first to challenge an electoral ballot: that of Arizona.

Cruz’s plan was similar to a plan White House advisor Peter Navarro explained in fall 2021 called the “Green Bay Sweep.” According to Navarro, that plan was to block the counting of electoral votes until public pressure forced Republican-dominated state legislatures to overturn the election results and give the presidency to Trump. (It is worth noting that Navarro’s plan absolves Trump of responsibility for the Capitol violence, and seems to have been deployed in part for that reason.)

Cruz’s spokesperson said the senator “does not know Peter Navarro, has never had a conversation with him, and knew nothing about any plans he claims to have devised.”    

Navarro has his own problems. Yesterday, the January 6 committee moved to hold him and another Trump aide, Dan Scavino, in criminal contempt of Congress, sending the resolution to the full House for a vote. Navarro has ignored the committee’s subpoena, saying—falsely—that Trump had asserted executive privilege over his testimony and so he could not testify, despite the fact he had written extensively about his participation in the attempt to overturn the election. Scavino, Trump’s director of social media, has also ignored the committee’s subpoena.

A budget proposal from the Department of Justice yesterday revealed that it wants 131 more lawyers to handle January 6 cases. In the request, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said, "Regardless of whatever resources we see or get, let's be very, very clear: we are going to hold those perpetrators accountable, no matter where the facts lead us,... no matter what level.”

Today, on a right-wing news show, Trump appeared to try to change the subject and regain control over the political trends when he called for Russian president Vladimir Putin to release dirt on the Biden family, since “he’s not exactly a fan of our country.” Russian state TV featured a Russian government official calling for “regime change” in the United States, asking the people of the U.S. to replace President Biden with Trump “to again help our partner Trump to become President.”

mickeyrat

  March 30, 2022 (Wednesday)

CBS News has hired Mick Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor. In his first official appearance on Tuesday morning to talk about President Joe Biden’s budget proposal, anchor Anne-Marie Green introduced Mulvaney as “a former Office of Management and Budget director,” and said, “So happy to have you here…. You’re the guy to ask about this.”

Mulvaney was a far-right U.S. representative from South Carolina from 2011 to 2017, when he went to work for then-president Trump as the director of the Office of Management and Budget. While in that position, he also took over as acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the government organization organized by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) after the financial crisis of 2008. In its first five years, the CFPB recovered about $11.7 billion for about 27 million consumers, but in Congress, Mulvaney introduced legislation to abolish it. At its head, Mulvaney zeroed out the bureau’s budget and did his best to dismantle it.

While retaining his role at the head of the Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney took on the job of acting White House chief of staff on January 2, 2019. This unprecedented dual role put him in a key place to do an end run around official U.S. diplomats in Ukraine and to set up a back channel to put pressure on newly elected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce he was launching an investigation into the actions of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.

As director of OMB, Mulvaney okayed the withholding of almost $400 million Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s protection against Russia. In May 2019, he set up “the three amigos,” Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, special envoy Kurt Volker, and Energy Secretary Rick Perry, to pressure Zelensky. When the story came out, Mulvaney told the press that Trump had indeed withheld the money to pressure Zelensky to help him cheat in the 2020 election. “I have news for everybody,” he said. “Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.” He immediately walked the story back, but there it was.

This event was the basis for Trump’s first impeachment. While Republican senators refused to hold Trump accountable, the Government Accountability Office found that withholding the money was illegal. Ironically, the GAO report came out during Trump’s second impeachment.

And yet, CBS hired Mulvaney and simply introduced him as a former director of the OMB, saying he was the guy to explain Biden’s budget. (After the episode, the CBS standards department reminded staffers they should always identify people with their relevant biographical information.)

Jeremy Barr of the Washington Post tonight revealed that he had reviewed a recording of a phone call in which the co-president of CBS News, Neeraj Khemlani, suggested they had hired Mulvaney to guarantee access to Republican lawmakers. “If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” Khemlani told staff. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”

People on the right have talked about a “liberal media” now for a generation. It has come to represent the idea that the media is slanted toward the Democrats. But initially, the phrase meant media based in facts.

In the 1950s, those eager to get rid of the government system instituted by the Democrats during the Great Depression of the 1930s grew frustrated because people liked that system, with its business regulation, basic social safety net, and promotion of infrastructure. In 1951, in “God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” William F. Buckley, Jr., rejected the Enlightenment idea that rigorous debate over facts would lead toward truth; the fondness of a majority of Republicans and Democrats for the newly active national government proved people could not be trusted to know what was best for them. Instead, he called for the exclusion of “bad” ideas like an active government, and for universities to push individualism and Christianity.

Three years later, Buckley and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., would divide the world into “Liberals,” by which they meant the majority of Americans from both parties who liked the New Deal government, and “Conservatives” like themselves, who were determined to overturn that government. Movement Conservatives lumped Soviet-style socialism and the New Deal government together.

With its focus on facts, the media, like the universities, was “liberal,” and Movement Conservatives wanted their ideology to be heard. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission killed the Fairness Doctrine, which had required public media to present issues fairly, and right-wing talk radio took off. In 1996, Australian-born Rupert Murdoch started the Fox News Channel, calling it “fair and balanced” because it presented the Movement Conservative ideology that fact-based media ignored.  

Twenty-five years later, that ideology had become so powerful that true believers tried to stop a legitimately elected Democrat from becoming president, and in the year since, their conviction has only become stronger. Now CBS News has hired a member of the administration that urged the attack on our democracy.

“When, oh Lord, when will the elite political media treat the current Republican Party as the threat to the republic that it most obviously is?” asked Charlie Pierce in Esquire.

Here’s what’s at stake: On the one hand, Biden is trying to rebuild the old liberal consensus that used to be shared by people of both parties, instituted by Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt to protect workers from the overreach of their employers and expanded under Republican Dwight Eisenhower to protect civil rights. To this, Biden has focused on those previously marginalized and has added a focus on women and children.

Biden’s new budget, released earlier this week, calls for investment in U.S. families, communities, and infrastructure, the same principles on which the economy has boomed for the past year. The budget also promotes fiscal responsibility by rolling back Trump’s tax cuts on the very wealthy. Biden's signature yesterday on the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime in the United States, is the culmination of more than 100 years of work.   

Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are defending democracy against authoritarianism, working to bring together allies around the globe to resist the aggression of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

On the other hand, the Republican Party is working to get rid of the New Deal government. While Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wanted to face the midterms without a platform, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), who chairs the committee responsible for electing Republican senators, has produced an “11-point plan to rescue America.” It dramatically raises taxes on people who earn less than $100,000, and ends Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act.

With a 6 to 3 majority on the Supreme Court, Republicans have also taken aim at abortion rights and are now talking about ending other civil rights protected by the federal government after 1950: the right to birth control, interracial marriage, and same-sex marriage.

The Republicans have sided with authoritarianism as they back former president Trump and his supporters, over 2,000 of whom stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. This week, federal judge David Carter wrote that it was “more likely than not” that Trump committed a federal crime when he encouraged the attack, and yesterday we learned that there are more than 7 hours of phone records missing from the official White House logs of that day. At The Guardian, Hugo Lowell today reported that Trump made at least one call from the White House that day that should have been on the logs and was not, opening up the possibility that Trump’s people tampered with the phone records.

And while Putin has launched a war of invasion on our democratic ally Ukraine, just yesterday, Trump asked Putin to help him dig up dirt on a political rival, just as he did in 2016.

Voters cannot choose wisely between these two paths unless their news is based in facts. Earlier this week, fact triumphed over ideology on the Fox News Channel, when anchor John Roberts noted that Senator Rick Scott’s 2022 Republican platform calls for raising taxes on most Americans and ending Social Security. Scott said that Roberts was using “a Democrat talking point.” But Roberts stood firm on facts: “It’s in the plan!” he said. “It’s not a Democratic talking point. It’s in the plan!”

mickeyrat

  March 31, 2022 (Thursday)

Today, Judge Mark E. Walker of the Federal District Court in Tallahassee, Florida, struck down much of the new elections law passed by the Florida legislature after the 2020 election. This is the first time a federal court has sought to overrule the recent attempts of Republican-dominated state legislatures to rig the vote, and Walker made thorough work of it.

Four cases were consolidated into one: the League of Women Voters v. Florida Secretary of State Laurel M. Lee, National Republican Senatorial Committee, and Republican National Committee. In his decision, Walker used Florida as a case study to explain how suppressing the Black vote rigs the system in favor of Republicans. His 288-page decision is a frightening portrait of how Republicans are taking control of certain states against the will of voters.

“This case is about our sacred right to vote,” Walker wrote, “won at great cost in blood and treasure. Courts have long recognized that, because “the right to exercise the franchise in a free and unimpaired manner is preservative of other basic civil and political rights, any alleged infringement of the right of citizens to vote must be carefully and meticulously scrutinized.”

While the defendants who wrote Florida’s new election law, SB 90, argued that the changes to voting rules were minor tweaks to avoid voter fraud, the plaintiffs said the new law “runs roughshod over the right to vote, unnecessarily making voting harder for all eligible Floridians, unduly burdening disabled voters, and intentionally targeting minority voters—all to improve the electoral prospects of the party in power.” Walker concluded that “for the most part, Plaintiffs are right,” and notes that “the right to vote, and the V[oting] R[ights] A[ct] particularly, are under siege.”

Walker notes that the issue at stake is not whether the legislators who wrote the new laws are racist, but rather whether race was a factor in the writing of SB 90. Recognizing that few people would today openly admit their racial motivations, he explains that the court needed to look at the circumstances around the passage of SB 90 to determine if race played a role in the law. “Think of it like viewing a pointillist painting, such as Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,” Walker wrote. “One dot of paint on the canvas is meaningless, but when thousands of dots are viewed together, they create something recognizable. So too here, one piece of evidence says little, but when all of the evidence is viewed together, a coherent picture emerges.”

Those dots of paint begin with Florida’s “grotesque history of racial discrimination.” After the Civil War, the Reconstruction legislature limited the vote to white men; when Congress insisted that Black men must be able to vote, Florida legislators changed the law to take their vote away little by little.

First, they changed the constitution to let the governor appoint all statewide officeholders; he appointed only white men. Then they required a sort of early voter ID: a voter had to bring a registration certificate to the polls. Finally, in 1888, the lawmakers passed the “Eight Box Law,” requiring that votes for each state office had to be dropped correctly into eight different boxes in order to count, an impossibility for illiterate farmers. It also passed a poll tax. Although all these new laws were neutral on their face, they drastically cut down Black voting. According to election historian J. Morgan Kousser, between 1888 and 1892, Black voting dropped from 62% to 11%.

For those still undaunted, violence sealed the deal. In 1960, Gadsden County had more than 12,000 Black residents old enough to vote, but only seven of them were registered. Not a single Black congress member was elected between 1877 and 1992. Latinos, too, have had trouble voting, largely because of language barriers.

Historic voter suppression is relevant today because differences in political power help to create differences in economic and social power. While 5.4% of White family households are below the poverty line, 15.8% of Black and 17.7% of Latino family households are. The median White household income ($65,149) is 46.7% higher than the Black median household income ($44,412) and about a quarter higher than the Latino median household income ($52,497). In terms of education, 6.9% of the White population has not finished high school, while 15.3% of the Black population and 20.4% of the Latino population have not.

About 4.8% of White households don’t have a car or a truck, while 7.3% of Latino households and 10.4% of Black households lack them, meaning they rely on public transportation at a higher rate than White Americans and so face longer commutes to work. Walker writes that “these disparities are the stark results of a political system that, for well over a century, has overrepresented White Floridians and underrepresented Black and Latino Floridians,” and he notes that 90% of Florida’s White voting age citizens are registered to vote, while only 83% of its Black and 77% of its Latino voting age population is.

Since 2004, White voters in Florida have been likely to vote for Republicans, but Black voters in Florida have favored Democratic candidates for president and governor at an average rate of about 89.7%. (In contrast, Latino voters tend to swing between parties.) Race and politics thus cannot be separated, and since Florida elections tend to be very close, decreasing the Black vote helps the Republican Party. Getting rid of even a few thousand votes can swing an election. It is “easy to see how Republican legislators who harbor no racial animus could be tempted to secure their own position by enacting laws targeting Black voters,” Walker wrote.

And since the days before the 2000 election, they have repeatedly done so. The infamous 2000 voter purge cut ten times as many Black voters as White voters from the rolls that year before victory in the presidential election came down to a few hundred votes in Florida for Republican candidate George W. Bush. Since then, the state has repeatedly purged its rolls, and legitimate Black voters have been disproportionately removed.

Similarly, when Black Floridians began to use early voting, the legislature changed the laws to limit that practice. So, in 2012, Black voters stood in line for as long as 8 hours, and tens of thousands ultimately were unable to cast a vote. In 2018, voters in Florida overwhelmingly favored restoring voting rights to felons who had served their sentences; the legislature promptly passed a law requiring felons to pay all fees they owed to the state before they could vote, a law that, again, affected Black voters more than White ones.

The 2020 election went smoothly in Florida, but the legislature nonetheless pushed through SB 90 to “instill voter confidence.” A text exchange between a legislator and the chair of the Florida Republican Party called this justification into question: they discussed how the standard procedures for absentee ballots were “killing” the Republican Party because the Democrats had so many more absentee voters the Republicans “could not cut down [that] lead” unless the law changed.

The new law makes it harder for voter-registration organizations to sign up voters. It limits the use of drop boxes and voting by mail, pushing people to vote in person, and then forbids giving food and water to the people who will inevitably be waiting in line to vote.

“This Court finds that the Legislature enacted SB 90 to improve the Republican Party’s electoral prospects,” Walker wrote. He required Florida to get the approval of the federal government before trying to make any such changes for the next ten years.

Florida will challenge this decision, and it may well win before the conservative Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit or the current Supreme Court. Republicans have defended their assaults on voting by citing the Constitution’s provision that “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof;” but Walker noted that there is another clause in the Constitution that follows that semicolon. It reads: “but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations….”

mickeyrat

  April 1, 2022 (Friday)

The March jobs report came out this morning and, once again, it was terrific. The economy added 431,000 jobs in March, and the figures for January and February were revised upward by 95,000. The U.S has added 1.7 million jobs between January and March, and unemployment is near an all-time low of 3.6%. As employment has risen, employers have had to raise wages to get workers. So, wages are up 5.6% for the year that ended in February.

Inflation in the U.S. is the highest it’s been in 40 years at 7.9%, but those high numbers echo other developed countries. In the 19 countries that use the euro, inflation rose by an annual rate of 7.5% in March, the highest level since officials began keeping records for the euro in 1997. Russia’s war on Ukraine, which is driving already high gasoline prices upward, and continuing supply chain problems are keeping inflation numbers high.

“America's economic recovery from the historic shock of the pandemic has been nothing short of extraordinary,” CNN’s Anneken Tappe wrote today. The nation is “on track to recover from the pandemic recession a gobsmacking eight years sooner than it did following the Great Recession.”

These numbers matter not just because they show the U.S. coming out of the pandemic, but because they prove that Biden’s approach to the economy works. The key to this economic recovery was the American Rescue Plan, passed in March 2021 without a single Republican vote, that dedicated $1.9 trillion to helping the economy recover from the pandemic shutdowns. The vote on the American Rescue Plan indicated the dramatic difference in the way Democrats and Republicans believe the economy works.

After the Depression hit, in the 1930s, Democrats argued that the way to build the economy was for the government to make sure that workers and consumers had the resources to buy products and services. Raising wages, providing a basic social safety net, and improving education would enable the “demand side” of the economy to buy the goods that would employ Americans and increase productivity. Democrats regulated businesses, imposing rules on employers, and funded their programs with taxes that fell on Americans according to their ability to pay.

When this system pulled the country out of the Depression and funded the successful military mobilization of World War II, members of both parties embraced it. Once in office, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower called for universal health insurance and backed the massive $26 billion Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 to build an initial 41,000 miles of roads across the United States, an act that provided jobs and infrastructure. To pay for these programs, he supported the high taxes of the war years, with the top marginal income bracket pegged at 91%.

“Our underlying philosophy,” said a Republican under Eisenhower, “is this: if a job has to be done to meet the needs of people, and no one else can do it, then it is a proper function of the federal government.” Americans had, “for the first time in our history, discovered and established the Authentic American Center in politics. This is not a Center in the European sense of an uneasy and precarious mid-point between large and powerful left-wing and right-wing elements of varying degrees of radicalism. It is a Center in the American sense of a common meeting-ground of the great majority of our people on our own issues, against a backdrop of our own history, our own current setting and our own responsibilities for the future.”

But Republicans since the 1980s have rejected that “Authentic American Center” and argued instead that the way to build the economy is by putting the weight of the government on the “supply side.” That is, the government should free up the capital of the wealthy by cutting taxes. Flush with cash, those at the top of society would invest in new industries that would, in turn, hire workers, and all Americans would rise together. Shortly after he took office, President Ronald Reagan launched government support for “supply side economics” with the first of many Republican tax cuts.  

But rather than improving the living standards of all Americans, supply side economics never delivered the economic growth it promised. It turned out that tax cuts did not generally get reinvested into factories and innovation, but instead got turned into financial investments that concentrated wealth at the top of the economic ladder. Still, forty years later, Republicans have only hardened in their support for tax cuts. They insist that any government regulation of business, provision of a social safety net, or promotion of infrastructure is “socialism” because it infringes on the “freedom” of Americans to do whatever they wish without government interference.

The conflict between these two visions came to the fore yesterday, when 193 Republicans voted against lowering the copays for insulin, the drug necessary to keep the 30 million Americans who live with diabetes alive. Twelve Republicans joined all the Democrats to pass the bill. The price of insulin has soared in the U.S. in the past 20 years while it has stayed the same in other developed countries. A vial of insulin that cost $21 in 1999 in the U.S. cost $332 in 2019. Currently, insulin costs ten times more in the United States than in any other developed country.

According to the nonprofit academic medical center Mayo Clinic, the cost of insulin has skyrocketed because people need it to live, there is a monopoly on production, there is no regulation of the cost, and there are companies that profit from keeping prices artificially high.

While all drug prices are high, the reasons that pharmaceutical companies have given for the high pricing of other drugs do not apply to insulin. The drug is more than 100 years old, so there are no development costs. The cost is not a result of free market forces, since the jump in cost does not track with inflation. Indeed, insulin operates in a system that is the opposite of the free market: because people need insulin to survive, they cannot simply decide not to buy it if the price gets too high.

According to experts, there are currently only three clear options to bring down the price if the companies won’t. The government could negotiate with pharmaceutical companies on prices, as every other western country does, but the influence of drug companies in Congress makes such a measure hard to pass. We could shift the cost of the high prices onto insurers: employers and the government, which pays for healthcare through Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Administration, and so on. Or we can keep shifting the cost to the consumers.

Democrats wrote a much more sweeping proposal to lower a range of drug costs into the Build Back Better bill that Senate Republicans killed, and say they want to continue to push for the government to be able to negotiate with drug companies. At the same time, they say, we cannot wait any longer to make insulin affordable for the diabetics who need it. So House Democrats and 12 House Republicans have passed a law regulating the cost that consumers—who will die if they don’t get insulin—have to pay for the product. That cap will shift the cost onto insurers, including the government.

The insurance industry opposed the measure, saying it would not actually bring down costs and might create higher premiums as insurers have to cover the costs consumers won’t. Most Republicans opposed the measure, saying it would give the government too much say in healthcare. The Republican members on the House Committee on Ways and Means said it was a “socialist drug pricing scheme from [the Democrats’] failed radical tax and spending spree.”

mickeyrat

 April 2, 2022 (Saturday)

Today, Ukrainian soldiers recaptured the areas around Kyiv that Russian forces had taken early in the invasion. Retaking the territory, they found mined homes, executed civilians, and, in the city of Bucha near Kyiv, a mass grave of nearly 280 civilians. In the town of Trostyanets, the evacuating Russians defecated in the rooms of the police station and on a dead civilian outside.  

The reported war crimes and atrocities have made it impossible to separate the Russian troops from Russian president Vladimir Putin. Their shared criminality will have the effect of solidifying Putin’s power by making all the Russians outcasts together as they have deliberately demonstrated they reject the western rules of war. As Russia expert Tom Nichols put it: “If Putin's goal was to cement his grip on power by making Russia hated for decades to come, well, congratulatons*, I guess.”

That Putin has taken as many as 400,000 Ukrainians to Russia as potential hostages as he tries to bargain his way out of crippling sanctions or into land concessions is cause for concern. Russian troops continue to bombard the valuable deepwater Black Sea port of Odesa.

Refugees fleeing Russia for Finland before the last train service between Russia and Europe ended last week told writer William Doyle of a population in Russia gradually coming to realize they have fallen under the iron hand of a dictator as the government cracks down on dissent.

“The problem is that there are many Russians who cannot admit our mistakes, cannot realize that we are trapped in a nightmare,” an art director told Doyle. “It’s much easier to watch TV and absorb the government propaganda. It’s easier to not think…. You have this vast country with many people who are poor and who have never travelled abroad. They are very isolated, with no communication, only their television. They work hard all day, come home exhausted and the TV is their only source.”

A business manager told Doyle: “It seems to me that a majority of people support [the war], but I am not sure. The government propaganda tries to make it seem that a majority support it, but I don’t know. None of my friends, none of the people I know support it.”

Another man talked of the sanctions squeezing Russia and said: “As a consequence of believing the lies and spreading the lies on a national scale, maybe some Russian people will see that they won’t have any of these nice, good, warm, cozy comfortable things coming from the West anymore…. Maybe,” he said, “they should reconsider their attitude toward the propaganda they are listening to from the TV set.”

At home, CNN has reported more news about the gap of seven and a half hours in the White House diary and phone logs from the crucial hours of the January 6 insurrection. It turns out that about two weeks ago, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol interviewed the person in charge of compiling the president’s diary record.

In order to compile that official record, the White House diarist normally gets information from the Secret Service about the president’s movements, the phone logs from the switchboard, and the records from the Oval Office, including phone calls, visitors, and activities.

That record-keeping system was in place until January 4, 2021, but by then the plot to overturn the election was in high gear. Yesterday, the January 6 committee revealed a text message to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows dated January 3, saying: “I have details on the call that [trade advisor Peter] Navarro helped convene yesterday with legislators as part of his effort to get Pence to delay certification…including that the president participated….”

That call appears to have been reported at the time as including “nearly 300 state lawmakers” who were provided with resources to use “as they make calls for state legislatures to meet to investigate the election and consider decertifying their state election results.” An article about it stated: “A similar briefing is being scheduled in Washington, D.C., at the request of Members of Congress.”

On January 3, lawyer John Eastman wrote his memo outlining a plan for then–Vice President Pence to overturn the election results.

That night, Trump’s public schedule for the next day, tweeted by CNN’s Daniel Dale, read simply: “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings. The president will depart the White House at 6:10PM for a victory rally in Dalton, GA.” One of those “many meetings,” was with Eastman, Pence, Pence’s counsel Greg Jacob, and Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short to show Pence and his team the memo. Pence (who would have been the fall guy if the plan blew up) said he had no power to do what they were asking him to do.

Trump’s published schedule for January 5 was even shorter. It read: “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings.” On that day, the information for the White House diary stopped abruptly. In a dramatic departure from normal operations, on the 5th the diarist didn’t get any of the normal information.

Trump’s schedule for January 6, published the night of the 5th, read again: “President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening. He will make many calls and have many meetings.” This time, though, it added: “The President will depart for the Ellipse at 10:50AM to deliver remarks at a Save America Rally.”

They were just little things, those silly schedules and the articles about some deluded plan to decertify the state election results, littler than the many other norms Trump had broken. They were easily ignored or explained away by those who supported the president as well as by those just eager to see him gone. And yet, it turns out we should have been paying better attention: they were the signs that we were on the verge of losing our democracy.

---

*Nichols did not misspell this. I did, to get rid of the "text delights" which drive me bananas. Right now, I don't remember how to erase them.

mickeyrat

  April 3, 2022 (Sunday)

After a long week, here's a little piece of peace: an old mill dam now deep in the woods. It's one of my favorite places.

I'm calling it quits early tonight. I'll see you tomorrow.

[Photo by Buddy Poland.]

mickeyrat

 April 4, 2022 (Monday)

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee deadlocked, 11 to 11, on whether to send Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court to the full Senate for a vote. The Democrats can still move the nomination forward through procedural measures, and three Republicans—Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Mitt Romney (R-UT)—have said they will vote for her, so her confirmation is assured (even if Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who has not yet said how she will vote, votes no).

Jackson is very popular as a nominee: a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that only 27% of Americans oppose her confirmation while 42% support it (31% say they’re not sure what they think).

Many of the Republicans acknowledged that Judge Jackson is highly qualified for the position, but they cannot abide what they call her “activism,” by which they mean her willingness to use the federal government to protect the rights of American citizens within the states. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who is the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, says he opposes Jackson’s confirmation because he disagrees fundamentally with her “views on the role of judges and the role that they should play in our system of government.”

The “originalist” judges who object to the court’s use of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights control the court by a vote of 6 to 3. If she is confirmed, Judge Jackson will not change that split. The Republicans are looking to make their vision take over the court entirely.

The hearings for Jackson had Republicans questioning abortion rights, of course, but also the right to birth control, interracial marriage, and gay marriage. Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have suggested they would also overturn Gideon v. Wainwright, the 1963 Supreme Court decision that says states must provide defendants with legal counsel. The attacks on Jackson for her time as a public defender—the element of our justice system that guarantees poor people can have lawyers in court—suggest that the right to publicly funded legal counsel, too, is no longer secure.

Ideologically opposed to Jackson, but unable to find real cause for attacking her stellar record, the Republicans have gone after her for what they claim is her lenient sentencing of child pornographers. These claims have been widely dismissed by legal experts as baseless: even a conservative writer for the National Review, who otherwise opposed Jackson, called them “meritless to the point of demagoguery.” But the party doubled down on the lies.

In the Washington Post, Dana Milbank ran the numbers. In the four days of the hearings for Jackson’s nomination, senators on the Judiciary Committee used the words “child porn,” “pornography,” and “pornographer” 165 times. They used some version of “sex” (“sexual assault,” “sex crimes,” and so on) 142 times. They said “pedophile” 15 times and “predators” 13 times, one time more than the Bill of Rights came up. Sometimes the words came from Democrats defending Jackson, but the overwhelming majority of the comments came from Republicans attacking Jackson. That pattern continued today as senators made statements before their votes suggesting that Jackson had done all she could to turn those who commit sex crimes against children loose on the country.

Their attacks worked on their constituents. Before Biden nominated Jackson, when a Yahoo News/YouGov poll asked people to assess Jackson’s qualifications, 57% of Republicans said she was qualified. Only 19% of Republicans (and 11% of all Americans) said she was not qualified. While the hearings made her lose some support across the board, it still left her popular with Democrats and Independents. Republican opinions, though, have changed dramatically. Now just 31% say she’s qualified, and 47% say she’s unqualified.  

With their focus on sex crimes against children, Republicans are openly courting the QAnon vote, even though Republican words do not always seem to match their actions. We learned today that Florida governor Ron DeSantis delayed the release of public records involving a Florida state official, Halsey Beshears, who is linked to the underage sex crimes investigation in that state. Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is also under investigation in that case.

The implications of the focus on sex crimes against children are larger than the next election, though. Republicans are increasingly abandoning the party’s position in favor of small government, a position it adopted under Ronald Reagan, and calling for a strong government to enforce right-wing social policies.

In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis on March 28 signed a bill banning kindergarten through third-grade public school teachers from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity, a measure its opponents have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law. The Walt Disney Company, which is the state’s largest employer with 80,000 employees there, didn’t take a position on the bill until finally, under intense pressure from inside the company, Disney’s CEO Bob Chapek came out against the measure and promised the company would donate $5 million to LBGTQ organizations.

DeSantis called Disney’s opposition “radical” and tore into “woke” corporations. He has suggested that the Florida legislature should cancel Disney’s special status in Florida, a status that essentially makes it a local government. Right-wing commentators have cheered him on, eager to use government power to retaliate against companies that bow to popular pressure in favor of Black rights, LGBTQ rights, and so on.

This has pushed them into the camp of authoritarians, and they are using fears of sexual attacks on children to win support for that authoritarianism. When Hungary’s Viktor Orbán won reelection yesterday, columnist Rod Dreher tweeted: “Viktor Orban wins crushing re-election victory. Groomers hardest hit. [Governor Ron DeSantis], you are onto something!”

Pushing Orbán’s voters yesterday was a referendum on the ballot that included questions like: “Do you support the unrestricted exposure of underage children to sexually explicit media content that may affect their development?” DeSantis’s spokesperson Christina Pushaw tweeted: “Love the referendum idea. Wish the USA could do something similar[.]” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also applauded Orbán’s approach to “sex ed” and tweeted: “Congratulatons* to Viktor Orban on winning a victory well deserved! He’s leading Hungary the right way and we need this in America.”

As soon as his victory was announced—it was a done deal thanks to his manipulation of the mechanics of elections—Orbán reaffirmed his friendship with Russian president Vladimir Putin and took a hit at Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, who is defending his country against Putin’s invasion.

On that same day that Orbán took the side opposed to Zelensky, we learned more about the atrocities that took place in Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, where Russian soldiers raped and executed civilians. “You may remember I got criticized for calling Putin a war criminal,” President Joe Biden said today. “Well, the truth of the matter is, you saw what happened in Bucha…he is a war criminal.”

Today, the U.S., Europe, and allies prepared more sanctions against Russia, and the U.S. froze currency reserves Russia needs to make payments on its debt, forcing it closer to default.

--

*Again, my misspelling to avoid those balloons.

tempo_n_groove

Came up in my feed. 

mickeyrat

  April 5, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today, former president Barack Obama returned to the White House to talk about the Affordable Care Act (ACA), popularly known as Obamacare. He noted there have been changes in the White House since he left in 2017. For one thing, "[t]here’s a cat running around," he joked, "which I guarantee you [his family’s dogs] Bo and Sunny would have been very unhappy about.”

Obama signed the ACA into law in 2010. Today, 31 million Americans have healthcare coverage thanks to it. They can’t be denied coverage because of preexisting conditions. The ACA has lowered prescription drug costs for 12 million seniors, and it has enabled young people to stay on their parents’ insurance until they’re 26. It’s eliminated lifetime limits on benefits.

Republicans have loathed the ACA since Obama signed it into law in 2010. This is a modern-day stance, by the way: it was actually Republican president Theodore Roosevelt who first proposed universal healthcare at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Republican president Dwight Eisenhower who first tried to muscle such a program into being with the help of the new department created under him: the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which in 1979 became the Department of Health and Human Services. Its declared mission was "improving the health, safety, and well-being of America." In contrast to their forebears, today’s Republicans do not believe the government has such a role to play.

Last month, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) said the Republicans’ goal is to obstruct Biden and the Democrats until they retake power, and then immediately make good on old promises like repealing the ACA. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL), chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, has proposed sunsetting all laws after five years and then passing the popular ones again. Since Republicans kill all social welfare bills with the filibuster, it’s not hard to imagine that Scott has the Affordable Care Act in his sights.

Enrollment in healthcare coverage under the ACA is at a record high since Biden took office, since he helped to push enrollment by opening special enrollment periods and dramatically increasing outreach. The law is popular: a poll last month by healthcare analysts Kaiser showed that 55% of Americans like it while 42% do not.

Today, Biden signed an executive order to increase outreach and coverage still further, and to urge Congress to deal with the “family glitch” in the law that determines eligibility for subsidies based on whether the primary enrollee can afford coverage for herself, rather than for her family. Fixing this glitch would lower costs for about 1 million Americans and open up coverage for another 200,000.  

Before the signing, Obama, President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris used the ACA to talk about the difference between the two parties.

Harris noted that “the ACA is the most consequential healthcare legislation passed in generations in our country” and that it was more than just a law, it was “a statement of purpose; a statement about the nation we must be, where all people—no matter who they are, where they live, or how much they earn—can access the healthcare they need, no matter the cost.”

She called on Congress to pass legislation that would let Medicare directly negotiate prescription drug prices with pharmaceutical companies (as every other developed country does). With 60 million people enrolled in Medicare, the program would have significant bargaining power to negotiate prices.

The vice president also called on the 12 states refusing to expand Medicaid to do so, enrolling the 4 million people who are now excluded. Acknowledging those people determined to take away abortion rights, she noted that women without medical care during pregnancy are significantly more likely to die than those that do have it.

Obama then explained why the Democrats worked so hard to begin the process of getting healthcare coverage for Americans. “[W]e’re not supposed to do this just to occupy a seat or to hang on to power,” he said. “We’re supposed to do this because it’s making a difference in the lives of the people who sent us here.”

The ACA shows, he said, that “if you are driven by the core idea that, together, we can improve the lives of this generation and the next, and if you’re persistent—if you stay with it and are willing to work through the obstacles and the criticism and continually improve where you fall short, you can make America better—you can have an impact on millions of lives.”

Then Biden took the podium, adding that passing the ACA was about dignity. It was about the “countless Americans lying in bed at night, staring at the ceiling, wondering, ‘My God—my God, what if I get really sick?  What am I going to do? What is my family going to do? Will I lose the house?’ Discussions we had in my house with my dad when he lost his health insurance—’Who’s going to pay for it? Who’s going to take care of my family?’”  

He warned that the Republicans want to get rid of the law. “[P]ay very close attention, folks,” he said. “If Republicans have their way, it means 100 million Americans with pre-existing conditions can once again be denied healthcare coverage by their insurance companies. That’s what the law was before Obamacare. In addition, tens of millions of Americans could lose their coverage, including young people who will no longer be able to stay on their parents’ insurance policy to age 26. Premiums are going to go through the roof.”

“Instead of destroying the Affordable Care Act,” he said, “let’s keep building on it.”

Meanwhile, the Republicans continue to double down on the culture wars that whip up their base. By a vote of 70 to 14, the Oklahoma legislature has just passed a Republican bill making it illegal for doctors to perform an abortion unless the patient’s life is in danger. Violating the law carries a punishment of up to 10 years in prison and a $100,000 fine. There was little discussion of the measure, since lawmakers unexpectedly added it to the agenda Monday night.

Abortion is a constitutional right, defined by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. It is also popular in the U.S., with about 60% of Americans supporting Roe v. Wade and about 75% believing that abortion access should be between a woman and her doctor. Only 20% say that access should be regulated by law.

Those culture wars are pushing today’s right wing toward authoritarianism as they seek to enforce their views on the rest of the country.

Today, as we learned of more atrocities by Russian troops in Ukraine, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan resolution that called on the U.S. government to uphold the founding democratic principles of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO): “individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.” Since those values “face external threats from authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China and internal threats from proponents of illiberalism,” and since NATO countries have called for a recommitment to the founding values of the alliance, the resolution supports the establishment of a Center for Democratic Resilience within NATO headquarters. The resolution reaffirmed the House’s “unequivocal support” for NATO.

The resolution was introduced by Gerry Connolly (D-VA), who sits on both the Foreign Affairs and Government Oversight Committees, and had 35 other cosponsors from both parties. The vote in favor was bipartisan, with 219 Democrats and 142 Republicans voting yes. After all, what’s there to oppose in a nod to democratic values and diplomacy, when Ukraine is locked in a deadly battle to defend itself against an invasion and brutal occupation by Russian forces directed by authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin?

Sixty-three Republicans—those who tend to support former president Trump—voted against the resolution.

mickeyrat

  April 6, 2022 (Wednesday)

Today, all but two of the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted against a resolution finding Trump aides Dan Scavino and Peter Navarro in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Among the early “no” votes was Representative Greg Pence (R-IN), whose brother, Vice President Mike Pence, was in danger from the mob on January 6 after then-president Trump blamed him for his refusal to overturn the election. The two who voted in favor were committee vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) and committee member Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).

The Republicans explicitly backed former president Trump and insisted that the investigation of the January 6 insurrection was simply a way to try to keep Trump off the ballot in 2024 and to distract from scandals potentially involving President Joe Biden’s son Hunter (who holds no government office).

The Democrats, in turn, warned that Trump’s attack on our democracy must not go unchallenged. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) called the Republicans a party “drenched in Putin propaganda” and noted that it had turned even on Cheney, who used to rank third in the leadership of House Republicans, “[b]ecause if you don’t go along with Donald Trump…a cult…they will attack you.”

An important current feeding the Republicans’ embrace of Trump is that the Republican leadership is wedded to an ideology that sees the most important American principle as a specific form of individual economic “freedom,” not democracy.

After World War II, Americans of both parties began to defend the concept of democracy, in which every person was equal before the law. That meant civil rights for Black and Brown Americans, as well as for women. But it also meant that the government tried to keep the economic playing field level enough that everyone had an equal shot at rising to prosperity.

Beginning with the New Deal in the 1930s and reaching into the 1970s, the government regulated business and protected workers and consumers. Those opposed to such a government insisted that such protections hurt their freedom to arrange their businesses as they saw fit. Second to their hatred of regulations was their dislike of the taxes that funded the government bureaucrats who inspected their factories, as well as underpinning social welfare programs. But it was the promise to cut taxes for working Americans that enabled them to take the White House in 1980.

The idea that America meant freedom for individuals to act as they wished took over the Republican Party after the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Beginning in 1981, the party focused on tax cuts to put more money in the hands of the wealthy, who would, they insisted, use it to expand the economy. Using the government to defend the “demand side,” by protecting equality, would destroy the ability of business leaders to arrange the economy in the most productive way possible. It was, Republicans said, “socialism.” And so, Republicans focused on cutting regulations and slashing taxes.

Rather than revise their ideology when their “supply side” economics concentrated wealth upward rather than promoting widespread prosperity, the Republicans doubled down on it, promoting deregulation and tax cuts above all else. They have now, in the second generation since Reagan, become convinced that their version of “freedom” is the fundamental principle on which the United States stands and that any challenge to it will destroy the country.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida in late February, the attendees had little to say about authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin’s  invasion of democratic Ukraine, which had happened days before. But they had plenty to say about Democrats.

On February 26, Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) gave a speech in which he said “We survived the war of 1812, Civil War, World War I and World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War,” but “[t]oday, we face the greatest danger we have ever faced: The militant left-wing in our country has become the enemy within.” He claimed: “The woke Left now controls the Democrat Party. The entire federal government, the news media, academia, big tech, Hollywood, most corporate boardrooms, and now even some of our top military leaders… They want to end the American experiment. They want to replace freedom with control.”

This is completely wrong historically, of course. But the rising extremism of the Republican leadership suggests that it is concerned that American voters, including Republican voters, are turning against the ideology of “freedom” that focuses on concentrating wealth on the supply side of the economic equation and would like to see the government try to restore some semblance of equality. This would mean higher taxes on the wealthy.  

A YouGov poll released April 1 shows that 60% of Americans think that billionaires don’t pay the full amount of taxes they owe. Among poorer voters, only 16% thought billionaires were playing fair, while a whopping 63% thought they were not, and 20% were not sure. Two thirds of Americans think that households should pay at least 20% of their income over $100 million in taxes. In not a single demographic category did that number fall under 50%, and the only category for which it was 50% was Republicans.

More broadly, Americans have called for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations now for years. In 2018, two thirds of Americans said they were dissatisfied with “the way income and wealth are distributed in the U.S.”; in 2017, 78% said that what bothers them about the U.S. tax system is that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share, and 80% said what bothers them is that corporations don’t pay their fair share.

Biden’s proposed $5.8-trillion 2023 budget, released at the end of March, proposes tax increases on the wealthy and on corporations. It would end Trump’s 2017 tax cut for the wealthy early. That cut sliced the top marginal income tax rate from 39.6 to 37% until December 31, 2025. It would also tax the interest on stocks and bonds, which currently is not taxed until those assets are sold, which means that their owners can accumulate large sums of money without ever being taxed on it, while wage workers pay full freight on their income. Biden wants to make American households worth more than $100 million pay a tax rate of at least 20% on their real income as well as on the gains on their unsold stocks and bonds.

The administration also wants to get rid of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Biden’s proposal would raise the corporate tax rate from the Trump low of 21% up to 28%.

The White House says these taxes would raise $1.5 trillion over the next decade, and it wants to use that money to fund public housing, science, police departments, climate change adjustments, education, pandemic preparedness, and, in this precarious time for democracy, increases to the military. While Trump’s tax cuts drove the national debt up to an astounding $23.2 trillion by the end of 2019 (up from $19.9 trillion when he took office), Biden promises to use money from his proposed tax increases to pay down the deficit.

Biden’s plans signal an end to the era of “freedom” in American politics and a return to a focus on equality and democracy. In this, they, hark back to the principles of the original Republican Party. During the Civil War, when faced with a mounting debt in their fight to protect the government, the Republicans invented the U.S. income tax in order, as Senate Finance Committee chair William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME)  said, to make sure that tax burdens would “be more equalized on all classes of the community, more especially on those who are able to bear them.” Representative Thaddeus Stevens (R-PA) agreed, saying: “It would be manifestly unjust to allow the large money operators and wealthy merchants, whose incomes might reach hundreds of thousands of dollars, to escape from their due proportion of the burden.”

Meanwhile, Senator Rick Scott’s “11-Point Plan to Rescue America” promises to put income taxes on the 50% of Americans who currently don’t make enough to be taxed. It’s part of his plan to “grow America’s economy, starve Washington’s economy, and stop Socialism.”

It's no wonder the Republicans are trying to keep the national focus on Trump and the culture wars.

mickeyrat

  April 7, 2022 (Thursday)

Today, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was confirmed to become Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden’s nominee by a vote of 53 to 47, with three Republicans joining all 50 Democrats in favor of confirmation. The three Republicans voting yes were Senators Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and Mitt Romney (R-UT).

Jackson’s elevation will not change the legal philosophy of the court. She will replace Justice Stephen Breyer, who was one of the three justices still on the court who do not adhere to the concept of “originalism,” which argues that the court must largely defer to state power rather than use the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights within the states. Six of the current nine justices, including the three appointed by former president Donald Trump, favor originalism.

It is likely that Justice Jackson will largely write dissents as her colleagues dismantle the legal frameworks that have shaped modern America. The ones currently on the table are the rights to abortion, marriage across racial lines, birth control, and gay marriage, but it is not only civil rights that are at risk. So are business regulation and protections for workers and consumers, and a decision last night suggests that the current Supreme Court will not defer to states when right-wing principles are at stake.

By a 5 to 4 decision, the court last night limited the power of states to stop big development projects that state officials worry will hurt the state’s environment. It did so under the so-called “shadow docket,” a system, rarely used in the past but now a key part of the court’s decision-making process, in which the court hands down decisions on an emergency basis without briefings or written decisions, so we have no idea on what grounds they are making their ruling. The American Petroleum Institute, the Interstate National Gas Association of America, and the National Hydropower Association all applauded the decision.

Jackson brings to the court a stellar record as well as experience as a public defender. She is the first justice with this experience since Thurgood Marshall, the first Black justice, who left the court in 1991. Public defenders are a central part of our legal system, for if indeed everyone is equal before the law, it is crucial for everyone to have legal representation before the court. The Supreme Court itself recognized this principle in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), although two current justices have suggested they would overturn it if given the opportunity.

Jackson’s diverse experience is vital to a Supreme Court that is a historical outlier in its uniformity of professional backgrounds. While she brings experience as a public defender to the court, there is no one on the court who has ever served in elective office. Historically, presidents have always sought to have at least a few justices who understand politics because they have been part of the political system and thus understand that what they are doing in their chamber is very real life to those of us on the outside. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female justice, was the last justice on the court who had held elected office; she had served in the Arizona state senate. She left the court in 2006.

Justice Jackson, though, brings something brand new and vital to the U.S. Supreme Court. As Justice Marshall broke the Supreme Court’s color barrier, and Justice O’Connor broke the Supreme Court’s gender barrier, she is breaking her own barrier: She is the Supreme Court’s first Black female justice.

Justice Jackson’s perspective on the law and its effect on those of us who live here is crucially important. Also important, though, is that her elevation to the highest court in the land demonstrates the principle, however poorly we might honor it on occasion, that we are all equal before the law.

Today, Vice President Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black vice president, presided over the Senate chamber for the momentous vote. Farnoush Amiri and Lisa Mascaro of the Associated Press described what came next. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus had come to witness history; Black female lawmakers sat together along the back walls. The visitor galleries filled with young people, including Black women and men. Most of the senators were at their desks, although two Republican senators—Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma—stayed in the cloakroom because they were not wearing ties, as Senate rules require.

Harris instructed the clerk to call the roll.

Voting moved quickly until it became clear that everyone had voted except Rand Paul (R-KY). As the Senate waited for him to show up, Harris gave Senators Rafael Warnock (D-GA) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) each a piece of vice-presidential stationery and asked the only two Black Democrats in the Senate to write a letter to a young Black woman to remember this day in history.
 
Then Paul cast his no vote from the cloakroom and the voting was over.

Jackson had won confirmation to the Supreme Court. When the final tally was announced, the Democrats broke out into applause and cheers. Murkowski joined them, while Romney applauded from across the aisle. Many Republicans had already left the chamber, but those remaining walked out during the applause. Romney remained alone on the Republican side, clapping.

The moment recalled another time of jubilation and hope, when lawmakers used their votes to declare all Americans equal before the law by passing the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. They ended the system of legal enslavement in the United States, a system that had divided Americans into different castes and given some people the power to rule the rest.

The New York Times recorded the scene when the measure passed in January 1865: “Thereupon rose a general shout of applause. The members on the floor huzzaed in chorus with deafening and equally emphatic cheers of the throng in the galleries. The ladies in the dense assemblage waved their handkerchiefs, and again and again the applause was repeated, intermingled with clapping of hands and exclamations of ‘Hurrah for freedom,’ ‘Glory enough for one day,’ &c. The audience were wildly excited, and the friends of the measure were jubilant. Never was a scene of such a joyous character before witnessed in the House of Representatives….”

Representative George W. Julian (R-IN) later remembered what it had been like to participate in that momentous day in 1865: “It seemed to me I had been born into a new life, and that the world was overflowing with beauty and joy, while I was inexpressibly thankful for the privilege of recording my name on so glorious a page of the nation’s history.”

After Jackson’s confirmation, Vice President Harris said: “I’m overjoyed, deeply moved…. There’s so much about what’s happening in the world now that is presenting some of the worst of this moment and human behaviors. And then we have a moment like this.”

Judge Jackson will be sworn in to her new role after Justice Breyer resigns in June. Until then, she will continue in her present position as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

mickeyrat

  April 8, 2022 (Friday)

“I have dedicated my career to public service because I love this country and our Constitution and the rights that make us free," Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said today at a White House ceremony celebrating her confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Also today, we learned that Donald Trump, Jr., texted Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on November 5, 2020, two days after the presidential election and two days before the media would call the election for President Elect Joe Biden: "We have operational control Total leverage…. Moral High Ground POTUS must start 2nd term now.”

The text, in the possession of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and reviewed by CNN reporters Ryan Nobles, Zachary Cohen, and Annie Grayer, suggested that even before the election was called for Biden, Trump’s people knew he would lose. Trump, Jr., offered a number of different ways in which Trump could nonetheless steal the election, most of which later materialized. Trump, Jr. apparently could not see why this would be a problem, since, "we have operational control.” “It's very simple," he texted: "We have multiple paths[.] We control them all."

At least some of Trump’s inner circle were clearly conspiring to overturn our democracy. Just who was involved remains unclear to the public, although the January 6 Committee has more information than we do, not least because both Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter, and Jared Kushner, her husband, both of whom acted as White House advisors, testified before the committee recently. Trump spoke with the committee virtually on Tuesday, for 8 hours. Kushner testified for several hours on March 31.

Their cooperation stands in stark contrast to the refusal of the rest of Trump’s senior advisors to respond to subpoenas. But on April 6, the January 6 committee received the 101 emails that Trump advisor John Eastman, the author of the Eastman memo laying out an illegal plan for Vice President Mike Pence to throw the election to Trump, had refused to hand over but that a federal judge, David Carter, reviewed and ordered released. In his decision, Carter wrote that it is “more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”

The committee today secured cooperation from an important witness to the insurrection. Charles Donohoe, the leader of a chapter of the extremist Proud Boys in North Carolina, pleaded guilty this morning to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and to assaulting police officers. He has agreed to testify against his co-defendants.

Hugo Lowell at The Guardian reports today that the January 6 committee is focusing on cooperation between the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers in a plan to stop the certification of Biden’s victory using physical force. The committee has reviewed video from Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker who filmed a meeting between the two groups in a parking garage on January 5. It has focused even more closely, though, on 17 minutes filmed at the attack itself, along with communications between the Proud Boys and rally organizers including Alexander and right-wing media personality Alex Jones.

Quested testified before the January 6 committee on Tuesday. “They’ve done an incredible amount of hard work and have an exceptional grasp,” Quested told Politico’s Kyle Cheney.  He called the events of January 6 a "constitutional attack" that was "very serious."

The committee is digging into how organizers used social media to spread disinformation and plan the January 6 insurrection. Cristiano Lima and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported yesterday that the committee has been talking to experts on social media, disinformation, and online extremism, and has recently hired a new analyst to pull things together. Committee members are also looking into the ways in which key influencers used social media to push their plans.

Right-wing activist Ali Alexander also agreed today to comply with a grand jury subpoena from the Department of Justice, seeking information about the organization of the events surrounding January 6. This indicates that the Justice Department is looking broadly at people close to Trump and that prosecutors believe those people might have committed crimes. In a statement made through a lawyer, Alexander said: “I did nothing wrong, and I am not in possession of evidence that anyone else had plans to commit unlawful acts.”

But in videos posted online and now deleted, Alexander boasted about his work planning the events of January 6. He claimed that he worked with Representatives Mo Brooks (R-AL), Paul Gosar (R-AZ),  and Andy Biggs (R-AZ) to put “maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting…so that who we couldn’t lobby, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body, hearing our loud roar from outside.”

And yet, for all the new information about the January 6 attack on our democracy, Republican lawmakers are focusing elsewhere. Today, in an unprecedented attack by a senator on a newly confirmed Supreme Court justice, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) released a video attacking Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. Although Graham voted to confirm Jackson to a Senate-confirmed judgeship just last year, yesterday he voted against her elevation to the Supreme Court. Today he said: “I voted no to Judge Jackson, and now I understand why the radical left wanted her so badly. She’s a judicial activist, she gets the outcome she wants no matter how the law’s written, when it comes to crime, her record is very, very dangerous.”

mickeyrat

  April 9, 2022 (Saturday)
 
On April 9, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant got out of bed with a migraine.

The pain had hit the day before as he rode through the Virginia countryside, where the United States Army had been harrying the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee, for days.

Grant knew it was only a question of time before Lee had to surrender. After four years of war, the people in the South were starving, and Lee’s army was melting away as men went home to salvage whatever they could of their farm and family. Just that morning, a Confederate colonel had thrown himself on Grant’s mercy after realizing that he was the only man in his entire regiment who had not already abandoned the cause. But while Grant had twice asked Lee to surrender, Lee continued to insist his men could fight on.
 
So Grant had gone to bed in a Virginia farmhouse on April 8, dirty, tired, and miserable with a migraine. He spent the night “bathing my feet in hot water and mustard, and putting mustard plasters on my wrists and the back part of my neck, hoping to be cured by morning.” His remedies didn't work. In the morning, Grant pulled on his clothes from the day before and rode out to the head of his column with his head throbbing.
 
As he rode, an escort arrived with a note from Lee requesting an interview for the purpose of surrendering the Army of Northern Virginia. “When the officer reached me I was still suffering with the sick headache,” Grant recalled, “but the instant I saw the contents of the note I was cured.”
 
The two men met in the home of Wilmer McLean in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Lee had dressed grandly for the occasion in a brand new general’s uniform carrying a dress sword; Grant wore simply the “rough garb” of a private with the shoulder straps of a lieutenant general. But the images of the noble South and the humble North hid a very different reality. As soon as the papers were signed, Lee told Grant his men were starving and asked if the Union general could provide the Confederates with rations. Grant didn’t hesitate. “Certainly,” he responded, even before he asked how many men needed food. He took Lee's answer—“about twenty-five thousand"—in stride, telling the general that "he could have... all the provisions wanted."
 
Four years before, southerners defending their vision of white supremacy had ridden off to war boasting that they would beat the North’s misguided egalitarian levelers in a single battle. By 1865, Confederates were broken and starving, while the United States of America, backed by a booming industrial economy that rested on ordinary women and men of all backgrounds, could provide rations for twenty-five thousand extra men on a moment’s notice.
 
The Civil War was won not by the dashing sons of wealthy planters, but by people like Grant, who dragged himself out of his blankets and pulled a dirty soldier's uniform over his pounding head on an April morning because he knew he had to get up and get to work.

mickeyrat

 April 10, 2022 (Sunday)

Buddy and I are visiting the Pacific Northwest for the first time, and he's been busy with his camera while I've been working.

Here is his view of Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach, Oregon. It's quite different than our own rocky coast, although the tufted puffins-- which are related to our Atlantic puffins-- had arrived for the season just before we got there.

I'm going to leave you with this image tonight so we can regroup for the coming week, which promises to be a busy one.

I'll see you tomorrow.

[Photo by Buddy Poland.]

mickeyrat

 April 11, 2022 (Monday)

Last week, we lost a crucially important voice in the media when media reporter Eric Boehlert died unexpectedly. In his last column for his publication Press Run, titled “Why is the press rooting against Biden?,” Boehlert wrote that there is such a “glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments” that it seems the press is “determined to keep Biden pinned down.”

Boehlert pointed to the extraordinary poll showing that only 28% of Americans know the country has been gaining jobs in the last year—7 million jobs, in fact—while 37% think the country has lost jobs. Under Biden, the U.S. has added more than 400,000 jobs a month for 11 months, the longest period of job growth since at least 1939. And yet, Boehlert pointed out, on the day the latest job report was released, cable news used the word “inflation” as many times as “jobs.” On Sunday, NBC’s “Meet the Press” ignored the economy and instead featured conversations about two problems for the Democrats in the midterms: immigration and Trump.

It is no secret that we are in a battle between democracy and authoritarianism in America and around the world. It seems to me that the Biden administration is seeking to weaken the ties of misguided voters to authoritarianism by proving that a democratic government can answer the needs of ordinary Americans. The administration appears to be taking the position that focusing on the latest outrage from the right wing locks the country into their view of the world: you are either for Trump or against him. Instead, the administration seems to be trying to demonstrate its own worldview, but with the press glued to Trump and the Republicans, the administration is having a hard time getting traction.

The White House has taken on the idea that the Democrats are unpopular in rural areas. On March 31, the Department of the Interior announced a $420 million investment in clean water in Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota. Today, the president announced a $440 million commitment to an “America the Beautiful Challenge” to attract up to $1 billion in private and philanthropic donations to conserve land, water, and wildlife across the country.

It also released today a 17-page bipartisan “playbook” to help rural communities identify more than 100 programs designed to fund rural infrastructure. It explains how to apply for funds to expand rural broadband, clean up pollution, improve transportation, fix rural bridges and roads, ensure clean water and sanitation, prepare for disasters including climate change, upgrade the electrical grid, and so on. These are critical needs that local communities, which cannot afford lobbyists, might need help navigating.

The administration is also sending officials into rural communities to make sure that billions of federal dollars and the resources they command reach across the country. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, EPA Administrator Michael Regan, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Infrastructure Coordinator Mitch Landrieu will all be on the road.  

Also today, the administration took steps to address medical billing practices and medical debt. It will collect information on how more than 2000 providers handle patients, and will weigh that information into grant-making decisions as well as sharing potential violations with law enforcement. The newly rebuilt Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, gutted by the former president, will investigate and hold accountable debt collectors that violate patients’ rights. The administration is also eliminating medical debt as a factor for underwriting in federal loan programs.  

Last week, Biden extended the moratorium on most federal student loan programs through the end of August—sooner than most Democrats wanted—and expunged the defaults of roughly 8 million federal student loan borrowers, permitting them to resume payments in good standing.

Finally, today, Biden nominated Steve Dettelbach, a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio, to direct the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). The bureau has not had a Senate-confirmed director since 2015 because gun-rights groups oppose those nominated to the position. The Senate has confirmed only one director in the past 16 years. Dettelbach is Biden’s second nominee; the Senate scuttled the first, a former ATF agent who called for gun regulations.  

The administration today announced a Justice Department rule that manufacturers of gun kits, which enable people to build weapons at home, will be considered gun manufacturers and must be licensed, the gun parts must have serial numbers, and buyers must have background checks. So-called ghost guns, assembled at home and unmarked and untraceable, are increasingly widespread. From 2016 to 2020, law enforcement recovered nearly 24,000 ghost guns at crime scenes.

Polls widely show that more than 80% of Americans support background checks for gun buyers. Nonetheless, Gun Owners of America vowed to fight the rule.

Biden’s worldview in which the government works for ordinary people contrasts with what we are learning about the worldview of the former administration under Trump, where a lack of oversight meant that money went to grifters and well-connected people.

There have been plenty of stories about the misuse of funds under the Trump administration, including the story on March 28 by Ken Dilanian and Laura Strickler of NBC that prosecutors are calling the distribution of funds under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), designed to keep businesses afloat during the pandemic, “the largest fraud in U.S. history.” As much as 10% of the relief money—$80 billion—was stolen in 2020, as money went out the door without verification checks (the Biden administration has since imposed verification rules). Swindlers also stole $90 billion to $400 billion from the Covid unemployment relief program, and another $80 billion from a different Covid relief program.

We have also learned that the State Department can’t account for the foreign gifts Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence, and other administration officials received in office because the officials did not submit an accounting, as is required by law.

But those stories pale in comparison to the news broken last night by ​​David D. Kirkpatrick and Kate Kelly of the New York Times: six months after Trump left office, an investment fund controlled by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), invested $2 billion with Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner, despite the fact that the fund advisors found Kushner’s new company “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” At the same time, they also invested about $1 billion in another new firm run by Trump’s former treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin.  

Kushner has little experience in private equity, and his firm consists primarily of that Saudi money; no American institutions have invested with him. The Saudi investment will net Kushner’s firm about $25 million a year in asset management fees, and the investors required him to hire qualified investment professionals to manage the money.

It certainly looks as if Kushner is being rewarded for his work on behalf of the kingdom, and perhaps in anticipation of influence in the future. Kushner defended MBS after news broke that the crown prince had approved the killing and dismemberment of U.S. resident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Kushner helped to broker $110 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia, even as Congress was outraged by MBS’s war in Yemen. Most concerning, though, is that Kushner had access to the most sensitive materials in our government. Career officials denied Kushner’s security clearance out of concern about his foreign connections, but Trump overruled them.

We also know that classified material labeled “Top Secret” was in the 15 boxes of documents belonging to the National Archives and Records Administration that Trump took to his home at Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is currently investigating.

mickeyrat

 April 12, 2022 (Tuesday)
 
On April 12, 1945, a visibly exhausted President Franklin Delano Roosevelt jerked in his chair while having his portrait painted in Warm Springs, Georgia. FDR put his hand up, said "I have a terrific pain in the back of my head," and lost consciousness. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage within hours.

When FDR entered the White House in 1933, he undertook to rebuild the nation after Republicans had run it into the ground.

Believing that businessmen were the engine that drove the economy and that any government regulations or taxes that hampered them would hurt growth, Republicans under presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover had slashed taxes and regulations. The superheated economy boomed, but real wages stagnated, and the profits from dramatically improved production all went to the top 1% of the economy.

When spokespeople tried to point out that the new economy shut farmers, immigrants, and minorities out, Republicans accused those groups of falling behind because they were lazy. But then, in October 1929, the stock market crashed and the Roaring Twenties stopped dead. People lost their jobs, their homes, and their hope.

In the presidential election of 1932, desperate voters threw the Republicans out of office and put in Democrats, led by former New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR recognized that the economic crisis created by unfettered capitalism threatened to end democracy forever as starving Americans turned either to communism or to fascism, as Europeans were doing.

FDR understood that to preserve democracy and the economic system on which it rested, the government must regulate business, protect workers, and provide a basic social safety net. His "New Deal for the American people" did exactly that, and it helped Americans weather the Depression until the extraordinary deficit spending of WWII ended it altogether.

Ordinary Americans celebrated a government that worked for everyone, rather than just the rich. And on April 13, they mourned the man who had piloted the country through that transition.

[Image from the FDR Memorial, Washington, D.C.]

mickeyrat

 April 13, 2022 (Wednesday)

“Democrats need to make more noise,” Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) told Greg Sargent of the Washington Post. “We have to scream from the rooftops, because this is a battle for the free world now.”

Sargent interviewed Schatz after the senator called out Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) on the floor of the Senate on April 7 for the profound disconnect between the Republican senator’s speeches and his actions. Hawley has placed a hold on President Joe Biden’s uncontroversial nominee for an assistant secretary of defense, saying that Biden’s support for Ukraine was “wavering” and that he wasn’t doing enough.

Of course, the Biden administration has been central to world efforts to support Ukraine in its attempt to hold off Russia’s invasion. Just today, Biden announced an additional $800 million in weapons, ammunition, and other security assistance to Ukraine. In contrast, Hawley voted to acquit former president Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress when he withheld $391 million of congressionally approved aid to Ukraine in order to pressure Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to cook up a story about Hunter Biden.

Hawley’s bad-faith argument goes beyond misleading statements about aid to Ukraine. Hawley has vowed that he will use his senatorial prerogative to hold up “every single civilian nominee” for the Defense Department unless Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin resigns. He has vowed the same for the State Department, demanding the resignation of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Hawley says his demands are because of the withdrawal from Afghanistan; he also said that Biden should resign. This is a highly unusual interference of the legislative branch of government with the executive branch. It also means that key positions in the departments responsible for managing our national security are not being filled, since Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer must use up valuable floor time to get nominations around Hawley’s holds.   

In February, for example, Hawley blocked the confirmation of the uncontroversial head of the Pentagon’s international security team, Celeste Wallander, a Russia expert and staunch advocate for fighting Russian aggression, even while Russian troops were massing on the Ukraine border. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) noted in frustration: “He’s complaining about the problems we have in Russia and Ukraine and he’s making it worse because he’s not willing to allow those nominees who can help with that problem to go forward.” (The Senate eventually voted 83–13 to confirm Wallander.)

Hawley is not the only Republican to be complaining about the administration even as he gums up the works.

Texas governor Greg Abbott has ordered Texas state troops to inspect all commercial trucks coming from Mexico after the federal government has already inspected them. Normally, Mexican authorities inspect a commercial driver’s paperwork and then officers from U.S. Customs and Border Protection thoroughly inspect the vehicle on the U.S. side of the international bridge, using dogs, X-ray machines, and personal inspections. At large crossings, officials from the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Transportation will make sure that products and trucks meet U.S. standards. Sometimes after that, the state will spot-check a few trucks for roadworthiness. Never before has Texas inspected the contents of each commercial vehicle.

Abbott instituted the new rule after the Biden administration announced it would end the pandemic emergency health order known as Title 42. This is a public health authority used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to protect against the spread of disease. It was put in place by the Trump administration in March 2020. Title 42 allows the U.S. government to turn migrants from war-torn countries away at the border rather than permitting them to seek asylum as international law requires.

Abbott said the new rule would enable troopers to search for drugs and smuggled immigrants, which he claims the administration is not doing. But journalists Mitchell Ferman, Uriel J. García, and Ivan Pierre Aguirre of the Texas Tribune report that officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety do not appear to be examining the trucks and have not announced any captured drugs or undocumented immigrants.

Wait times at border crossings have jumped from minutes to many hours, with Mexican truckers so frustrated they blocked the roads from the southern side, as well. Truckers report being stuck in their trucks for as much as 30 hours without food or water. About $440 billion worth of goods cross our southern border annually, and Abbot’s stunt has shut down as much as 60% of that trade. The shutdown will hammer those businesses that depend on Mexican products. It will also create higher prices and shortages across the entire country, especially as perishable foods rot in transit.

On Twitter, Democratic candidate for Texas governor Beto O’Rourke showed a long line of trucks behind him in Laredo and said: “What you see behind me is inflation.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki issued a statement today saying: “Governor Abbott’s unnecessary and redundant inspections of trucks transiting ports of entry between Texas and Mexico are causing significant disruptions to the food and automobile supply chains, delaying manufacturing, impacting jobs, and raising prices for families in Texas and across the country. Local businesses and trade associations are calling on Governor Abbott to reverse this decision…. Abbott’s actions are impacting people’s jobs, and the livelihoods of hardworking American families.”

Tonight, Abbott backed down on his rule, and normal traffic seems to be resuming over one of the key bridges between Mexico and the U.S., but his stunt indicates that Republicans plan to use inflation and immigration as key issues to turn out their base for the 2022 midterm elections. Today, pro-Trump Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who replaced Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) as the House Republican Conference Chair, the third-highest Republican in the House, tweeted: “We must SECURE our southern border.”

Abbott has also ordered the Texas National Guard to the U.S. border with Mexico to conduct “migration drills” in preparation for an influx of migrants. But Abbott’s use of the 10,000 National Guard personnel last fall for a border operation to prevent an influx of migrants seemed to be a political stunt: it led to complaints from National Guard personnel of lack of planning, lack of pay, lack of housing, and lack of reason to be there.

Abbott has deployed troops in the past while he was under fire for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the February 2021 winter storm that left millions of Texans without heat or electricity for days and killed 246. This deflection seemed to be at work last February, too, when Abbott issued a letter saying that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services should investigate any instances of care for transgender children as child abuse. That letter appeared just as it came to light that Abbott was behind the extraordinarily high electricity prices in the 2021 storm. Although Abbott’s office had said he was not involved in the decision to charge maximum electricity prices, in February, Bill Magness, the former CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas that runs the state’s electrical grid, said Abbott had personally ordered him to keep prices at their maximum: $9,000 per megawatt hour.

And so Abbott grabbed headlines with a bill attacking transgender children.

Today, Abbott sent a bus of migrants seeking asylum to Washington, D.C., where they were set down right outside the offices of the Fox News Channel, which filmed them disembarking. These migrants have been processed by federal authorities and are awaiting decisions from federal judges about whether they will be allowed to remain in the U.S. "I think it’s pretty clear this is a publicity stunt," Psaki said.

And finally, tonight, under the category of bad-faith arguments, it is clear that the current Supreme Court has run amok. Republicans attack “activist judges” who want to protect civil rights in the states by using the Fourteenth Amendment’s rule that the states cannot deprive a citizen of the equal protection of the laws. But Republican justices are making up their own law outside the normal boundaries of the court.

On April 6, five Supreme Court justices agreed to reinstate a Trump-era rule that limits the ability of states to block projects that pollute their rivers and streams. The court did so under the so-called “shadow docket,” a form of decision previously used to address emergencies, in which the court makes a decision without arguments or written explanations. Last week, Chief Justice John Roberts indicated just how far off the rails the current Supreme Court has slid when he joined the dissent against the majority’s decision out of concern for the use of this shadow docket as a way to hand down unbriefed and unexplained decisions.

Hawley is not the only Republican these days operating in bad faith.

mickeyrat

 April 14, 2022 (Thursday)

Today’s stories illuminate the increasingly dangerous international struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.

On the world stage, that struggle is most visible these days in the invasion of democratic Ukraine by the authoritarian president of Russia, Vladimir Putin. Putin apparently believed his invasion would be a cakewalk, but we are now in day 51 of Putin’s brutal attack, and while Ukraine is badly battered, it is holding strong.

Yesterday, Ukrainian Neptune missiles sank Russia’s flagship cruiser Moskva in the Black Sea. The humiliation of losing a flagship to Ukraine prompted Russian state propaganda first to claim that the ship sank from an accident and then to insist that their real enemy in the war was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an organization Russian leaders consider significant enough to struggle with, unlike “weak” Ukraine.

A study out today from political scientists Ryan Grauer and Dominic Tierney reveals why democracies have an advantage over authoritarians in war. The sharing of power across officials in the legislature, judiciary, and executive branches means there is more open debate, reducing the chance of unpopular wars and, by extension, bad decisions. Observers of Russia, for example, blame the loss of the Moskva, as well as the miscalculation of Ukraine’s ability to fight, on a refusal to take accounts of Ukraine’s abilities seriously.  

Grauer and Tierney also note that the ability of people in a democracy to protest means leaders cannot fight unpopular wars and stay in power, and that democratic countries do not tend to go to war with other democracies. Grauer and Tierney argue that the need to gain public support for wars makes it hard for democratic leaders to fight other democracies toward which their people might have good feelings, or that can put up strong resistance.

That speaks to the ability of democracies to work together, and Grauer and Tierney’s study helps to explain why Russia’s war of choice against a democratic neighbor has strengthened the alliances of those countries committed to national self-determination. Finland and Sweden, which have not previously expressed an interest in joining NATO, are now so seriously considering it that today a Russian spokesperson warned that if they did so, Russia would move nuclear weapons closer to Europe. Finnish former prime minister Alexander Stubb said his country was already “well prepared” for any Russian actions.

Yesterday, in a speech at the Atlantic Council, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen noted the multilateral cooperation that has enabled countries across the world to isolate Russia economically. Countries have joined together, she said, not to advance any one country’s foreign policy objectives, but “in support of our principles—our opposition to aggression, to widespread violence against civilians, and in alignment with our commitment to a rules-based global order that protects peace and prosperity.”

"Going forward,” the treasury secretary said, “it will be increasingly difficult to separate economic issues from broader considerations of national interest, including national security.” She warned China that it runs the risk of being shut out of this system if it refuses to stand against Russia’s invasion.

Yellen promised that countries would work together to address the food shortages the war would bring to developing nations, and called for allied nations to expand their economic alliances for the twenty-first century.

She called for limiting supply chains to “countries we know we can count on” and for developing trade and data exchanges with those same countries in such a way as to protect American workers. She called for building on last year’s global minimum tax deal to enable governments to tax corporations without encouraging them to move to cheaper countries, for more financial flexibility to combat financial crises, and for more investment in the developing world. She urged a global transition to cleaner energy and the strengthening of our global health systems to combat future pandemics.

“Some may say that now is not the right time to think big,” Yellen said, but she noted that Treasury officials began crafting proposals for a new postwar international financial structure in 1941, even before the U.S. entered World War II. In 1944, with the war still raging, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said: “It is fitting that even while the war for liberation is at its peak, [we] should gather to take counsel with one another respecting the shape of the future which we are to win.” Just like then, Yellen said, “we ought not wait for a new normal.  We should begin to shape a better future today.”

Democracies are at risk from authoritarianism today in large part because centralizing power in a few wealthy people permits those people to continue to pocket disproportionate shares of the national wealth.

A study released yesterday by ProPublica of leaked tax documents from the Internal Revenue Service revealed how our current laws permit the very wealthy to sidestep taxes and amass greater and greater wealth. According to Forbes, the wealth of the richest 25 Americans rose more than $400 billion from 2014 to 2018, giving them a combined wealth of $1.1 trillion. It would take the wealth of 14.3 million ordinary American wage earners to get to that number. During those years, those 25 richest Americans paid $13.6 billion in taxes, a true tax rate of 3.4%.

Those with virtually unlimited money can buy the tools to spread propaganda in favor of their position. That concern is behind the fight over “free speech” that right-wing leaders have launched against social media platforms that have excluded their lies and calls for violence.

It is also behind the outcry today over the proposal of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, allegedly the richest man in the world, to buy Twitter for a cash offer of $43 billion in a hostile takeover of the popular platform. (According to ProPublica, Musk paid no income tax in 2018.) Musk says he wants to own the platform himself to make it more “broadly inclusive,” because he believes that inclusion is “extremely important to the future of civilization…. I don’t care about the economics at all.”

Musk’s call for “free speech” is perceived to be a sign that he would reopen the platform to former president Donald Trump and others currently banned from it because of their lies about the January 6 insurrection. Right-wing politicians lauded the potential purchase, while journalists, who use the platform intensively to keep track of breaking stories, mulled whether they could stay if it becomes a haven for the right wing.

That right wing appears to be dominating the United States these days as the Republican Party has traded power for defense of democracy. Yesterday, CNN reported that a new book about the last days of the Trump presidency says that then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) indulged Trump’s attempt to overturn the election in order to get Trump’s help in the Georgia runoff election for the Senate so that the Republicans could stay in power there.

The Big Lie that Trump had really won the election has now become a litmus test for party members, as he is tightening his grip on the Republican Party. Today, in a clear indication that party leaders intend to hold the door open for a 2024 presidential run for Trump or someone like him, the Republican National Committee voted unanimously to withdraw from debates sponsored by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Commission on Presidential Debates. Trump repeatedly insisted the 2020 presidential debates, even the one hosted by Fox News Channel journalist Chris Wallace, were biased against him.

Trump hates debates not least because his knowledge of political topics is weak; in an interview on Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show last night, Trump appeared not to understand the difference between NATO—a defensive alliance of 30 member states including the Baltic states and the U.S.—and the European Union, a political and economic union of 27 member states primarily located in Europe. In a discussion about NATO, he claimed to have asked then-German chancellor Angela Merkel: “How many Chevrolets are you selling this month in Munich or Berlin?”

He added: “she looked at me and [said,] ‘Well, probably none.’”

In the same interview, Trump refused to condemn Putin and appeared to blame NATO for the invasion.

mickeyrat

  April 15, 2022 (Friday)

Early in the morning of April 15, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln breathed his last. The night before, he and his wife had gone to see a play—a comedy. One of the last men to talk to him before he left for the theater said it seemed the cares of the previous four years were melting away. The Confederacy was all but defeated, and the nation seemed to be on its way to a prosperous, inclusive new future.

The bullet that killed Lincoln had been delivered by John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor poisoned by the belief that Lincoln’s use of the federal government to end human enslavement as a central part of the nation’s economy was tyranny.

Since the 1830s, southern Democratic leaders had gotten around the sticky problem of the Declaration of Independence, with its insistence that “all men are created equal,” by insisting that democracy simply meant that men could elect their leaders at the state level. If voters chose to do unpopular things—like take Indigenous lands, enslave their Black neighbors, or impose taxes on Mexicans and Chinese and not on white men—that was their prerogative. Even if the vast majority of the U.S. population opposed those state laws, there was nothing the federal government could do to change them.

The only thing the national government could do was to protect property, and that power was expansive: in 1859, enslavers would demand that the government take the extraordinary step of enforcing enslavement in the western territories. But, they insisted, the government had no power to do anything else. It could do nothing that the Framers had not enumerated in the Constitution, even if the vast majority of Americans wanted it to establish colleges for poor men, for example, or lay a road across the Cumberland Gap for western migrants, or dredge the harbors where trading schooners kept commerce flowing.

To men like Lincoln, the men who organized the Republican Party, this simply made no sense. By its very nature, such an argument concentrated such wealth and power in a few men that the Republicans talked constantly of “oligarchy.”

The point of a democratic government, they believed, was to answer the will of the majority of voters in the whole country. During the Civil War, the Republicans used the government to provide homesteads for settlers, create public colleges, distribute seeds (no small thing in an era when seeds were handed down in families and poor men often had no access to such legacies), charter a national railroad, invent national taxation, and—finally—end systemic human enslavement.  

This system was wildly popular, but those determined to retain control of their states insisted it was tyranny. No longer able to manipulate the political system in their favor, they turned to violence. “Sic semper tyrannis!”-- thus always to tyrants-- Booth yelled from the stage at Ford’s Theater, after pulling the trigger.

The old Democratic argument for state’s rights has reemerged in the present-day Republican Party, and it has taken on many of the same contours as it had in the 1850s. Adherents are operating in a false reality, believing that their vision of the nation is the only correct one, and that they must impose their will on the rest of us, no matter what we want. As Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) tweeted on October 8, 2020, “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospe[r]ity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.”

That fear of democracy has brought us to the edge of losing our government. In an exclusive story today by Ryan Nobles, Annie Grayer, Zachary Cohen, and Jamie Gangel, CNN published 100 text messages between Senator Lee, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, and Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. The messages were obtained by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

They show elected members of our government eager to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election in which a national majority of 7 million people had chosen Democrat Joe Biden as president. On November 7, acting on the false narrative the Trump administration had established months before that the election would be marked by fraud, Lee was one of a number of right-wing lawmakers and leaders who offered to Trump their "unequivocal support for you to exhaust every legal and constitutional remedy at your disposal to restore Americans faith in our elections." On November 9, Lee told Meadows he was working to bring senators around to the idea of challenging the election. Roy wrote that they needed evidence of fraud: “We need ammo. We need fraud examples. We need it this weekend."

Gradually, though, Lee and Roy became concerned that the administration was long on accusations and short on evidence. On November 19, Trump’s public legal team—Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Jenna Ellis—gave a press conference that was full of wild accusations, all of which were false, that might well have been designed simply to whip up Trump’s base for later attacks on the counting of electoral votes. (Trump’s team lost more than 60 lawsuits over the election, and when Dominion Voting Systems sued Powell for $1.3 billion over her accusations that their software flipped votes, her legal team argued that “reasonable people would not accept such statements as fact.”)

In the wake of the conference, Lee worried that “the potential defamation liability for the president is significant here. For the campaign and the president personally. Unless Powell can back up everything she said, which I kind of doubt she can.” He believed the press conference was damaging enough that the president “should probably disassociate himself and refute any claims that can't be substantiated.” On November 22, he begged Meadows: “Please tell me what I should be saying.” Roy wrote: “If we don't get logic and reason in this before 11/30—the GOP conference will bolt (all except the most hard core Trump guys).”

Lee and Roy then turned to lawyer John Eastman’s plan to have states appoint “alternative slates of electors” in place of the legitimate, certified ones. By January 3, Lee specified that those new slates must be named “pursuant to state law,” and started calling state legislators.

In the end, Lee and Roy came to see that the fight to keep Trump in power was unconstitutional. On December 31, Roy wrote: “The President should call everyone off. It's the only path. If we substitute the will of states through electors with a vote by Congress every 4 years...we have destroyed the electoral college... Respectfully.” On January 1, he added: “If POTUS allows this to occur...we're driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic….”

On January 4, Roy had abandoned the attack on the federal government, but other Republicans persisted. Roy texted: “I am truly sorry I am in a different spot then you and our brothers re: Wednesday. But I will defend all.” On January 6, during the riot, he texted: “This is a sh*tshow…. Fix this now.”

“We are,” Meadows texted. Later that night, 8 senators and 139 representatives nonetheless voted to challenge certified state electoral votes electing Biden.

Since January 6, the Republican Party has shifted its focus to the states to undermine the federal government. Nineteen states have changed their election laws to enable Republicans to win their states regardless of the will of the voters, sending Republican electors to put a Republican president in place. Encouraged by the Supreme Court’s “originalist” majority, which denies the ability of the federal government to protect civil rights in the states, Florida, Mississippi, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Texas have all overridden the constitutional right to abortion, and Republican lawmakers have indicated they are gunning for birth control and interracial marriage as well. Dramatically, in the last week. Texas governor Greg Abbott has effectively shut down international trade across the U.S.-Mexico border, explicitly asserting state power over national power and thus driving prices up all across the country.

One hundred and fifty-seven years ago today, Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, stood heartbroken by the bedside of the man who had asserted the power of the federal government over the states and said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

mickeyrat

 April 16, 2022 (Saturday)

And just like that, it's spring again, and the world in this part of the globe, once again, is waking up.

There's a lot of work ahead of us in the next several months, but for now, let's take a deep breath and take the night off.

My very best wishes to those observing Passover, Ramadan, and Easter.

I'll see you tomorrow.

["Eastbound," by Buddy Poland.]

brianlux

It's not up here yet, but today's is a heavy.  My immediate response was, Are we seeing the death of democracy?  So depressing. 

mickeyrat

 April 17, 2022 (Sunday)

Today, political scientist and member of the Russian legislative body Vyacheslav Nikonov said, “in reality, we embody the forces of good in the modern world because this clash is metaphysical…. We are on the side of good against the forces of absolute evil…. This is truly a holy war that we’re waging, and we have to win it and of course we will because our cause is just. We have no other choice. Our cause is not only just, our cause is righteous and victory will certainly be ours.”

Nikonov was defending the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which Russian troops have leveled cities, killed thousands, kidnapped children, and raped and tortured Ukrainian citizens.

The intellectual leap from committing war crimes to claiming to be on the side of good might be explained by an interview published in the New Statesman at the beginning of April. Speaking with former Portuguese secretary of state for European affairs Bruno Maçães, Sergey Karaganov, a former advisor to Russian president Vladimir Putin, predicted the end of the western democracies that have shaped the world since World War II. Dictators, he suggested, will take over.

Democracy is failing and authoritarianism rising, Karaganov said, because of democracy’s bad moral foundations. As he put it: “Western civilisation has brought all of us great benefits, but now people like myself and others are questioning the moral foundation of Western civilisation.”

Karaganov’s statement says a lot about why white evangelicals in the U.S. are willing to toss democracy overboard in favor of a one-party state dominated by one powerful leader. They deny the premise of a system in which all people are equal before the law and have the right to have a say in their government.

Putin cemented his rise to power in 2013 with antigay laws that supporters claimed defended conservative values against an assault of “genderless and fruitless so-called tolerance,” which “equals good and evil.” Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, an ally of Putin’s, has been open about his determination to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” for “the Christian family model.”

The American right has embraced this attack on our system. In October 2021, former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest at a forum denouncing immigration and urging traditional social values, where he told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump put on the court. Next month, the American Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held in Budapest, Hungary; Orbán will be the keynote speaker.

Increasingly, Republican lawmakers have called not for the U.S. government to leave business alone, as was their position under President Ronald Reagan, but to use government power to crack down on ”woke” businesses they insist are undermining the policies they value—meaning companies that protect LGBTQ rights, racial justice, reproductive choice, and access to the ballot. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis and his supporters have threatened Disney for its mild defense of LGBTQ rights, insisting the company grooms children for sexual abuse, and Texas Republicans are considering barring local governments from doing business with any national company that provides abortion coverage for its employees.  

To achieve such control in a country where they are a minority, they are skewing the electoral system to install a one-party government. Just like Orbán’s government in Hungary, and Putin’s in Russia, the one-party government they envision will benefit a very small group of wealthy people: witness the Russian oligarchs whose yachts worth hundreds of millions of dollars are being impounded all over the world. And, just like those governments, it will be overseen by a strongman, who will continue to insist that his opponents are immoral.

But here’s the thing:

Democracy is a moral position. Defending the right of human beings to control their own lives is a moral position. Treating everyone equally before the law is a moral position. Insisting that everyone has a right to have a say in their government is a moral position.

This moral position is hardly some newfangled radicalism. It is profoundly conservative. It is the fundamental principle on which our country has been based for almost 250 years.

In 1776, the nation’s Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all people “are created equal…[and] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….” They asserted that governments are legitimate only if those they govern consent to them.

The Founders did not live these principles, of course; they preserved the racial, gender, and wealth inequality that enabled them to imagine a world in which white men of property were all equal.

But after World War II, Americans tried to bring these principles to life. It is this attempt for America to realize its ideals that the radicals on the right want to overturn.  

After World War II, the Supreme Court began to insist that all Americans really do have a right to self-determination and that they must be treated equally before the law. Using the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee that no state can “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,” it began to upend longstanding racial, gender, class, and religious hierarchies.

It said, for example, that the promise of equality before the law meant that people of color had a right to a jury that was not made up exclusively of white people, that Black and Brown kids had a right to attend the same public schools as their white neighbors, and that white Americans could not kill or assault Black Americans without consequences.

It decided that states could not privilege one race or one religion over another and that people have the right to marry whom they wish, across racial and gender lines. It decided that people themselves, not the state, had a right to plan their families.

Then, to ensure that states were truly democratic, in 1965, Congress protected the right of all Americans to vote, giving them an equal say in their government and bringing to life the concept in the Declaration of Independence that governments are legitimate only when they derive their power from the consent of the governed.
 
Americans who had seen the horrors of the Holocaust—which was, after all, the logical and ultimate outcome of a society based on hierarchies—saw their defense of equality as a moral position. It recognizes the inherent worth of individuals without privileging one race, one gender, one religion, or the wealthy. It works to bring the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to life, stopping the violence that certain white Christian men in the past visited on those they could dominate with impunity.

Those radicals who are now taking away the right of self-determination, the right to equality before the law, and the right to vote because they are “questioning the moral foundation of Western civilisation” are launching a fundamental attack on our nation.

In his day, responding to a similar attack, Abraham Lincoln noted that accepting the idea of inequality was an act of destruction that would “transform this Government into a government of some other form.”

Arguments based in the idea that some people are not capable of making their own decisions “are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” Lincoln said in 1858. “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[.]”

mickeyrat

  April 18, 2022 (Monday)

Today is tax day, since public workers in Washington, D.C., got April 15, our usual tax day, off to celebrate Emancipation Day. That holiday honors April 16, the day that President Abraham Lincoln in 1862 signed the law emancipating enslaved Black Americans in the nation’s capital.

The Biden administration used the occasion of tax day to highlight the difference between its tax policies and those of the current Republican Party. Biden is calling for making “billionaires and large corporations pay their fair share” and “ensur[ing] no one making under $400,000 a year pays a penny more in taxes.”

The Republicans have offered only Florida senator Rick Scott’s “11-Point Plan to Rescue America,” which calls for imposing taxes on the 57% of Americans who made too little during the pandemic to pay income taxes, as well as getting rid of all legislation after five years, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare. The nonprofit, nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that Scott’s tax policy would increase taxes on the nation’s poorest 40% by more than $1000 on average. The states hit hardest are in the South: Mississippi, West Virginia, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Georgia, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Florida.

Since the American Civil War, deciding who pays taxes—and for what—has been shorthand for who belongs in our nation and what we care about. Curiously, Biden’s policies echo those of the early Republican Party.

The Republicans invented our national income taxes during the Civil War. As costs for uniforms, guns, food, mules, wagons, bounties, and burials rose to as much as $2 million a day, Congress recognized the need to raise money to cover the debts the United States was incurring. Ordinary Americans, who were terrified of the inflation that had come with the “rag paper” money of the American Revolution, told the government that there was “not the slightest objection raised in any loyal quarter to as much taxation as may be necessary.”

So Congress turned to manufacturing taxes, which essentially turned into sales taxes, of 3% on all manufactured goods. Those taxes would not be enough to stabilize the economy, and members of Congress knew the taxes could not be raised higher without unduly burdening farmers and workers. So, to make sure that tax burdens would “be more equalized on all classes of the community, more especially on those who are able to bear them,” they invented the U.S. income tax to be collected by a national agency—the precursor to the Internal Revenue Service.

By the end of the war, Congress had imposed 5% taxes on manufactured goods, and income taxes of 5% for incomes between $600 and $5,000, 7.5% for incomes from $5,000 to $10,000, and 10% for incomes of more than $10,000.

These taxes were enormously popular, in part because they demonstrated the health of the national treasury and the ability of ordinary Americans to support their government, but also in part because Congress recognized that if it was going to levy tax money from ordinary people, it needed to make sure ordinary people had the money to pay those taxes.

Shortly after imposing taxes, Congress stopped selling the “public lands”—Indigenous lands in the West—to land speculators to raise money and instead gave them away to poor men to farm. “Every smoke rising from a new opening in the wilderness marks the foundation of a new feeder to Commerce and the Revenue,” wrote newspaper editor Horace Greeley.

In 1862, Congress also created the Department of Agriculture to spread knowledge about modern farming practices and provide seeds to poor men. In exchange for “seed money,” Senate Finance Committee chairman William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME) said, the country would be “richly paid over and over again in absolute increase of wealth. There is no doubt of that.” It then turned to public colleges, which were “demanded by the wisest economy” because they would help men to work more efficiently, which would enable them to accumulate wealth, which would, in turn, enable them to buy from others, creating prosperity for the whole economy.

On the same day that Lincoln signed the Land-Grant College Act, he signed a bill creating the Union Pacific Railroad, claiming for the government the power to develop the country’s economy.

The early Republicans believed that a democratic government should guarantee education and equality of opportunity to all men, rather than turning the country over to an oligarchy that made its fortunes in a hierarchical economic system based on human enslavement.

Today, the White House echoed this worldview when it released a fact sheet titled “This Tax Day, the President Is Fighting to Reward Work, Not Wealth, While Republicans Want to Increase Taxes on the Middle Class.” It pointed out that the 2017 Trump tax cuts gave a $1.5 trillion tax cut to the very wealthy, and now Republicans are turning to working Americans to make up the budget shortfalls. “Republicans complain that middle-class Americans don’t have ‘skin in the game’ and don’t pay enough in taxes,” the White House said. “But the truth is that middle-class Americans are the back bone of our economy, pay plenty in federal, state, and local taxes, and in many cases pay a higher rate than the super-wealthy.”  

Biden’s emphasis on public investment in individuals illustrates his view of the U.S. economy. He has been pushing for federal procurement to nurture American business, requiring that “made in America” for federal procurement will mean 60% of component parts are made in the U.S.; that number will rise to 65% in 2024 and 75% in 2029. When he took office, products qualified as “made in America” if 55% of their components were made in the U.S.

Today, the White House issued guidance requiring that after May 14, all of the iron, steel, manufactured products, and construction materials used for any project funded by the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill must be made in the U.S. That rule can be waived if it hurts the public interest, if the supplies are not available in the U.S., or if it will increase costs more than 25%. The administration hopes to create jobs, ease shortages, and limit our reliance on countries whose national interests are not in line with ours, like China. Since manufacturing is above the historical average at 78.7% capacity, the rule will probably require more factories.

The Biden administration has also used money as leverage over Russia, of course, and the sanctions there are biting. On April 13, Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, left the country. Losing Maersk, along with a number of other shippers, will strangle the movement of goods. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin insists that the sanctions have failed, but today the head of Russia’s central bank said that consumer prices are up 16.7% from last year and that since “practically every product” in Russia depends on imported parts, when factories run through their inventories, prices will skyrocket. Meanwhile, Russian workers are losing jobs as foreign businesses leave the country.

For his part, Putin insists that the global alliance against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will collapse. But tonight CNN reports that the U.S. State Department is considering naming Russia a state sponsor of terrorism, a designation that would place Russia with North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Cuba and further choke Russian trade.

MSNBC commentator and national security expert Malcolm Nance has thrown his lot in with those fighting against Russia. Tonight, speaking in uniform from Ukraine, he told MSNBC’s Joy Reid: “The more I saw of the war going on, the more I thought I’m done talking… It’s time to take action here. So about a month ago I joined the international legion here in Ukraine….”

mickeyrat

  April 19, 2022 (Tuesday)

Last night, lawyers for Ed Vallejo, one of 11 members of the right-wing Oath Keepers gang accused of seditious conspiracy for their actions surrounding January 6, filed a motion for Vallejo’s release from pretrial jail.

Vallejo’s lawyer describes his client as having “a passionate yet gentle nature, as well as [a] love of animals,” and quotes one of Vallejo’s friends as saying the accused conspirator is a “true man of passion” whose “tools are an abundance of love, sunshine and gratitude to God for giving him a chance to prove it by helping people.” The lawyer tried to explain away the 200 pounds of food Vallejo brought for a 30-day siege (he thought they were going camping, the lawyer says) and his declaration that there would be “guerilla war” if Trump didn’t “bring the f*cking hammer down." The lawyer’s argument is that Vallejo should be let out of prison because the real culprits were former president Trump—who convinced Vallejo that the election was stolen and that the country must be protected—and Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, who was planning an attack on the Capitol.

The motion is interesting because included in it were several hundred pages of exhibits, including dozens of pages of messages allegedly between many of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. Messages indicate how closely the insurrectionists on the ground followed former president Trump’s Twitter feed—“there’s no better direct link from him than Twitter”—and offer extensive evidence that the attack on January 6 was planned in advance.

The insurrectionists talked at length from late December onward about arming themselves and going to Washington, D.C. On January 3, one reported to the group that they had gotten an email saying that the rally would start at the Ellipse, whose space “merges into the Mall around the Washington Monument, and heads down to the Capitol, the scene of the ‘action.’”

Calling himself “We the People,” one of them wrote, “WeAreTheStorm as you are about to witness!!” The person took heart from what was happening in Congress: “Sens Ted Cruz (RTX), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Mike Braun (RIN), Steve Daines (R-MT), John Kennedy (RLA), James Lankford (R-OK) and senators elect Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Roger Marshall (R-KS), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) announced they will object to the Jan. 6 electoral vote certification and are calling for a 10-day electoral commission to audit the election results.”

As well, the messages refer to Trump advisor Roger Stone and to Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX), at the time the newly elected representative who had been the White House physician. “Roger Stone just asked for security,” Jessica Watkins texted the group chat on January 1, referring to a statement Stone had made on television. Another answered: “Who reached out to you? I [spoke] to him Wednesday.” On January 6, around 3:00 in the afternoon, one person texted the group: “Dr. Ronnie Jackson—on the move. Needs protection. If anyone inside cover him. He has critical data to protect,” one person messaged. Oath Keeper leader Steward Rhodes messaged back: “Give him my cell.”

By 6:36 on January 6, the conspirators appear to have figured out they were in trouble. “We are now the enemy of the State,” one messaged the others. Another was furious at Rhodes: “As I figured. This organization is a huge f*ckin joke. You Stewart are the dum*ass I heard you were. Good luck getting rich off those Dumb ass… donations you f*ck stick.”

Rhodes responded to the group by moving the goalposts. They had “one FINAL chance to get Trump to do his job and his duty,” he said. “Patriots entering their own Capitol to send a message to the traitors is NOTHING compared to what's coming if Trump doesn't take decisive action right now. It helped to send that message to HIM. He was the most important audience today. I hope he got the message.”

This morning, a spokesperson for Jackson said: “Rep. Jackson is frequently talked about by people he does not know. He does not know nor has he ever spoken to the people in question.“

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol also has a great deal of information; it has now interviewed more than 800 people. On April 11, Salon columnist Chauncey DeVega published an interview with Hugo Lowell, who has been following the January 6 committee closely for The Guardian. Lowell’s observations support the idea of a conspiracy, although he noted evidence is still coming in. “The evidence so far points to the fact that Donald Trump knew and oversaw what happened on Jan. 6,” Lowell told DeVega. “Trump knew in advance about these different elements that came together to form both the political element of his plan, which was to have Pence throw the election, and the violence that took place on Jan. 6.”

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a member of the January 6 committee, suggested Lowell’s observation was correct yesterday when he told reporters: “This was a coup organized by the president against the vice president and against the Congress in order to overturn the 2020 presidential election.” Trump’s role in that coup will be the centerpiece of next month’s public committee hearings.

Last week, on April 12, Alan Feuer of the New York Times broke the story that on December 30, 2020, Jason Sullivan, a former aide to Roger Stone, urged Trump supporters on a zoom call to “descend on the Capitol” on January 6 to intimidate Congress. Sullivan said that Trump would declare martial law and would stay in office. “Biden will never be in that White House,” Sullivan said. “That’s my promise to each and every one of you.” “If we make the people inside that building sweat and they understand that they may not be able to walk in the streets any longer if they do the wrong thing, then maybe they’ll do the right thing,” he said. “We have to put that pressure there.” Sullivan’s lawyer responded to the story by saying he had just “shared some encouragement” with people who believed the election had been stolen.

Yesterday, Kimberly Guilfoyle, former Trump advisor and fiancée of Donald Trump, Jr., spoke with the January 6 committee for 9 hours. Guilfoyle was with the Trump family the morning of January 6 and was also a fundraiser for the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse, claiming to have raised $3 million to underwrite it. In its March 3, 2022, letter subpoenaing Guilfoyle, the committee reminded her that she spoke at that rally, telling “the crowd, 'We will not allow the liberals and the Democrats to steal our dream or steal our elections,' and were filmed backstage prior to your speech telling people to 'Have the courage to do the right thing. Fight!'"

In Georgia, voters are challenging the inclusion of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on the ballot this fall, arguing that she is an insurrectionist disqualified to hold office under the Fourteenth Amendment. Ratified after the Civil War, that amendment says any official who has taken an oath to support the U.S. Constitution and then engages “in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof,” cannot hold office. Greene took her oath of office on January 3, 2021, three days before the January 6 insurrection, and insisted the election had been stolen. “This is our 1776 moment,” she told Newsmax on January 5, 2021.

Greene promptly sued to get a judge to block the challenge. Yesterday, federal judge Amy Totenberg decided that the case can go forward. Greene will have to testify on Friday, under oath, before a state administrative law judge in Atlanta. She will be the first member of Congress to testify under oath about the events of January 6. After the judge handed down the decision, Greene complained to Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson that “I have to go to court on Friday and actually be questioned about something I’ve never been charged with and something I was completely against.”

This will be a bellwether for the other nine similar cases already filed across the country and might, of course, affect the candidacy of the former president should he run again in 2024.