“Anecdotal data point,” conservative commentator Tom Nichols tweeted this afternoon, “Had lunch with an old friend, a fellow former [Republican] (but not in politics or media or anything) and he said that things feel different after the Pelosi attack. Not sure why. I feel the same thing; not sure that it'll matter, but have that same sense.”
Perhaps it is the echoes of lawyer Joseph Nye Welch, who in 1954 on television confronted Joseph McCarthy as the Wisconsin senator shredded people’s lives by accusing them of being communists: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
Perhaps it is the many observers pointing out that in a time when more than half the Republicans running for office have refused to acknowledge that Democratic President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and when Republican legislatures are claiming the right to choose presidential electors without the input of voters, “American democracy is on the line.”
Or perhaps it is the sheer horror of Republican politicians joking about a brutal attack on the Speaker of the House, the second in line for the presidency, an attack that left her elderly husband with a fractured skull, but Nichols is right: something feels different.
Tonight, President Joe Biden gave a speech on democracy. He began by describing the attack on Paul Pelosi, then noting that the attacker’s demand, “Where’s Nancy?”, echoed the words “used by the mob when they stormed the United States Capitol on January the 6th, when they broke windows, kicked in the doors, brutally attacked law enforcement, roamed the corridors hunting for officials and erected gallows to hang the former vice president, Mike Pence.”
That enraged mob had been whipped into a frenzy by former president Trump’s repeating the Big Lie that the 2020 election had been stolen. That lie, Biden said, has “fueled the dangerous rise in political violence and voter intimidation over the past two years.”
Biden urged us to “confront those lies with the truth,” for “the very future of our nation depends on it.” “We must with one overwhelming unified voice speak as a country and say there’s no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America. Whether it’s directed at Democrats or Republicans. No place, period. No place ever.”
“Democracy itself” is at stake in the upcoming election, Biden said. He appealed “to all Americans, regardless of party, to meet this moment of national and generational importance.” Nothing is guaranteed about democracy in America, he said, “Every generation has had to defend it, protect it, preserve it, choose it. For that’s what democracy is. It’s a choice, a decision of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
“We the people must decide whether we will have fair and free elections and every vote counts. We the people must decide whether we’re going to sustain a republic, where reality’s accepted, the law is obeyed, and your vote is truly sacred. We the people must decide whether the rule of law will prevail or whether we will allow the dark forces and thirst for power put ahead of the principles that have long guided us.”
Biden warned that the same forces that challenged the 2020 election, despite all the confirmations of its results, are setting out to question the legitimacy of the 2022 election. MAGA Republicans are “trying to succeed where they failed in 2020, to suppress the right of voters and subvert the electoral system itself. That means denying your right to vote and deciding whether your vote even counts.” They’ve encouraged violence and intimidation of voters and election workers, Biden said. “It’s damaging, it’s corrosive, and it’s destructive.”
“And I want to be very clear,” Biden said, “this is not about me, it’s about all of us. It’s about what makes America America. It’s about the durability of our democracy. For democracies are more than a form of government. They’re a way of being, a way of seeing the world, a way that defines who we are, what we believe, why we do what we do.”
Biden warned that “we can’t take democracy for granted any longer.”
“Democracy means the rule of the people, not the rule of monarchs or the moneyed, but the rule of the people. Autocracy is the opposite of democracy. It means the rule of one, one person, one interest, one ideology, one party…. [T]he lives of billions of people, from antiquity till now, have been shaped by the battle between these competing forces, between the aspirations of the many and the greed and power of the few, between the people’s right for self-determination and the self-seeking autocrat, between the dreams of a democracy and the appetites of an autocracy.”
“What we’re doing now is going to determine whether democracy will long endure and…whether the American system that prizes the individual bends toward justice and depends on the rule of law, whether that system will prevail. This is the struggle we’re now in, a struggle for democracy, a struggle for decency and dignity, a struggle for prosperity and progress, a struggle for the very soul of America itself.”
Biden listed the “fundamental values and beliefs that unite us as Americans.” First, “we believe the vote in America’s sacred, to be honored, not denied; respected, not dismissed; counted, not ignored. A vote is not a partisan tool, to be counted when it helps your candidates and tossed aside when it doesn’t.” “Second,” he said, “we…stand against political violence and voter intimidation.” “We don’t settle our differences…with a riot, a mob, or a bullet, or a hammer. We settle them peacefully at the ballot box.” Third, he said, “we believe in democracy…. History and common sense tell us that liberty, opportunity, and justice thrive in a democracy, not in an autocracy.”
“At our best,” the president said, “America is not a zero-sum society where for you to succeed, someone else has to fail. A promise in America is big enough…for everyone to succeed…. Individual dignity, individual worth, individual determination, that’s America, that’s democracy and that’s what we have to defend.”
He urged voters to judge the candidates by whether they would accept the legitimate will of the American people. “Will that person accept the outcome of the election, win or lose?” The answer to that question should be decisive. “Too many people have sacrificed too much for too many years for us to walk away from the American project and democracy…. It’s within our power, each and every one of us, to preserve our democracy.”
“You have the power, it’s your choice, it’s your decision, the fate of the nation, the fate of the soul of America lies where it always does, with the people, in your hands, in your heart, in your ballot.”
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While most of us have been watching the jockeying around the election, our legal system has continued to work on its own clock.
Yesterday morning, Kyle Cheney, Josh Gerstein, and Nicholas Wu of Politico reported more about the eight emails lawyer John Eastman, who wrote the memo outlining a plan by which then–vice president Mike Pence could steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump, tried to hide from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The emails included discussions between Eastman, fellow Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, and others about how to stop Congress from counting the certified 2020 electoral ballots on January 6, 2021.
In the emails, Chesebro urged arranging to get a case before Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court so he could issue a stay that would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election in Georgia. They should “frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt.” Thomas oversees the circuit court that includes Georgia, and he would “end up being key” to getting Biden’s victory overturned.
Eastman responded: “I think I agree with this.” Such a move by Thomas could “kick the Georgia legislature into gear.”
As a young lawyer, Eastman clerked for Thomas, and Dan Froomkin of PressWatchers noted that Eastman and others were in this same period of time writing to Thomas’s wife, Ginni, who was urging state legislators to overturn the election by submitting fake slates of electors.
Froomkin pointed to a New York Times article from June 15, 2022, which explained that on December 24, 2020, five days after Trump had announced a “protest” at the Ellipse to be held on January 6, Eastman wrote to Chesebro that Eastman had heard there was a “heated fight” among the Supreme Court justices about whether they should take up the election issue. Chesebro replied that the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”
So we seem to have a deliberate attempt to throw a court case to Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife was urging the overthrow of the election, and to pressure the Supreme Court to act by creating chaos in the streets, all in order to keep former president Trump in the White House.
In the case of the 11,000 government documents the former president took to Mar-a-Lago, the Department of Justice has offered immunity in the case to Kash Patel, a man closely tied to former president Trump, to testify about Trump’s handling of those documents. Patel has previously invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, after telling the right-wing Breitbart media network that Trump declassified the documents before he left the White House in January 2021. Prosecutors cannot use anything Patel says against him at trial so long as he testifies truthfully. A federal judge ordered him to testify before a grand jury, which he did today.
In the case of the Trump Organization’s fraudulent business practices, New York Judge Arthur Engoron today ordered an independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization and blocked it from transferring assets without court approval. Trump lawyers complained that this move was “about seizing control of a successful company,” but the attorney general’s office said it was trying to guard against “ongoing fraudulent activity or deceptive activity.” In September, on the same day the New York attorney general’s office brought suit against the Trump Organization for fraudulent business practices, representatives from that organization created a new company called Trump Organization II. The judge has appointed a monitor to make sure the old company doesn’t transfer assets to the new company to avoid legal action.
Trump promptly attacked the decision, calling Engoron “a puppet judge” and saying the decision is “Communism come to our shores.” Later, he told a crowd that “a radical left lunatic judge in New York City who is totally controlled by my worst enemies in the Democrat Party…started a process of property confiscation that is akin to Venezuela, Cuba, or the old Soviet Union.”
The characterization of a decision to make sure the Trump Organization does not continue to break the law after a pattern of fraudulent behavior as “Communism” is a product of the U.S. interpretation of the 1991 fall of the USSR. Republicans then made the mistake of assuming that democracy and unfettered capitalism always traveled together. Over the years, Republicans have largely ignored the “democracy” part of that equation and continually doubled down on the idea that the American system means that businesses should be able to do whatever they wished. In that warped formulation, any oversight must be like Soviet-style communism.
Trump also called his followers on his social media site to “fight back against radical tyranny and save our Country!”
This call for violence echoes the former president’s calls to stop the counting of the certified electoral votes on January 6, 2021, and it illustrates why it is so important for the Department of Justice to enforce the laws. If there is no penalty for lawbreaking, there is no deterrent from breaking laws going forward. But, in fact, the Justice Department has been calling to account those who participated in the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol: in September, former New York City police officer Thomas Webster was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
With actual penalties mounting against those who answered to Trump’s previous calls for violence, it is unclear how many will answer again, although Trump appeared to be trying to rally them with what observers say is a frivolous lawsuit filed yesterday against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, complaining that “she attacks great and upstanding businesses.”
Penalties appear to be mounting for those breaking the law for Republican election victories. Republican operatives Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl pleaded guilty in October to a felony charge of telecommunications fraud for robocalls to depress the Black vote in Cleveland in 2020 and are facing fines and up to a year in prison. And earlier this week, a judge ordered two leaders of True the Vote, a right-wing organization pushing the voter fraud conspiracy theories at the heart of the debunked film 2000 Mules, to jail for contempt of court. An election logistics software company they have publicly accused of stealing the election for Biden has sued them for defamation; they claim to have evidence of election fraud but have refused to produce it.
Meanwhile, the Trump Organization is currently on trial in New York for criminal tax fraud. Prosecutors allege the company avoided taxes by paying executives with apartments, cars, and school tuitions.
While legal news has piled up, the upcoming midterm elections have not gone away. Tonight, television personality Oprah Winfrey, who was largely responsible for bringing Republican Mehmet Oz to national prominence on her television show, endorsed his Democratic opponent, John Fetterman, for senator from Pennsylvania.
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For all that they have tried to argue that the midterm election is a referendum on President Joe Biden’s handling of the nation’s high inflation, House Republicans today released a 1050-page “report” laying out their priorities for what they expect will be their takeover of the House.
The report begins as an attack on the FBI, claiming it has been politicized under the Biden administration and is now “broken.” It goes on to echo years of complaints from former president Trump, from his insistence that the FBI “spied on” his 2016 campaign through his complaints about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents he took with him when he left office.
Only the first 50 pages of the report are new prose. Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo read the rest and noted that about 1000 of the pages simply reprint letters Republican representatives have sent to members of the Biden administration, including 93 copies of a 5-page letter they sent to U.S. attorneys.
The House Republicans’ plan was apparently to grab headlines with an apparently big “report” and make people uneasy about the Biden administration. The document makes it clear that their priorities if they take the House will be to investigate Hunter Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the evacuation of Afghanistan, immigration policies, and, perhaps above all, Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice (DOJ). But the report is a self-own in that it makes clear that the Republicans have no intention of actually trying to deal with inflation and are instead going to push the investigations that keep their grievances before the media and feed their base.
The House Republicans’ decision to double down on Trump just before the election shows exactly how they plan to govern after it. Leaders like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) would like to downplay the role of the former president and keep voters focused instead on the economy, an issue on which they feel they can make headway as the world is still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic. But extremists in the House are signaling that they are all in for Trump.
Indeed, the timing of the House Republicans’ warning that they plan to launch numerous investigations might well be an attempt to protect the former president by taking the spotlight off Trump’s growing legal troubles.
Today, the former president’s allies told media outlets that shortly after the midterm election, Trump expects to announce that he is running for president in 2024. Knowing he is a lightning rod, Republicans have wanted him to stay out of the spotlight before the midterms, but he now has a reason—aside from the fact that he can never seem to abide being in the shadows—to announce his candidacy.
As Maggie Haberman of the New York Times tweeted: “Trump is facing multiple investigations that his advisers anticipate will heat up again after next week’s midterms, particularly into the documents held for no clear explicable reason at Mar-a-Lago. His advisers say he thinks DOJ will move differently if he’s a candidate.” (The Department of Justice has said its procedures will not be affected by any such announcement.)
Trump’s dangling of a presidential bid is almost certainly related to his looming legal troubles. Yesterday, his ally Kash Patel testified with limited immunity before a grand jury investigating the handling of the classified documents Trump took to Mar-a-Lago, meaning he had the option of testifying honestly without penalties or lying and risking perjury charges on this topic. Patel has maintained he is a hostile witness, but there is reason to think he will not shield Trump. Constitutional lawyer and law professor Laurence Tribe commented: “This will break the dam.”
Also, today was the deadline for Trump to produce documents for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the committee this evening announced that it was in conversation with Trump’s lawyers about that production. It continued: “We have informed Trump’s counsel that he must begin producing records no later than next week and he remains under subpoena for testimony starting on November 14th.”
And the January 6th committee has continued its interviews, recently talking to the Secret Service agents who were in the presidential motorcade on January 6, 2021.
Trump has clearly made the calculation that his own interests are best served by teasing the idea of his running for office, despite the fact that many national Republican lawmakers have hoped he would keep his head down.
It is not clear that the idea of a resurgence of Trump will motivate Republican voters. Indeed, so far, election data for next week’s election is not showing the red wave that media has recently tried to argue was in the offing. Pollsters Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier both have focused less on polls and more on the early vote, which so far has shown Democrats overperforming. Races are still very close, but the idea of a red wave appears to be premature. The results of the election will come down to voter turnout.
In the midst of all this drama, the social media site Twitter, which was recently acquired by entrepreneur Elon Musk, appears to be imploding. Advertisers are fleeing, and this morning the company fired a raft of employees, apparently illegally in many jurisdictions because he did not give them the warning that laws require. They are now suing.
This afternoon, Jeff Seldin, the national security correspondent for Voice of America News, tweeted that two organizations representing state election officials who have used Twitter to get out reliable election information, including the National Association of State Election Directors, are watching Twitter’s changes with concern. The mass layoffs cut the teams dedicated to fighting election disinformation and communicating with campaign staff and journalists. Further, it currently appears that account verification, which makes it clear if an account is official or not, will end on Monday, the day before the election.
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One hundred and fifty years ago today, American women turned out to vote in the presidential election, exercising their right to have a say in their government by choosing either Democratic candidate Horace Greeley or Republican incumbent Ulysses S. Grant.
Except they didn’t have that right explicitly. They were claiming it.
After the Civil War, lawmakers discussed what a newly reconstructed nation would look like and who would get to decide its parameters. Women who had worked for the survival of the United States government, given their sons and husbands to it, invested their money in it, nursed and sometimes fought for it, believed they had demonstrated their right to have a say in it. When Congress began to discuss the Fourteenth Amendment, overturning the 1857 Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court denying that Black Americans could be citizens and protecting Black Americans from racially discriminatory laws in the South, suffragists demanded that their citizenship be included in that constitutional amendment.
Instead, the Fourteenth Amendment included the word “male” in the Constitution for the first time. The amendment specified that it protected the right of men—not women—to vote with its attempt to pressure states into allowing Black male suffrage by threatening to reduce congressional representation for any state that kept a significant number of men from the polls. It provided that “when the right to vote…is denied to any of the male inhabitants of [a] state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States…, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced [proportionally].”
Outraged that they had been excluded, suffragists set their sights on the Fifteenth Amendment, protecting the right to vote. But when Congress passed it and sent it off to the states for ratification in 1870, the amendment said nothing about women’s suffrage. Indeed, it distinctly avoiding the word “sex” when it established that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Fed up with trying to gain their rights through lawmakers, in 1872, suffragists took matters into their own hands. They decided to vote in the presidential election, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment recognized their citizenship by virtue of its first section, which said: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” They were born in the United States, they pointed out, and therefore, according to the Fourteenth Amendment, were citizens.
In Rochester, New York, suffragist Susan B. Anthony led a group of women to the polls in November and successfully cast her vote for Grant. But Anthony was already famous for her long career as a reformer, making her a perfect figure for officials to use as an example. Three weeks after the election, authorities arrested her for voter fraud. She could not testify at her own trial and the judge wrote his opinion before it began, directing the jury to find her guilty. Anthony was fined $100 but refused to pay it, instead going on a speaking tour of New York in which she declared: “This government is not…a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex….”
Anthony’s case grabbed headlines, but it was the story of Virginia Minor that would change the next hundred years of our history. Minor was a suffragist in St. Louis, Missouri. She and her husband, Francis, had been instrumental in developing and publicizing the idea that women had the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment and that they should force that issue in 1872 by showing up at the polls.
On October 15, 1872, Minor had tried to register to vote in her St. Louis district, but the registrar, Reese Happersett, refused to enroll her on the grounds that she was female. Virginia’s husband sued—as a married woman she had no standing to sue on her own account—and the case wound its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
On March 29, 1875, the court handed down the Minor v. Happersett decision.
“There is no doubt that women may be citizens,” it said, but it went on to say that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote. “[T]he constitutions and laws of the several States which commit that important trust to men alone are not necessarily void,” it wrote.
According to the Supreme Court, state governments, elected by white men, could discriminate against their citizens so long as that discrimination was not on the grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
The next year, white supremacists would take control of the South with the argument that Black men should not vote because they were poor and would vote for lawmakers who would promise roads, schools, and hospitals that could only be paid for with tax levies on white men. Such rules accumulated until in 1890, Mississippi codified this state-based system by putting into place a new constitution that limited voting to white men by imposing education requirements to be judged by white officials, lack of criminal record, and proof of tax paying. Soon, state constitutions across the country limited voting with all sorts of requirements that cut Black people out on grounds other than race.
In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” overruled Minor v. Happersett on the issue of women’s suffrage. But the Supreme Court continued to use its guidelines for other restrictions until the 1960s, upholding literacy tests, poll taxes, and other rules designed to keep Black people from voting.
Finally, in 1966, almost 100 years after Virginia Minor sued, the Supreme Court decided that voting was a fundamental right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
And 50 years later—and 150 years after Anthony cast her vote—those of us who have not been cut out of the right to vote by one or another of the measures states are now imposing on their voters can exercise that right, and determine what our nation will look like, once again.
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I can't be the only one who needs a little calm before the storm of news and pundits and anger and charts and percentages and celebrations and reflections that this entirely unpredictable week seems likely to bring.
I asked my photographer friend Peter to send me something uplifting, and while a lot of images he offered were inspirational, this is the one that jumped out.
I'm going to take a few deep breaths, get a good night's sleep, and be back at it tomorrow. I hope you all can do the same.
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Not sure if you’ve heard, but the U.S. midterm elections are tomorrow.
Just kidding, of course. Not sure anyone can think of much else.
Remember, though, this election is full of wild cards. Traditionally—but not always—the party of the president does poorly in the first midterm election. But we are in uncharted territory: never before in our history have more than half of Americans lost the recognition of a constitutional right, as the Supreme Court took from us with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision in June, overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to an abortion.
Never, too, have we had to vote in an election where more than half the candidates of one of the parties deny that the president was fairly elected. Those candidates have suggested that, had they been in power in 2020, they would have put former president Donald Trump in power even though he lost the popular vote by more than 7 million and lost in the Electoral College. Their position is a profound attack on our democracy.
For all the polls showing that Democrats are going to win in huge numbers or Republicans are, no one knows how it will turn out. The polls are deeply problematic this time around, and at least some of them are attempts by Republicans to boost the hopes of their donors and to keep Democrats from voting. Perhaps even more than most elections, this one will come down to turnout.
There are, though, some stories worth following:
There has been a crazy amount of money invested in this year’s contests, much of it by a very few people. Ronald Lauder, for example, the 78-year-old heir to the cosmetics fortune, has dumped at least $11 million into getting a Trump Republican, Representative Lee Zeldin, elected governor of New York. Billionaire Peter Thiel put $30 million into super PACs backing Republican senate candidates J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona.
Today, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch and the leader of the private military company the Wagner Group, who is close to Russian president Vladimir Putin, boasted that Russians had interfered in U.S. elections and continue to do so. “We have interfered, we are interfering and we will continue to interfere. Carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do." He added: “During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.”
Prigozhin is apparently behind the Russia-based “troll farms” that try to affect U.S. elections. Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times writes that Russians have indeed targeted the 2022 elections to make right-wing voters angry and undermine trust in U.S. elections. Their hope is to erode support for Ukraine’s struggle to repel Russian invasion by electing Republicans who side with Putin.
Republicans are not acting as if they expect big wins tomorrow. Many of the Republican candidates have refused to say they would accept the election results, and Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson is already saying that Democrats will steal the election.
Others are fighting to get Democratic mail-in ballots thrown out, especially in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Still others are trying to game the vote count already, claiming that results that are not announced by the end of the day on Tuesday are suspicious. But votes postmarked on Election Day can take days to arrive. In addition, a number of Republican-dominated states have made it illegal to count mail-in votes before Election Day, creating backlogs that take time to work through. It sounds as if they, like Trump in 2020, are expecting to lose the actual vote and to fight to steal it.
The Department of Justice will be monitoring the polls in 64 jurisdictions in 24 states to make sure those jurisdictions comply with federal voting rights laws. Officials remind voters that any disruptions at polling places should be reported to officials. Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson expressed thanks to the Department of Justice for “real support for protecting voters,” which she said was missing in 2020 under the former president.
Aside from tomorrow’s election, there is an epic fight brewing in the Republican Party. Former president Donald Trump threatened to announce tonight at a rally in Ohio that he is running for president in 2024, likely because he believes such an announcement will make it harder for the Department of Justice to indict him for his theft of classified documents when he left the White House. He is also concerned that Florida governor Ron DeSantis will steal his thunder and capture the 2024 nomination, but because they are competing for the same voters, an announcement from Trump will undercut DeSantis.
Republican Party leaders urged Trump to hold off on the announcement, worrying it would energize Democratic voters before Election Day. In the end, Trump’s announcement tonight was: “I’m going to be making a very big announcement on Tuesday, November 15, at Mar-a-Lago in Florida…. We want nothing to detract from the importance of tomorrow.”
Finally, for all the uncertainty surrounding tomorrow's election, there is one thing of which I am 100% certain. Far more Americans today are concerned about our democracy, and determined to reclaim it, than were even paying attention to it in 2016. There are new organizations, new connections, new voters, new efforts to remake the country better than it has ever been, and the frantic efforts of the Republicans to suppress voting, gerrymander the country, and now to take away our right to choose our leaders indicates we are far more powerful than we believe we are. No matter what happens tomorrow, that will continue to be true, and I am ever so proud to be one of you.
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I just got a text from a Gen Z voter in Michigan who has been in line to vote for more than an hour and predicts he will be there hours more. He has no intention of leaving.
If there is an obvious story from today with results still unknown, it is this: a new generation is picking up the torch of our democracy.
It puts me in mind of what poet Walt Whitman wrote about the momentous election of 1884. In that year the Republican Party had become so extremist that many of its members, disparagingly called "Mugwumps" by party loyalists, jumped ship to vote for a reformer, Democrat Grover Cleveland. It was a chaotic and consequential election, for it showed those Republicans who stayed with the party that they must moderate their stances or become a permanent minority.
Younger Republicans like Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, and Theodore Roosevelt of New York took notice and turned their party back toward its roots, protecting the rights of individuals rather than of corporations. By the end of the century, they had captured the imagination of the nation. Once in office, they ushered in the Progressive Era.
But on Election Day, 1884, all anyone could know was that there were currents and crosscurrents. What would come from any of them would not be clear for another decade or more. In that tense election the main point was that there was voting at all, for the right to choose our lawmakers was what made America, America.
Whitman wrote:
"If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show, 'Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado, Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing, Nor Oregon's white cones—nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes—nor Mississippi's stream: —This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name—the still small voice vibrating—America's choosing day, (The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing,) The stretch of North and South arous'd—sea-board and inland—Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California, The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict, The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict, Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's:) the peaceful choice of all, Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross: —Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants, life glows: These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships, Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails."
I am not going to say any more tonight out of concern I will mislead people with incomplete information. I do feel comfortable saying that the youth vote will be a big story going forward.
With that I am going to stop obsessively refreshing my screen and go to bed.
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Yesterday was a good day for democracy. Americans turned out to defend our principles from those who denied our right to choose our own leaders. There was little violence, the election appears to have gone smoothly, and there are few claims of “fraud.” As I write tonight, control of the House and Senate is still not clear, but some outlines are now visible.
Usually, the party in power loses a significant number of congressional seats and state seats in the first midterm after it takes the presidency. Today, President Joe Biden spoke to reporters and noted that the Democrats had the best midterm elections for governors since 1986 and lost fewer House seats than they have in any Democratic president’s first midterm in 40 years.
That this election—the results of which are still coming in as I write—is so close is an endorsement of the nation’s current path, despite the shock of inflation. As Biden said: “the overwhelming majority of the American people support the elements of my economic agenda—from rebuilding America’s roads and bridges; to lowering prescription drug costs; to a historic investment in tackling the climate crisis; to making sure that large corporations begin to pay their fair share in taxes.”
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) agreed with Biden on the Fox News Channel tonight, but for him it was a complaint: “Why did Democrats do better than expected? Because they have governed as liberals.” And people appear to like a government that works on their behalf.
Voters appear to have been far more motivated to protect abortion rights than many pundits thought. In Michigan, California, and Vermont, voters amended their state constitutions to protect abortion rights. In Kentucky, voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have restricted abortion rights.
Former president Trump and his loyalists had a bad day. Trump endorsed more than 330 candidates in yesterday’s races, including a number of high-profile people he had urged to run. They were extremist candidates whose key attraction was that they backed Trump’s allegations that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from him, and he remained bullish on their chances until the end, telling a host for NewsNation: “I think if they win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.”
But when many of Trump’s candidates lost yesterday, former supporters did indeed blame Trump. Former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro tweeted: “Trump picked bad candidates, spent almost no money on his hand-picked candidates, and then proceeded to crap on the Republicans who lost and didn’t sufficiently bend the knee. This will have 2024 impact.”
It is not at all clear that the election results will, in fact, end Trump’s political career, but they do open up the possibility that Republican leaders will not be unhappy to see him moved offstage, particularly by events they can blame on opponents—events like indictments. In any case, Trump’s status as the party’s undisputed kingmaker is no longer secure.
This seems likely to bring the Republican Party’s simmering civil war into the open. Yesterday, Trump warned Florida governor Ron DeSantis not to run for president, hinting that he would tell reporters dirt about DeSantis if the governor did announce. (“I would tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering—I know more about him than anybody—other than, perhaps, his wife,” Trump said.)
But DeSantis came out of yesterday’s elections with a second term as Florida governor and looking strong indeed. He fared well with Hispanic voters and won his state with about 60% of the vote (it should not be overlooked that his new election security police clearly intimidated voters). If, in fact, the Republicans do end up taking control of the House of Representatives, presumptive speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will have a delicate dance between MAGA Republicans who back Trump and those trying to move beyond Trump while keeping his voters.
But the biggest winner yesterday was democracy.
More than half of the Republican candidates on ballots were election deniers and either would not say that they would honor election results going forward or openly said they would not. That position appears to have hurt their chances of winning their elections. While some election deniers won their elections, more lost.
Most notably, the story in Michigan was that of democracy, as Democrats won control of the state legislature for the first time since 1984. Governor Gretchen Whitmer was heavily targeted by former president Trump and made abortion rights central to her reelection. Both factors appeared to have helped her win, hold onto a Democratic attorney general and secretary of state, and flip both chambers of the legislature.
There is a larger story here. For decades the Republicans who controlled the Michigan legislature had drawn heavily gerrymandered districts, the most recent so extreme that in 2019, federal judges called them a “political gerrymander of historical proportions.” Voters amended the state constitution to require an independent, nonpartisan panel of 13 citizens to redraw the maps. While political competitiveness was not central to the criteria they used, it was the result.
Michigan Republicans have challenged that new map through the courts, but on Monday the Supreme Court dismissed their appeal. The outcome of yesterday’s elections suggests that what scholars have been saying for years is true: Republicans have won by gaming the system.
The importance of that partisan gerrymandering—and the importance of today’s Supreme Court in upholding that gerrymandering—showed up yesterday in the cases of four states in which Republican lawmakers simply refused to change maps that state courts had determined were illegal. In Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Ohio, heavily gerrymandered maps stayed in place despite state court decisions that they were unconstitutional.
Those four states make up almost 10% of the seats in the House of Representatives. According to congressional redistricting specialist David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, those illegal maps were likely to hand five to seven seats to the Republicans that they would not have won without them. At the same time, Florida governor Ron DeSantis put in place heavily gerrymandered districts—so extreme that the Republican legislature balked—that were expected to turn four seats Republican and create a House delegation more than 70% Republican from a state that Trump won with just over half the vote in 2020.
Gaming the system sets up a structural problem for democracy, of course, but also for the party in power. In safe districts, candidates don’t have to worry about attracting voters from the other party and so worry only about being challenged by those more extreme than they are in the primaries (which are always dominated by the most fervent partisans). The party becomes more and more extreme and can stay in power only by continuing to manipulate the system.
Eventually, though, they become so extreme they lose even members of their own party, as the Republican Party has done since Trump took it over. A new influx of voters—as we saw last night—can win elections, and then they will demand that the playing field be leveled back to fairness. Jack Lobel of Voters of Tomorrow, which is mobilizing Gen Z voters, told NPR’s Rachel Martin today: “The far right is trying to attack us, they’re trying to restrict our rights, and they’re trying to take us back in time. [Young people] want to go forward….”
Lobel mentioned abortion rights, economic rights, and building a better future, and he noted that the Democratic Party has stepped up for Gen Z. Certainly, organizers like strategy director of Voters of Tomorrow Victor Shi have been pounding the pavement to turn out their people.
Exit polls from last night show voters in the 18–29 age bracket making up about 12–13% of the vote and preferring Democrats by much larger margins than any other group: as much as 70%. In 25-year-old Maxwell Frost (D-FL), elected last night, Gen Z has its first member of Congress.
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Two days after an election in which the Republican Party attacked the Democrats for inflation, today’s consumer price index data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that inflation is slowing more quickly than expected. It rose just 0.4% in October, making the rate over the past twelve months also come in lower than expected at 7.7%.
The stock market had its biggest jump since 2020, with the different indexes observers use to measure the market all rising. The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped more than 1,200 points, or 3.7%; the S&P 500 jumped 5.54%; and the Nasdaq Composite surged 7.35%, the best it has done since March 2020.
In a statement, President Joe Biden promised to continue to work to get prices down but noted that his policies are having an effect. “[O]ur economy has reopened, new jobs are being created, new businesses are growing, and now, we are seeing progress in getting inflation under control—with additional measures taking effect soon.”
Then Biden appeared to reach out to Republicans interested in forging a way forward from their party’s politics of the recent past, while also recalling that for all their complaints about inflation, their only plan to fix the problem was to cut taxes for the wealthy again. Virtually no economist said cutting taxes would help inflation, and many said such a policy would actually make inflation worse.
Biden said: “I will work with anyone—Democrat or Republican—on ideas to provide more breathing room to middle-class and working families. And I will oppose any effort to undo my agenda or to make inflation worse. We are on the right path—we need to keep moving forward to build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out.”
Biden appeared to have wind under his wings, though, as with this recent vote of confidence he looks forward to the rest of his term. The 27th United Nations Climate Change conference is being held right now in Egypt, and the U.S. administration today announced a new policy for dealing with climate change. Arguing that climate change and the shortages and damage to supply chains it brings create significant financial risk for the government (that is, taxpayers), it advanced a plan to use the federal government’s power as the world’s largest buyer of goods and services—over $630 billion in the last fiscal year—to address climate change.
It would require any federal contractor who gets annual contracts worth more than $7.5 million a year to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, explain their climate-related financial risks, and set emissions reduction targets.
Climate change is a key issue for Gen Z, who came out for Biden strongly on Tuesday, but Biden’s other major initiative on their behalf ran into trouble today as U.S. District Court Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee, declared Biden’s student loan relief program illegal. The government has already appealed.
Meanwhile, the counting of votes continues, with control of both houses of Congress still unclear.
What is clear is that there is a war erupting in the Republican Party. After former president Trump surged to an unexpected victory in 2016, there appeared to be a sense in the Republican Party that he had figured out how to mobilize previously unengaged voters to deliver victories to the Republican Party, and established Republicans increasingly rallied to his standard.
But he has led the party to defeat now for the third time. In the 2018 midterms, Republicans lost control of the House, with Democrats picking up 41 seats. In 2020, of course, he lost the election, as well as control of the Senate. And while this year’s outcome is not yet clear, the Democrats have had one of the best midterm performances in recent memory. Suddenly, Trump no longer seems to have a magic formula.
White nationalist Nick Fuentes told his audience that the solution to the fact Republicans are in a minority and keep losing elections is to establish “a dictatorship.” "We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules.”
Others seem to think the answer is just to dump Trump, although as Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) warned Republicans in his closing argument in Trump’s first impeachment trial: "If you find that the House has proved its case and still vote to acquit, your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel—and for all of history."
That his star is tarnished became clear today not just on cable television and Twitter, where right-wing users complained about his hand-picked candidates, and in Pennsylvania, where Republicans were stung by the loss of a Senate seat, but also on media owned by right-wing kingmaker Rupert Murdoch. Today the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal noted Trump’s perfect record of electoral defeat and said: “Trump is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.”
Apparently stung, Trump unleashed a furious rant on Truth Social, claiming credit for DeSantis’s start in politics. It included an astonishing claim: “I was all in for Ron, and he beat Gillum, but after the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his Election from being stolen….”
This is an apparent reference to the 2018 election that put DeSantis in the governor’s chair rather than his Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum. The race was very close: just 32,463 votes out of 9 million cast, about 0.4%, separated the two candidates. Considering what we now know about Trump’s approach to election results, a claim to having rigged the 2018 Florida election was one heck of a statement. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo noted that even though Trump “is a pathological liar… this requires some explanation, if only a clear and definitive confirmation that this did not happen.”
Pundits are already suggesting Florida governor Ron DeSantis as a replacement for Trump as a presidential candidate in 2024. This is terribly premature. If, in fact, the party is going to move beyond the Trump years, it seems it might well not turn to DeSantis, who, among other things, is still under investigation for flying a plane load of legal migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, an act not just cruel but possibly illegal.
There will be plenty of time to worry about 2024.
In the meantime, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to a Democratic National Committee Event today at the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C. Harris told the audience members that their work sent a message to the entire world: Our democracy is intact…. [T]his what it looks like…. Some Democrats won and some Republicans won. That is what happens when more than 100 million Americans participate and vote in free and fair and open elections…. And the people in this room and around our country made that possible by standing up for basic American values: freedom, liberty, and the rule of law. And I believe when you know what you stand for, you know what to fight for.”
Biden told the attendees that Democrats “beat the odds” in the midterms “for one reason—this is not hyperbole—because of you…. I really mean it…. You believed in the system. You believed in the institutions. You fought like hell for it. And that’s the most important thing that happened, in my view, in this election. It was the first national election since January 6th, and there were a lot of concerns about whether democracy would meet the test.”
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In 1918, at the end of four years of World War I’s devastation, leaders negotiated for the guns in Europe to fall silent once and for all on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. That armistice was not technically the end of the war, which came with the Treaty of Versailles. Leaders signed that treaty on June 28, 1919, exactly five years to the day after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off the conflict. But the armistice declared on November 11 held, and Armistice Day became popularly known as the day “The Great War,” which killed at least 40 million people, ended.
In November 1919, President Woodrow Wilson commemorated Armistice Day, saying that Americans would reflect on the anniversary of the armistice “with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…."
In 1926, Congress passed a resolution noting that since November 11, 1918, “marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed,” the anniversary of that date “should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”
In 1938, Congress made November 11 a legal holiday to be dedicated to world peace.
But neither the “war to end all wars” nor the commemorations of it, ended war.
Just three years after Congress made Armistice Day a holiday, American armed forces were fighting a Second World War, even more devastating than the first. Then, in 1950, American forces went to Korea.
In 1954, to honor the armed forces of those later conflicts, Congress amended the law creating Armistice Day by striking out the word “armistice” and putting “veterans” in its place. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a veteran who had served as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and who had become a five-star general of the Army before his political career, later issued a proclamation asking Americans to observe Veterans Day: “[L]et us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”
Central to Eisenhower’s vision, and to the American vision for world peace after World War II, was the idea of a rules-based international order. Rather than trying to push their own boundaries and interests whenever they could gain advantage, countries agreed to abide by a series of rules that promoted peace, economic cooperation, and security. The new system provided places for countries to discuss their differences—like the United Nations, founded in 1945—and mechanisms for them to protect each other, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949, which has a mutual defense pact that says any attack on a NATO country will be considered an attack on all of them.
In the years since, these agreements have multiplied and been deepened and broadened to include more countries and more ties. While the U.S. has sometimes failed to honor them, their central theory remains important: no country should be able to attack its neighbor, slaughter its people, and steal its lands at will. It is a concept that has preserved decades of relative peace compared to the horrors of the early twentieth century, and it is one the current administration is working hard to reestablish as autocrats increasingly reject the idea of a rules-based international order and claim the right to act however they wish.
In the modern world, Ukraine’s battle to throw off a Russian invasion is a defense of the rules-based international system. Today, Ukrainians celebrated as Ukrainian soldiers forced Russian invaders out of the southern city of Kherson in one of the Ukrainian regions Russian president Vladimir Putin claimed for Russia just a month ago.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a televised message for people in the United States today:
“On behalf of all Ukrainians, Happy Veterans Day and thank you for your service.
“For almost 250 years the men and women of the United States armed forces have prevailed against tyranny, often against great odds. Your example inspires Ukrainians today to fight back against Russian tyranny. Special thanks to the many American veterans who have volunteered to fight in Ukraine, and to the American people for the amazing support you have given Ukraine. With your help, we have stunned the world and are pushing Russian forces back. Victory will be ours. God bless America and Slava Ukraini.”
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A little before 9:30 p.m. Eastern time, NBC called Nevada’s tight Senate race for the incumbent: Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto. Cortez Masto defeated Adam Laxalt, a former attorney general for the state, whom former president Trump had endorsed.
This means that the Democrats keep control of the Senate.
Democrats will have 50 votes in the new Congress just as they did in the current one, enabling Vice President Kamala Harris to break ties in their favor.
Harris may not need to break ties, though, if the last Senate seat goes to the Democrats. That last seat is the one outstanding seat from Georgia. In the election there, Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock garnered about 35,000 more votes than Trump-endorsed Republican Herschel Walker, but neither man won 50% of the vote. Under Georgia law, this forces a runoff, which will be held on December 6. Walker is a deeply flawed candidate, and now that his election cannot give the Republicans control of the Senate, it is not clear that voters will turn out for him.
As of late October, NPR reported that outside groups had spent almost a billion dollars on the campaigns of Republican Senate candidates, hoping to take control of that body. Key to that desire for control was control of the judiciary, where the right wing has entrenched itself as it has become increasingly extreme and unpopular. Even without control of the House—which is still unclear as election officials continue to count votes—Democratic control of the Senate means that President Joe Biden will be able to continue confirming judges.
After the Nevada race was called, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters that the victory was “a vindication for Democrats, our agenda, and…for the American people.” He explained: “The American people rejected the antidemocratic extremist MAGA Republicans.”
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The contours of last Tuesday’s midterm election continue to come into focus. They are good, indeed, for the Democrats and Democratic president Joe Biden. Foremost is that the Democrats have not lost a Senate seat and could well pick one up after the December 6 runoff election between Georgia senator Rafael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker.
Those results are strong. According to Axios senior political correspondent Josh Kraushaar, only in 1934, under Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt; 1962, under Democratic president John F. Kennedy; and 2002, under Republican president George W. Bush and just after the 9/11 attacks, has a president’s party not lost a Senate seat in the midterms and lost fewer than 10 House seats. Since World War II, midterms have cost the party in power an average of 28 seats.
Democrats also did well in state governments, picking up some state governorships—including Arizona’s tonight, as Democrat Katie Hobbs is projected to have beaten Trump-backed Republican election denier Kari Lake—and taking control in some legislative chambers, although again, it’s not clear yet how many. They also denied the Republicans veto-proof supermajorities in others.
Also crucial was the defeat of election deniers, who backed Trump’s false allegations that he won the 2020 election, in six key elections where those folks would have been in charge of certifying ballots for their states in the future. In Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico, voters rejected election deniers running to become secretary of state. Indiana voters elected as secretary of state election denier Diego Morales, who has been mired in scandal, securing Republican control of the state.
In Nevada, Republican Jim Marchant was personally recruited by Trump’s people to run for secretary of state, and they asked him to put together a group of those who thought like him across the nation. At a Trump rally in October, Marchant promised voters that “[w]hen my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re going to fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024.”
Instead, voters chose Democrat Cisco Aguilar, who told Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times: “People are tired of chaos…. They want stability; they want normalcy; they want somebody who’s going to be an adult and make decisions that are fair, transparent, and in the best interest of all Nevadans.”
While many of us have been focusing on events here at home, the outcome of the election had huge implications for foreign policy. As today’s column by conservative columnist Max Boot of the Washington Post notes, “Republicans lost the election—and so did [Russian president Vladimir] Putin, MBS [Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman], and [former/incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu.”
Autocrats and hard-right leaders liked Trump at the head of the U.S. government, for he was far more inclined to operate transactionally on the basis of financial benefits, while Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, have advanced a foreign policy based on democratic values. Leaders like MBS have ignored Biden or denigrated him, expecting that a reelected Trump in 2024 would revert to the system they preferred. Now those calculations have hit a snag.
Indeed, Russia put its bots and trolls back to work before the election to weaken Biden in the hope that a Republican Congress would cut aid to Ukraine, as Republican leaders had suggested they would. The Russian army is in terrible trouble in Ukraine, and its best bet for a lift is for the international coalition the U.S. anchors to fall apart. Russian propagandists suggested that Putin suppressed news that the Russians were withdrawing from the Ukrainian city of Kherson until after the election to avoid giving the Democrats a boost in the polls.
Today, Secretary of State Blinken announced more sanctions against Russian companies and individuals, in Russia and abroad, “to disrupt Russia’s military supply chains and impose high costs on President Putin’s enablers.” Director of the CIA William Burns met recently in Turkey with his Russian counterpart to convey “a message on the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons” and “the risks of escalation,” but said the U.S. is firmly behind “our fundamental principle: nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”
Also today, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved a resolution saying that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine violated international law and that Russia must pay war reparations. In Germany and Poland, the governments separately announced they were taking over natural gas companies that had been tied to Russia’s huge energy company, Gazprom, in order to guarantee energy supplies to their people.
On Friday, November 11, Biden spoke at the United Nations climate change conference in Egypt. He was the only leader of a major polluting nation to go to the meeting, and there he stressed U.S. leadership, pointing to the Inflation Reduction Act’s $370 billion investment in the U.S. shift to clean energy and other climate-positive changes. Also on Friday, his administration announced it would use the U.S. government’s buying power to push suppliers toward climate-positive positions. Protesters called attention to how little the U.S. has done for poorer countries harmed by climate change that has been caused by richer countries.
From Egypt, the president traveled to Cambodia for a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. In the past year, the U.S. has announced more than $250 million in new initiatives with ASEAN, investing especially in infrastructure in an apparent attempt to disrupt China’s dominance of the region by supporting counterweights in the region. The U.S. is now elevating the cooperation with ASEAN to a comprehensive strategic partnership to support a rules-based Indo-Pacific region, maritime cooperation, economic and technological cooperation, and sustainable development. “ASEAN is the heart of my administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy, and we continue to strengthen our commitment to work in lockstep with an empowered, unified ASEAN,” Biden said.
While in Cambodia, Biden also met with Japanese prime minister Kishida Fumio and reinforced the U.S. “ironclad commitment to the defense of Japan” after North Korea’s recent ballistic missile tests. Biden and Kishida reiterated their plan to strengthen and modernize the relationship between the U.S. and Japan to “address threats to the free and open Indo-Pacific.”
From there, Biden traveled to Bali, Indonesia, for a meeting of the G20, a forum of 19 countries and the European Union comprising countries that make up most of the nation’s largest economies.
Today the president met for more than three hours with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The main message from the meeting was that the two countries are communicating, and while each is standing firm on its national sovereignty, each sees room to cooperate on major global issues.
Biden made it a point to say that U.S. policies toward Taiwan have not changed—a concern that created ripples of uncertainty when House speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island nation last summer—and both he and Xi agreed that Russia should not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. In a sign that relations are easing, Biden said that Blinken and other U.S. officials will visit China to begin working on issues of mutual interest..
Meanwhile, authorities in Iran are cracking down on the protesters there, with news of torture and now of a death sentence for one of the 15,000 protesters who have been arrested. Today, national security advisor Jake Sullivan condemned the human rights abuses inflicted on its citizens by the Iranian government and called for “accountability…through sanctions and other means.”
In Bali today, the president reminded reporters: “On my first trip overseas last year, I said that America was back—back at home, back at the table, and back to leading the world. In the year and a half that’s followed, we’ve shown exactly what that means. America is keeping its commitments. America is investing in our strength at home. America is working alongside our allies and partners to deliver real, meaningful progress around the world. And at this critical moment, no nation is better positioned to help build the future we want than the United States of America.”
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Today, what appears to have been a Russian-made missile fell into eastern Poland near Ukraine, killing two civilians. Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an organization formed in 1949 to stand against the expansion of the Soviet Union and now standing against the expansion of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
According to Article 5 of NATO’s founding document, an attack on one NATO member is considered an attack on all of them. But exactly what happened today remains uncertain: it is not clear if the missile was an intentional attack, an error, or an intercepted weapon that went off course. Poland could invoke Article 5 but doesn’t have to and indeed would have a hard time getting the necessary support for that escalation without absolute proof the attack was deliberate.
So far, Poland appears to have activated Article 4, which brings NATO leaders together for consultation “whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.” A joint consultation shows the world that NATO is still unified and warns against further escalation (if indeed any was intended).
Biden spoke by phone with Polish president Andrzej Duda to express his condolences and reiterate the U.S. commitment to NATO while the investigation into what actually happened is ongoing. He also spoke with NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg.
Russian missile attacks on Ukraine have increased as world leaders are meeting at the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia. The G20 is a forum of the European Union and 19 countries that include most of the world’s largest economies. Meetings of the G20 focus on cooperation for development, financial stability, and addressing climate change.
After filing the paperwork earlier today, former president Donald Trump announced a run for the 2024 presidency tonight in a speech from Mar-a-Lago before an audience that included a number of far-right social media influencers, his wife Melania, and family members Eric, Lara, and Barron Trump and Jared Kushner, but, so far as I can tell, no members of the Republican Party leadership. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who was a key advisor in the Trump White House, was not there, and said tonight she does “not plan to be involved in politics.”
The speech was a subdued version of his rallies, claiming he is a victim and offering a replay of his inaugural address, which focused on what he called “American carnage.” Tonight he warned “our country is in a horrible state, we’re in grave trouble” and said he was leading “a great movement” to take the country back. Compared with the midterms crowds yelling for their candidate, the lack of enthusiasm in the room seemed marked, and after about an hour, while Trump was ranting about former German chancellor Angela Merkel, the Fox News Channel cut the live feed.
Domenico Montanaro of NPR indicated that Trump might not enjoy the same uncritical coverage he received in 2016 when he began his story on the announcement: “Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, announced he is running again for president in 2024.”
According to Mark Sweney of The Guardian, after the Republicans’ poor showing on Tuesday, in which the high-profile candidates Trump backed lost, media mogul Rupert Murdoch has told Trump that he will not support Trump’s 2024 candidacy and will instead back Florida governor Ron DeSantis should he decide to run. If Murdoch follows through, this means Trump will lose the backing of the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Fox News Channel.
The party’s losses in the midterms appear to have opened the door for Trump's opponents to toss him under the bus. According to Jonathan Swan at Axios, at this morning’s annual meeting of the Republican governors, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie got “huge applause” from the room full of hundreds of politicians, consultants, and wealthy donors when he blamed Trump for three cycles of losses for the Republican Party. Christie said voters “rejected crazy.”
Trump has likely announced his candidacy so early either to try to stop DeSantis from announcing and attracting Trump’s voters, or to try to avoid indictments, or both.
There is no doubt the former president’s legal troubles are heating up. On Saturday, a legal filing from the Department of Justice to Special Master Judge Raymond Dearie, in charge of reviewing the documents the FBI seized on August 8 from Mar-a-Lago, revealed that Trump kept a document marked “SECRET” and another marked “CONFIDENTIAL” in a drawer together with personal documents from after his time in office. This suggests that he deliberately mishandled the documents at a time after he left office.
Meanwhile, Trump has told the special master that the president has the authority simply to declare which records are personal records, and that he declared all the seized documents to be personal records while in office. He suggests his careless handling of the classified documents proves he considered them personal records. The Department of Justice has responded with incredulity (that’s the gist of it, anyway).
Two days ago, Trump’s second chief of staff, 72-year-old former Marine Corps general John F. Kelly, told Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times that Trump wanted to use the Department of Justice and other government agencies against those he perceived to be his political enemies. Repeatedly, he told Kelly he wanted to use the Internal Revenue Service in that way; last summer the New York Times revealed that after Kelly had left the White House, the IRS selected former FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe, whom Trump blamed for the investigation into the ties of his 2016 campaign to Russian operatives, for rare and extensive audits.
Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington dismissed Kelly’s account, although others have made similar statements, saying: “It’s total fiction created by a psycho, John Kelly, who never said this before, and made it up just because he’s become so irrelevant.”
New documents from Trump’s former accounting firm, Mazars USA, released by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, showed that foreign governments including those of Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and China “spent more money than previously known at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., and did so at sensitive times for those countries’ relations with the United States.” The leader of Malaysia, for example, spent more than $250,000 over 9 days at the hotel, and Trump praised him highly while the leader was “publicly under investigation by the Department of Justice…for looting a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund and laundering the money through U.S. financial institutions.”
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform yesterday wrote to the acting archivist of the United States, Debra Steidel Wall, asking her for presidential records to determine whether Trump distorted foreign policy to serve his own financial interests. In a statement, the committee’s chair, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) said of the information from Trump’s accountants: “These documents, which the Committee continues to obtain from Mazars, will inform our legislative efforts to ensure that future presidents do not abuse their position of power for personal gain.”
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It turns out that caution was warranted before drawing conclusions about the missile that fell into Poland yesterday, killing two civilians. Today, Polish president Andrzej Duda told reporters that the missile was likely an “unfortunate accident” caused by Ukrainian attempts to counter a group of about 100 Russian missiles launched at Ukraine.
“We have no evidence at the moment that it was a rocket launched by Russian forces,” Duda said. “However, there are many indications that it was a missile that was used by Ukraine’s antimissile defense.”
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) secretary general Jens Stoltenberg agreed that there is currently no evidence that Russia had deliberately attacked Poland. Poland is a member of NATO, whose mutual defense pact requires members to see any attack on one NATO member as an attack on all of them. Nonetheless, Stoltenberg reiterated that, at the end of the day, the blame for the errant missile still fell on Russia. “Russia bears ultimate responsibility as it continues its illegal war against Ukraine.”
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky says he’s not convinced of this explanation.
Stoltenberg also participated today in a virtual meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, formed in April for defense chiefs and ministers from those countries supporting Ukraine to coordinate military assistance and train Ukrainian soldiers to use it. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin convened the group’s seventh meeting, days after the U.S. pledged more assistance that will bring its total so far up to $18.6 billion, and seven other countries also either delivered or pledged more military assistance.
Austin praised the Ukrainian determination “to live in a free and sovereign country” and said the group would discuss what is necessary to “ensure that Ukraine can continue to consolidate its gains and keep its momentum on the battlefield even throughout the winter.” At a press conference afterward, Austin called the meeting “highly successful” and noted that Sweden today offered another $287 million, Spain is sending 2 more HAWK launchers and missiles, and Canada is sending another $500 million in assistance and more in winter gear. Germany is sending more defense supplies, artillery, and ammunition. Greece and Poland are sending more ammunition as well.
Austin concluded: “[O]ur resolve is only strengthened by Russia's indefensible attacks on civilian targets, and we'll continue to stand together in common purpose because no member of this contact group wants to live in a world where big countries bulldoze their peaceful neighbors, and we won't just accept Putin's imperial aggression and erosion of international norms as some kind of new normal. Instead, we will continue to stand up for Ukraine's inalienable rights to defend itself. We'll continue to strengthen our unity and resolve. We'll continue to show the power of partnership.”
Taking the microphone, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said that Russia failed to achieve its strategic objectives with a quick strike at Ukraine in February. Then they changed their operational objectives to seize the Donbas. They failed. Then they tried to seize Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. They failed there, too.
“So across the entire front line trace of some 900 or so kilometers, the Ukrainians have achieved success after success after success and the Russians have failed every single time. They've lost strategically, they've lost operationally, and I repeat, they lost tactically.”
Milley said that Russia is now settling in to inflict suffering on the civilian population with strikes designed to cut electricity and heat. This, he points out, is a war crime.
Milley noted that Russia could stop the war at any time, and he pledged that the U.S. would stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes to keep them free, sovereign, independent with their territory intact.” That being said, he warned that while “the Russian military is suffering tremendously,” it is not going to withdraw entirely from Ukraine any time soon. He suggested that with the military “really hurting bad” there might be a possibility of a political solution to get Putin to withdraw his troops.
Meanwhile, election fallout continues.
The Republican civil war between the far right and the medium right is playing out in leadership struggles.
In the Senate, Rick Scott (R-FL) launched a challenge to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from the right, with Trump’s support. Scott told other senators that “it’s time for bold change.” For his part, McConnell in March struck out at Scott’s plan for the party, saying “We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.” One senator called today’s meeting “a rhetorical slugfest.” McConnell won the secret vote by 37 to 10 with 1 senator abstaining.
The media has now projected that the Republicans will take control of the House, where Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is also facing a challenge from the far right as he is seeking to become House speaker. Unlike Republican Senate leadership, though, the House speaker is elected by the full House. Yesterday the House Republican conference nominated McCarthy for speaker, over far-right MAGA Republican Andy Biggs (R-AZ). Biggs got 31 votes to McCarthy’s 188, suggesting that the far-right “Freedom Caucus” can command only 31 votes.
McCarthy has courted the far right by promising to strip Democrats of power, kicking Representatives Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) off the House Intelligence Committee, for example. Still, he needs 218 votes to become speaker, and MAGA Republican Matt Gaetz (R-FL) told CNN that McCarthy does not have the votes.
The election of a House speaker can be a way for different factions to test out their power at the beginning of a session. If McCarthy can’t muster the necessary votes, the speakership could open to a far more moderate Republican who could get Democratic votes. That shift might, in fact, look good to a number of Republicans who see how thoroughly voters in some areas rejected extremism in the midterms. Or the need for more moderate votes could swing McCarthy away from the MAGA crowd. It’s not clear yet, but it might tell us a lot. In 1856, at a time when party alignments were shifting markedly, it took the House two months and 133 ballots finally to choose Representative Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts, and by then, everyone knew exactly who backed whom.
Other fallout from the election suggests the election has created some immediate results. After asking Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to delay consideration of a bill to protect marriage equality until after the election, twelve—but only twelve—Senate Republicans have voted with all the Democrats to advance a bill to protect marriage equality for same-sex and interracial couples. The measure repeals the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage under federal laws as between one man and one woman, and guarantees that states recognize marriages that were legal in the states where they were performed.
“Love is love,” President Biden said in a statement as he returned from Indonesia, “and Americans should have the right to marry the person they love…. The Respect for Marriage Act will ensure that LGBTQI+ couples and interracial couples are respected and protected equally under federal law, and provide more certainty to these families since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs [v. Jackson Women’s Health, which challenged judicial protection of marriage equality].”
Biden thanked the members of Congress who worked together to move the measure forward, and asked them to “send this bill to my desk where I will promptly sign it into law.”
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Yesterday, midterm results gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives after a campaign in which they emphasized inflation; today, Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who has received his party’s nomination to become speaker of the House, along with other Republican leadership, outlined for reporters their plans for the session.
“We must be relentless in our oversight of this administration,” the number 2 Republican in the House, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, told his colleagues. They plan to begin a raft of investigations: into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, the origins of Covid-19, the FBI, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and so on. But not, apparently, inflation.
Republicans have relied on congressional investigations to smear the Democrats since 1994, the year after the Democrats passed the so-called Motor Voter Act, making it easier to register to vote. After that midterm election, they accused two Democratic lawmakers of being elected thanks to “voter fraud” and used their power in Congress to launch long investigations that turned up no wrongdoing but convinced many Americans that the country had a problem with illegal voting (which is vanishingly rare).
House Republicans also led six investigations of the 2012 attack on two United States government facilities in Benghazi, Libya. That attack by a militant Islamic group while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state left four Americans dead. After several committees had found no significant wrongdoing, Republicans in the House created a select committee to reopen the case, and Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity: “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”
And then, of course, there were Secretary of State Clinton’s emails before the 2016 election, and former president Donald Trump’s attempt in 2019 to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into a company on whose board Joe Biden’s son Hunter sat in order to weaken Biden before the 2020 election.
House oversight of the executive branch is actually a really important part of the House’s role, and yet it is one that Trump Republicans have rejected when Democrats were at the helm. Just yesterday, former vice president Mike Pence did so, saying that Congress had “no right” to his testimony before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. In fact, presidents and vice presidents have acknowledged their responsibility to testify to Congress back as far as…George Washington.
It is not clear, though, that upcoming Republican investigations will have the teeth the older ones did. True believers are demanding the investigations—and some are already hoping for impeachments—but this tactic might not be as effective now that Americans have been reminded what it’s like to have a Congress that accomplishes major legislation. Democratic strategists are also launching a rapid-response team, the Congressional Integrity Project, to push back on the investigations and the investigators.
The switch in control of the House of Representatives has brought another historic change.
Today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced she is stepping down from party leadership, although she will continue to serve in the House. “The hour has come for a new generation to lead the Democratic Caucus that I so deeply respect,” she told her colleagues. Democratic majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) is also stepping away from a leadership position. Both of them are over 80.
Pelosi was elected to Congress in a special election in 1987, becoming one of 12 Democratic women (now there are more than 90). She was first elected speaker in 2007, the first woman ever to hold that role. She was speaker until the Democrats lost the House in 2011, then was reelected to the position in 2019, and has held it since. Jackie Calmes of the Los Angeles. Times tweeted: “As an ex–Congress reporter, I can speak to the records of 8 of the 55 House speakers, 4 Dem[ocrat]s & 4 R[epublican]s back to Tip O’Neill. I'm not alone in counting Pelosi as the best of the bunch. 2 Dem[ocratic] presidents owe their leg[islati]v[e] successes to her; 2 GOP presidents were repeatedly foiled by her.”
Pelosi began her speech to her colleagues by remembering her first sight of the U.S. Capitol when her father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., was sworn in for his fifth congressional term representing Baltimore. She was six.
She called attention to the Capitol in which they stood: “the most beautiful building in the world—because of what it represents. The Capitol is a temple of our Democracy, of our Constitution, of our highest ideals.”
“In this room, our colleagues across history have abolished slavery; granted women the right to vote; established Social Security and Medicare; offered a hand to the weak, care to the sick, education to the young, and hope to the many,” she reminded them, doing “the People’s work.”
“American Democracy is majestic—but it is fragile. Many of us here have witnessed its fragility firsthand—tragically, in this Chamber. And so, Democracy must be forever defended from forces that wish it harm,” she said, and she praised the voters last week who “resoundingly rejected violence and insurrection” and “gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.”
Despite our disagreements on policy, she said, “we must remain fully committed to our shared, fundamental mission: to hold strong to our most treasured Democratic ideals, to cherish the spark of divinity in each and every one of us, and to always put our Country first.”
She said it had been her “privilege to play a part in forging extraordinary progress for the American people,” and noted pointedly—because she worked with four presidents—“I have enjoyed working with three Presidents, achieving: Historic investments in clean energy with President George Bush. Transformative health care reform with President Barack Obama. And forging the future—from infrastructure to health care to climate action—with President Joe Biden. Now, we must move boldly into the future….”
“A new day is dawning on the horizon,” she said, “And I look forward—always forward—to the unfolding story of our nation. A story of light and love. Of patriotism and progress. Of many becoming one. And, always, an unfinished mission to make the dreams of today the reality of tomorrow.”
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The price of crude oil this morning was $78.47 a barrel, down from $92.61 a barrel on November 4, falling by at least 18% over the past two weeks. This should help to relieve high costs of gas for consumers, although when the price falls to around $70 a barrel, the administration will begin to refill the strategic petroleum reserve, the release of which has helped to bring down gas prices. Diesel prices, though, are going up because of shortages caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a shortage of refinery capabilities after a 2019 fire shut down a refinery in Pennsylvania.
Shipping prices are also coming down, getting back to a normal range after crazy heights after the pandemic that fed inflation. The dislocations of the coronavirus pandemic sent shipping costs as much as 547% over the usual range by last January, driving up the prices of consumer goods. The return of more normal costs for transportation should help bring those prices down.
As Americans head out of town for the holidays, President Biden reminded them today that his administration is taking on the hidden “junk fees” on airline tickets and hotel rooms.
In other economic news, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has already spurred dramatic investment in American manufacturing of battery equipment. Previously, China was dominating that industry, but now America is developing its own battery sector to help the nation move toward electrical vehicles and other climate-friendly technologies.
Biden pushed for the IRA to combat climate change, provide jobs, and compete with China. By passing the IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Biden administration “has basically seized the bull by the horns,” Sanjiv Malhotra, the chief executive of a company building a battery plant in rural West Virginia told Harry Dempsey and Myles McCormick of the Financial Times. Malhotra’s new plant will hire out-of-work coal miners.
Meanwhile, the two parties continue to try to organize themselves into new patterns after the midterms. The far-right, pro-gun “Second Amendment Caucus” today hosted Kyle Rittenhouse, the 19-year-old who shot three men, killing two of them, in summer 2020 during a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and who was later acquitted of homicide.
Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), whose Democratic opponent, Adam Frisch, conceded today rather than force a hand recount of their close election, told Emily Brooks of The Hill: “It was an honor to have Kyle join the Second Amendment Caucus. He is a powerful example of why we must never give an inch on our Second Amendment rights, and his perseverance and love for our country was an inspiration to the caucus.” Rittenhouse tweeted a photograph of himself at the Capitol with the caption: “T-minus 5 years until I call this place my office?”
Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is facing opposition from the far-right MAGA Republicans in his quest to be speaker of the House, and welcoming Rittenhouse signals to the base that they will have a strong voice in the new Congress.
New candidates for Democratic leadership in the House are stepping up now that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she is stepping down. Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) today launched a bid to become the Democratic leader. Emphasizing continuity from Pelosi, with whom he is close, Jeffries called for working with Republicans “where possible…to deliver results for the American people,” but noted that “the opposing party appears to have no plan to accomplish anything meaningful. If the Republican Conference continues to major in demagoguery and minor in disinformation, their bankruptcy of ideas must be aggressively exposed on an ongoing basis.”
Jeffries called for Democrats to “unify around an agenda designed to make life better for everyday Americans from all walks of life,” and to center Democratic “communication strategy around the messaging principle that values unite, issues divide. House Democrats are actually the party that defends freedom, promotes economic opportunity and values families by uplifting them. We must make sure that the perception of the Democratic brand matches up with the reality that we do in fact authentically share values that unite the Heartland, Urban America, Rural America, Suburban America and Small Town America.”
Massachusetts Representative Katherine Clark is running for the number two position in the party leadership—the place Steny Hoyer (D-MD) has held since 2003—and California Representative Peter Aguilar is running for the number 3 position. Both Clark and Aguilar are close to Jeffries, and the three are seen as a team.
The coming Republican control of the House means shifting of the investigation into former president Trump. Trump was subpoenaed on November 14 to testify before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol but didn’t acknowledge the subpoena. The committee said it would “evaluate next steps.”
Yesterday, committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said he established a subcommittee about a month ago to look at "all outstanding issues" and to consider criminal and civil referrals to the Department of Justice. The members of the subcommittee are all lawyers: Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Liz Cheney (R-WY), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).
Today, days after Trump announced he would seek reelection in 2024, Attorney General Merrick Garland said he had appointed a special counsel to assume control over the investigations of the former president. One is the investigation into Trump’s theft of United States documents, including some that were classified at the highest levels, when he left office. The other is Trump’s role in the events leading up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol in an attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election for Trump.
The Department of Justice has been investigating both of these issues since they came to light, but with Trump now in the political ring for 2024—in part because he hoped an announcement would stop his prosecution—and with Biden likely to announce later, Garland said he thought it was important to demonstrate that the investigations were independent. It is also of note that a special counsel can be removed only for misconduct, insulating the investigations from the new Republican majority in the House. The White House was not given advance notice of Garland’s action.
Garland appointed to the position Jack Smith, a graduate of Harvard Law School who served as a prosecutor for government corruption cases and since 2018 has been a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague. A former colleague said of him: “I have no idea what his political beliefs are because he’s completely apolitical. He’s committed to doing what is right.”
The appointment frustrated those who saw no reason to treat Trump differently than any other U.S. citizen and thought it would significantly slow the investigation; others saw it as a sign the Justice Department would indict the former president. Tonight, referring to the issue of the stolen documents, Trump’s attorney general William Barr told CNN, “I personally think they probably have the basis for legitimately indicting [Trump].... They have the case.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
The price of crude oil this morning was $78.47 a barrel, down from $92.61 a barrel on November 4, falling by at least 18% over the past two weeks. This should help to relieve high costs of gas for consumers, although when the price falls to around $70 a barrel, the administration will begin to refill the strategic petroleum reserve, the release of which has helped to bring down gas prices. Diesel prices, though, are going up because of shortages caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a shortage of refinery capabilities after a 2019 fire shut down a refinery in Pennsylvania.
Shipping prices are also coming down, getting back to a normal range after crazy heights after the pandemic that fed inflation. The dislocations of the coronavirus pandemic sent shipping costs as much as 547% over the usual range by last January, driving up the prices of consumer goods. The return of more normal costs for transportation should help bring those prices down.
As Americans head out of town for the holidays, President Biden reminded them today that his administration is taking on the hidden “junk fees” on airline tickets and hotel rooms.
In other economic news, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has already spurred dramatic investment in American manufacturing of battery equipment. Previously, China was dominating that industry, but now America is developing its own battery sector to help the nation move toward electrical vehicles and other climate-friendly technologies.
Biden pushed for the IRA to combat climate change, provide jobs, and compete with China. By passing the IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Biden administration “has basically seized the bull by the horns,” Sanjiv Malhotra, the chief executive of a company building a battery plant in rural West Virginia told Harry Dempsey and Myles McCormick of the Financial Times. Malhotra’s new plant will hire out-of-work coal miners.
Meanwhile, the two parties continue to try to organize themselves into new patterns after the midterms. The far-right, pro-gun “Second Amendment Caucus” today hosted Kyle Rittenhouse, the 19-year-old who shot three men, killing two of them, in summer 2020 during a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and who was later acquitted of homicide.
Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), whose Democratic opponent, Adam Frisch, conceded today rather than force a hand recount of their close election, told Emily Brooks of The Hill: “It was an honor to have Kyle join the Second Amendment Caucus. He is a powerful example of why we must never give an inch on our Second Amendment rights, and his perseverance and love for our country was an inspiration to the caucus.” Rittenhouse tweeted a photograph of himself at the Capitol with the caption: “T-minus 5 years until I call this place my office?”
Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is facing opposition from the far-right MAGA Republicans in his quest to be speaker of the House, and welcoming Rittenhouse signals to the base that they will have a strong voice in the new Congress.
New candidates for Democratic leadership in the House are stepping up now that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she is stepping down. Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) today launched a bid to become the Democratic leader. Emphasizing continuity from Pelosi, with whom he is close, Jeffries called for working with Republicans “where possible…to deliver results for the American people,” but noted that “the opposing party appears to have no plan to accomplish anything meaningful. If the Republican Conference continues to major in demagoguery and minor in disinformation, their bankruptcy of ideas must be aggressively exposed on an ongoing basis.”
Jeffries called for Democrats to “unify around an agenda designed to make life better for everyday Americans from all walks of life,” and to center Democratic “communication strategy around the messaging principle that values unite, issues divide. House Democrats are actually the party that defends freedom, promotes economic opportunity and values families by uplifting them. We must make sure that the perception of the Democratic brand matches up with the reality that we do in fact authentically share values that unite the Heartland, Urban America, Rural America, Suburban America and Small Town America.”
Massachusetts Representative Katherine Clark is running for the number two position in the party leadership—the place Steny Hoyer (D-MD) has held since 2003—and California Representative Peter Aguilar is running for the number 3 position. Both Clark and Aguilar are close to Jeffries, and the three are seen as a team.
The coming Republican control of the House means shifting of the investigation into former president Trump. Trump was subpoenaed on November 14 to testify before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol but didn’t acknowledge the subpoena. The committee said it would “evaluate next steps.”
Yesterday, committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said he established a subcommittee about a month ago to look at "all outstanding issues" and to consider criminal and civil referrals to the Department of Justice. The members of the subcommittee are all lawyers: Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Liz Cheney (R-WY), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).
Today, days after Trump announced he would seek reelection in 2024, Attorney General Merrick Garland said he had appointed a special counsel to assume control over the investigations of the former president. One is the investigation into Trump’s theft of United States documents, including some that were classified at the highest levels, when he left office. The other is Trump’s role in the events leading up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol in an attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election for Trump.
The Department of Justice has been investigating both of these issues since they came to light, but with Trump now in the political ring for 2024—in part because he hoped an announcement would stop his prosecution—and with Biden likely to announce later, Garland said he thought it was important to demonstrate that the investigations were independent. It is also of note that a special counsel can be removed only for misconduct, insulating the investigations from the new Republican majority in the House. The White House was not given advance notice of Garland’s action.
Garland appointed to the position Jack Smith, a graduate of Harvard Law School who served as a prosecutor for government corruption cases and since 2018 has been a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague. A former colleague said of him: “I have no idea what his political beliefs are because he’s completely apolitical. He’s committed to doing what is right.”
The appointment frustrated those who saw no reason to treat Trump differently than any other U.S. citizen and thought it would significantly slow the investigation; others saw it as a sign the Justice Department would indict the former president. Tonight, referring to the issue of the stolen documents, Trump’s attorney general William Barr told CNN, “I personally think they probably have the basis for legitimately indicting [Trump].... They have the case.”
It’s unreal how the GOP have embraced a killer it’s sickening!
For three hot days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, more than 150,000 soldiers from the armies of the United States of America and the Confederate States of America slashed at each other in the hills and through the fields around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
When the battered armies limped out of town after the brutal battle, they left scattered behind them more than seven thousand corpses in a town with fewer than 2500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, the townspeople had to get the dead soldiers into the ground as quickly as they possibly could, marking the hasty graves with nothing more than pencil on wooden boards.
A local lawyer, David Wills, who had huddled in his cellar with his family and their neighbors during the battle, called for the creation of a national cemetery in the town, where the bodies of the United States soldiers who had died in the battle could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and Wills and an organizing committee planned an elaborate dedication ceremony to be held a few weeks after workers began moving remains into the new national cemetery.
They invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. To deliver the keynote address, they asked prominent orator Edward Everett, who wanted to do such extensive research into the battle that they had to move the ceremony to November 19, a later date than they had first contemplated.
And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Abraham Lincoln to make a few appropriate remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.
On November 19, 1863, about fifteen thousand people gathered in Gettysburg for the dedication ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln stood up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, speaking slowly, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln began.
While the southern enslavers who were making war on the United States had stood firm on the Constitution and said that its protection of property rights—including their enslavement of their Black neighbors— was the heart of the nation, Lincoln tied the country's meaning instead to the Declaration of Independence.
The men who wrote the Declaration considered the “truths” they listed “self-evident”: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But Lincoln had no such confidence. By his time, the idea that all men were created equal was a “proposition,” and Americans of his day were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Standing near where so many men had died four months before, Lincoln honored “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.” But he noted that those “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated” the ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.”
Instead, “[i]t is for us the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He urged the men and women in the audience to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion."
In November 1863, after more than two years of deadly fighting, Lincoln rallied Americans not just behind the idea of freedom for Black Americans that he had declared the previous January with the Emancipation Proclamation, but also behind a new concept of America, one that would bring to life the ideas the founders had put in the Declaration but never brought to life: that all men are created equal, and that governments "derive... their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Lincoln urged Americans "to here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
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November. Buttoning up the last of the summer season and hunkering down for winter.
Buddy caught some of the lobstermen heading out in November one cold morning a few years ago. He wrote: "Had a little 'sea smoke' in the harbor the other morning. Getting a little wintry feeling. Pleasure boats have pretty much disappeared, and at the rate some traps are coming ashore... the work boats won't be far behind."
And here we are, once again, as the seasons turn.
I'm aiming to have the new manuscript entirely wrapped before Thanksgiving, so am going to go to bed early to get a jump on the last of this round of edits in the morning.
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The first harks back to the furor last May when the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—the decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized abortion rights as a constitutional right—was leaked to Politico before it was released. At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts called the leak a “singular and egregious breach of…trust” and ordered an investigation to find the leaker. In late October, Justice Samuel Alito told the Heritage Foundation that the leak was a “grave betrayal of trust by somebody, and it was a shock” that had made the court’s right-wing majority “targets for assassination.”
On Saturday, Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker of the New York Times reported that the Reverend Rob Schenck, formerly an antiabortion activist, wrote to Roberts in July (although the letter was dated June 7, 2022) to say that in 2014 he had received advance notice of the court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby—the decision allowing corporations to deny their employees contraceptive health care coverage—from a woman who had just had dinner with Justice and Mrs. Alito. The dinner guest told Schenck that she had learned that Alito was writing the decision and that it would favor evangelical Christians. Schenck, who has become an advocate of choice as he is trying to mark himself as a progressive evangelical leader, signed the letter to Roberts, “Yours in the interest of truth and fairness.”
Schenck provided the reporters with contemporary emails suggesting he knew the outcome of the Hobby Lobby case ahead of time, and they talked to four people who confirmed that he had confidential information about it before the court handed it down. He used that information to prepare a public relations push ready to go the minute the decision was public.
The leak of a Supreme Court decision is shocking and potentially illegal, but even more shocking than the revelation that there have been two major leaks from the court—both of right-wing opinions authored by Alito—was the story the reporters unraveled of the degree to which evangelical activists worked to become close to the justices, especially through participation in the court’s historical society, as well as religious events, a plan Schenck called “Operation Higher Court.” Their goal was to influence the justices quietly, and it appears to have been at least somewhat successful: in July, Peggy Nienaber, the executive director of Liberty Counsel’s D.C. ministry, who worked with Schenck, was caught on a hot mic saying she prayed with certain Supreme Court justices.
On Sunday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) wrote to Chief Justice John Roberts to say that if the court is not going to investigate the breaches, lawmakers will.
New York Times reporters were evidently busy this weekend, because Eric Lipton and Maggie Haberman reported Sunday that the Trump family has begun to work not just with foreign nationals, but with foreign governments themselves. The Trumps have recently signed a $4 billion deal with a Saudi Arabian real estate company that is backed by the government of Oman.
The Trumps are deeply tangled with the Saudis already, of course, hosting the LIV Golf tournaments backed by the Saudi government and—in Jared Kushner’s case—investing $2 billion of Saudi government funds, a deal that Saudi leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, personally approved after the panel that screens investments advised against the deal.
Meanwhile, prosecutors today called their last witness in the criminal trial of the Trump Organization for fraud and tax evasion. Key witness Allen Weisselberg, former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, has painted a picture of an organization that avoided taxes by paying officers with private school tuition, cars, and rent money. The company denies all charges and says the fraudulent movement of money can be tied to Weisselberg alone.
Finally tonight, on a lighter note, this morning President Joe Biden pardoned turkeys Chocolate and Chip, lucky turkeys indeed in this season where supply chain choke points and the late season, virulent avian flu meant the culling of 7.3 million birds earlier this year, at least 3.6% of the nation’s turkeys. Chocolate and Chip will live out their lives on the campus of North Carolina State University.
Later, the president and First Lady Jill Biden had a “Friendsgiving” dinner this afternoon at the Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, with service members and military families, greeting them table by table and then thanking both the “best fighting force in the history of the world” and those at home who, in the words of poet John Milton, “stand and wait.”
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For many Americans today, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, represents a dramatic break from what came before. Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets hacked a chasm between an idyllic Camelot and the chaos and division of the modern era.
But at the time, Americans were eager to see not a break, but continuity. And no one recognized this need more viscerally than the two presidents who served on either side of President Kennedy—Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson—although their goals were very different.
One of the first people to whom Johnson turned upon his sudden elevation to the presidency was former president Eisenhower. After all, Eisenhower had stepped down from the leadership of the free world less than three years before, and Johnson understood that having Ike’s stamp of approval on his own unexpected presidency would give it stability and enable him to move his policies forward. Johnson hoped to get Eisenhower to tell the press that he would stand behind the new president.
For his part, Eisenhower disliked Johnson and distrusted his familiarity and was too smart to let Johnson box him in. A transcript of the telephone call Johnson placed to Eisenhower on the evening of November 22 reveals Johnson coaxing: “You know how much I have admired you through the years.”
Eisenhower replied: “The country is far more important than any of us.”
Although he publicly and repeatedly pledged his support to the government, the Republican ex-president declined to issue a joint statement declaring his political support for the Democrat Johnson.
But, like the new president, Eisenhower saw the need to emphasize to Americans that the country would survive the first murder of a president since Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley in 1901. Pulled out of a meeting at the United Nations to address the news of Kennedy’s assassination, Eisenhower spoke to reporters off the cuff to insist that Americans were too solid and faithful to let fanatics derail their government.
“I’m sure the entire citizenry of this nation will join as one man in expressing not only their grief but their indignation at this act, and will stand faithfully behind the government,” Eisenhower said. Relying on the lessons of history, he went on to detail how the nation had responded to every other presidential murder or assassination attempt in American history: attacks on Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. In each case, regardless of the partisan affiliation of either the president or the assassin, Eisenhower noted, Americans had rallied behind the government, and the nation had moved on.
For Eisenhower, the American government stood above the president and above party. “These things have happened,” he said, “and it seems inexplicable to me, because Americans are loyal, and it is just this occasional psychopathic sort of accident that occurs and I don’t know what we can do about it…. In civilized countries of the world this doesn’t happen….”
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The past week has brought seven mass shootings in the United States. Twenty-two people have been killed and 44 wounded. I’ll have more to say later about our epidemic of gun violence, but tonight, on the night before Thanksgiving, when I traditionally post the story of the holiday’s history, I simply want to acknowledge the terrible sorrow behind tomorrow’s newly empty chairs.
Thanksgiving itself came from a time of violence: the Civil War.
The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.
In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady's Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slaveholding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.
And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.
Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.
In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.
The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.
New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
The next year Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.
In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation.
They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming.
And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.
The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front to create a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
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Yesterday, Representative Mary Peltola (D-AK) won Alaska’s House seat for a full term after taking it this summer in a special election to replace Representative Don Young (R-AK), who died in office in March after 49 years in Congress. Peltola is the first woman to represent Alaska and, as Yup’ik, is the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.
Peltola was endorsed by Alaskans of both parties, including Republicans like Senator Lisa Murkowski. Peltola promised to protect abortion and the salmon fisheries and was elected thanks to Alaska’s recent adoption of ranked choice voting, in which votes from poorly polling candidates are redistributed to those at the top until one gets more than 50%. This method of voting tends to favor moderates. Peltola’s reelection stopped former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, whom Trump endorsed, from reentering politics.
Murkowski has also won reelection, defeating a Trump-backed challenger endorsed by the Alaska Republican Party. Trump targeted Murkowski after she voted to convict him for incitement of insurrection during his second impeachment after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The reelections of Peltola and Murkowski illustrate that we are, in many different ways, at a sea change moment in American history.
In the past two years, Democrats have successfully pushed back on forty years of efforts to dismantle the business regulation, basic social safety net, promotion of infrastructure, protection of civil rights, and international cooperation that were the fundamental principles underpinning American government after the Depression and World War II. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with the Democratic Congress, have rebuilt some of the economic fairness of the old system and invested in infrastructure, while Biden, Harris, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have strengthened the foreign alliances that the former president had undermined.
Democratic leadership is also changing in the House of Representatives as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) have stepped out of the top three leadership roles in the House to make way for members of a new generation, presumably Representatives Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Katherine Clark (D-MA), and Pete Aguilar (D-CA). Pelosi’s team has defended the liberal consensus and expanded it into health care and measures to address climate change; the new generation of Democrats seems likely to center issues like childcare and racial equality more fully than their predecessors did.
These changes embrace the demographic change the last election made so clear. Gen Z—the generation born after 1997—is racially and ethnically diverse. Its members want the government to do more to solve problems than it has done in their lifetime, and they are now politically awake. That generation looks much like the Millennials from the generation preceding it—those born between 1981 and 1996—and both groups strongly favor Democratic policies.
Peltola reflects another change visible after the election: the record number of women elected to office this cycle. Peltola will add one more woman to the House of Representatives, bringing the total to 124, one more than the record set by the current Congress. Murkowski will bring the total of female senators to 25, which is one fewer than the record of 26, set in 2020 thanks to a few special appointments for unexpectedly empty seats.
But the place women’s representation really changed in 2022 was in the number of women elected to govern their states. In 2018, just 16 female candidates ran for governorships. In 2022, there were 36 governor’s contests, and 25 women ran in them. Until now there have been only 45 women governors in our history, and only 9 in office at one time.
Beginning in 2023, a record number of twelve women will hold governorships. Incumbent female governors in Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, New Mexico, Michigan and South Dakota were reelected. Voters in Arizona, Arkansas, Massachusetts, and Oregon elected new governors who are women. And New Yorkers elected Kathy Hochul, who took office initially in 2021 to replace resigning governor Andrew Cuomo.
Meredith Conroy and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux of FiveThirtyEight note that historically, voters are less likely to vote for women for solo offices than as group lawmakers, but Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics, told Jennifer Shutt of the Idaho Capital Sun that a number of factors fed the success rate of women candidates this cycle. First, there is now a long enough history of women in high positions of leadership that voters have confidence in them, especially as some of them—like Kay Ivey in Alabama and Hochul in New York—stepped into their positions after their male predecessors resigned in disgrace.
Even more key, perhaps, was the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion guaranteed in 1973 by Roe v. Wade. Women turned out to protect their right to healthcare in this election and, not surprisingly, they turned to women governors who made protecting abortion care central to their reelection campaigns.
The female governors have a great deal of legislative experience, perhaps in part because their rise through the political ranks has been slow as it has been hampered by resistance. Republicans reelected female governors in South Dakota, Iowa, and Alabama and added Trump’s former White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, as governor of Arkansas. While Sanders has no experience in elected office, the other three—South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, Iowa’s Kim Reynolds, and Alabama’s Kay Ivey—all have significant experience in their state governments and, in Noem’s case, in Congress.
The same is even more true on the Democratic side. Maine’s Janet Mills, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Arizona’s Katie Hobbs, New York’s Kathy Hochul, New Mexico’s Michelle Lujan Grisham, Oregon’s Tina Kotek, and Kansas’s Laura Kelly all have legislative experience; Maura Healey of Massachusetts twice won election as state attorney general.
While Noem made headlines for her fervent support of former president Trump, the new Democratic governors all ran as competent administrators who strongly opposed Trump-type politics. Maine’s Mills ran against a former governor who once described himself as “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular,” and Michigan’s Whitmer was such a target of the former president that she became the target of a kidnapping and murder plot.
This focus on competence and moderation clearly boosted Peltola and Murkowski, along with female candidates for governor, but the expansion of representation still does not come close to reflecting the actual percentage of women in the U.S. population. Nor does it reflect racial and ethnic identities. Women representatives are more diverse than in the Senate, but only two women senators—Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI)—are Asian American, and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) is Latina. Since Vice President Kamala Harris resigned from the Senate to take her current office, there have been no Black women in the Senate.
Of the women governors, only New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham is Latina, and voters have not yet put a Black women governor at the head of a state. They did, though, put Karen Bass, a Black former congressional representative, in charge of Los Angeles, with record voter turnout. Bass will be the first female mayor in the city’s 241-year history, and her charge is a big one: the city’s 3.8 million people give it more inhabitants than 22 U.S. states. Voters have also embraced other diversity: the new governors in Massachusetts and Oregon are openly lesbian.
That female candidates won so many seats—some contests had women running against each other—is “a really good reminder that women get to be as diverse in their viewpoints and perspectives, priorities, et cetera, as their male counterparts,” Dittmar told Jasmine Mithani of The 19th. “We get to see that being a woman candidate, being a woman doesn't mean the same thing for everybody.”
The expansion of our political representation to reflect the many different people in our diverse democracy can only be a good thing.
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I hate to break up a holiday weekend with a political post, but I want to put down a marker for the record.
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, November 22, former president Trump hosted the antisemitic artist Ye, also known as Kanye West, for dinner at a public table at Mar-a-Lago along with political operative Karen Giorno, who was the Trump campaign’s 2016 state director in Florida. Ye brought with him 24-year-old far-right white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Fuentes attended the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in its wake, he committed to moving the Republican Party farther to the right.
Fuentes has openly admired Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is currently making war on Russia’s neighbor Ukraine. A Holocaust denier, Fuentes is associated with America’s neo-Nazis.
In February 2020, Fuentes launched the America First Political Action Conference to compete from the right with the Conservative Political Action Conference. In May 2021, on a livestream, Fuentes said: “My job…is to keep pushing things further. We, because nobody else will, have to push the envelope. And we’re gonna get called names. We’re gonna get called racist, sexist, antisemitic, bigoted, whatever.… When the party is where we are two years later, we’re not gonna get the credit for the ideas that become popular. But that’s okay. That’s our job. We are the right-wing flank of the Republican Party. And if we didn’t exist, the Republican Party would be falling backwards all the time.”
Fuentes and his “America First” followers, called “Groypers” after a cartoon amphibian (I’m not kidding), backed Trump’s lies that he had actually won the 2020 election. At a rally shortly after the election, Fuentes told his followers to “storm every state capitol until Jan. 20, 2021, until President Trump is inaugurated for four more years.” Fuentes and Groypers were at the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and at least seven of them have been charged with federal crimes for their association with that attack. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed Fuentes himself.
Accounts of the dinner suggest that Trump and Fuentes hit it off, with Trump allegedly saying, “I like this guy, he gets me,” after Fuentes urged Trump to speak freely off the cuff rather than reading teleprompters and trying to appear presidential as his handlers advise.
But Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2024 just days ago, and being seen publicly with far-right white supremacist Fuentes—in addition to Ye—indicates his embrace of the far right. His team told NBC’s Marc Caputo that the dinner was a “f**king nightmare.” Trump tried to distance himself from the meeting by saying he didn’t know who Fuentes was, and that he was just trying to help Ye out by giving the “seriously troubled” man advice, but observers noted that he did not distance himself from Fuentes’s positions.
Republican lawmakers have been silent about Trump’s apparent open embrace of the far right, illustrating the growing power of that far right in the Republican Party. Representatives Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have affiliated themselves with Fuentes, and while their appearances with him at the America First Political Action Conference last February drew condemnation from Republican leader Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), now McCarthy desperately needs the votes of far-right Republicans to make him speaker of the House. To get that support, he has been promising to deliver their wish list—including an investigation into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter—and appears willing to accept Fuentes and his followers into the party, exactly as Fuentes hoped.
Today, after the news of Trump’s dinner and the thundering silence that followed it, conservative anti-Trumper Bill Kristol tweeted: “Aren’t there five decent Republicans in the House who will announce they won’t vote for anyone for Speaker who doesn’t denounce their party’s current leader, Donald Trump, for consorting with the repulsive neo-Nazi Fuentes?”
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I hate to break up a holiday weekend with a political post, but I want to put down a marker for the record.
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, November 22, former president Trump hosted the antisemitic artist Ye, also known as Kanye West, for dinner at a public table at Mar-a-Lago along with political operative Karen Giorno, who was the Trump campaign’s 2016 state director in Florida. Ye brought with him 24-year-old far-right white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Fuentes attended the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in its wake, he committed to moving the Republican Party farther to the right.
Fuentes has openly admired Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is currently making war on Russia’s neighbor Ukraine. A Holocaust denier, Fuentes is associated with America’s neo-Nazis.
In February 2020, Fuentes launched the America First Political Action Conference to compete from the right with the Conservative Political Action Conference. In May 2021, on a livestream, Fuentes said: “My job…is to keep pushing things further. We, because nobody else will, have to push the envelope. And we’re gonna get called names. We’re gonna get called racist, sexist, antisemitic, bigoted, whatever.… When the party is where we are two years later, we’re not gonna get the credit for the ideas that become popular. But that’s okay. That’s our job. We are the right-wing flank of the Republican Party. And if we didn’t exist, the Republican Party would be falling backwards all the time.”
Fuentes and his “America First” followers, called “Groypers” after a cartoon amphibian (I’m not kidding), backed Trump’s lies that he had actually won the 2020 election. At a rally shortly after the election, Fuentes told his followers to “storm every state capitol until Jan. 20, 2021, until President Trump is inaugurated for four more years.” Fuentes and Groypers were at the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and at least seven of them have been charged with federal crimes for their association with that attack. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed Fuentes himself.
Accounts of the dinner suggest that Trump and Fuentes hit it off, with Trump allegedly saying, “I like this guy, he gets me,” after Fuentes urged Trump to speak freely off the cuff rather than reading teleprompters and trying to appear presidential as his handlers advise.
But Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2024 just days ago, and being seen publicly with far-right white supremacist Fuentes—in addition to Ye—indicates his embrace of the far right. His team told NBC’s Marc Caputo that the dinner was a “f**king nightmare.” Trump tried to distance himself from the meeting by saying he didn’t know who Fuentes was, and that he was just trying to help Ye out by giving the “seriously troubled” man advice, but observers noted that he did not distance himself from Fuentes’s positions.
Republican lawmakers have been silent about Trump’s apparent open embrace of the far right, illustrating the growing power of that far right in the Republican Party. Representatives Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have affiliated themselves with Fuentes, and while their appearances with him at the America First Political Action Conference last February drew condemnation from Republican leader Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), now McCarthy desperately needs the votes of far-right Republicans to make him speaker of the House. To get that support, he has been promising to deliver their wish list—including an investigation into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter—and appears willing to accept Fuentes and his followers into the party, exactly as Fuentes hoped.
Today, after the news of Trump’s dinner and the thundering silence that followed it, conservative anti-Trumper Bill Kristol tweeted: “Aren’t there five decent Republicans in the House who will announce they won’t vote for anyone for Speaker who doesn’t denounce their party’s current leader, Donald Trump, for consorting with the repulsive neo-Nazi Fuentes?”
Another quick note at the end of this holiday weekend to mark yet another story that shouldn't be overlooked:
Protests have broken out across China after the country’s strict zero-Covid policies appear to have delayed firefighters responding to a deadly apartment fire Thursday night in Urumqi, the capital of China's Xinjiang region, which lies in the country’s vast northwest.
Official reports say at least ten people died and nine others were injured in the fire, and protesters took to the streets in anger at the lockdown and strict testing and quarantine policies the government insists are imperative to protect the country’s vulnerable elderly.
The protests quickly spread to cities around the country and have become political protests against Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who was reelected for an unprecedented third term as head of the Communist Party last month, and against the Communist Party itself. In Shanghai, protesters shouted, “Step down, Xi Jinping! Step down, Communist Party!” In Beijing, university students called for “Democracy and rule of law! Freedom of expression!”
Observers appear to have been surprised both by the rapid spread of the protests and by the relatively restrained response of authorities, who usually crack down on political protest fast and hard. Those observers note that the country’s zero-Covid policy has meant seemingly unending lockdowns, causing extraordinary hardship for ordinary citizens with no end in sight, even as cases in the country are at an all-time high and rising.
China’s approach to Covid has also exacerbated a harsh downturn in the Chinese economy. Its government focused on mass testing and isolation facilities to keep the virus away rather than on effective vaccines and new hospitals to treat those infected, locking itself into a policy that now appears unsustainable.
Observers attribute the protests to frustration over the lockdowns, concern over the economy, and even the World Cup, which has given the Chinese audience a look at more open and free societies outside China.
While these protests are unusual because of the many different factions that are working together—workers, students, rural protesters, and so on—scholars of China say it is far too early to make predictions about what will come next.
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Four of twelve unions have rejected the deal the administration brokered in mid-September between rail carriers and union workers to avert a national strike. They remain concerned about their lack of paid sick days. More generally, though, they oppose a new staffing system implemented after 2018, which created record profits for the country’s main rail carriers but cost the industry 40,000 jobs, mainly among the people who actually operate the trains, leading to brutal schedules and dangerous working conditions.
The new system, called Precision Schedule Railroading (PSR), made trains far more efficient by keeping workers on very tight schedules that leave little time for anything but work. Any disruption in those schedules—a family emergency, for example—brought disciplinary action and possible job loss. Although workers got an average of 3 weeks’ vacation and holidays, the rest of their time, including weekends, was tightly controlled, while smaller crews meant more dangerous working conditions. Union leaders and railroad management negotiated for more than two and a half years for new contracts without success.
In July, Biden established a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to try to resolve the differences before the September 16 deadline by which the railway workers could legally strike. The PEB’s August report called for significant wage increases and health care benefits but kicked down the road the problems associated with PSR. The National Carriers Conference Committee, which represents the railroads, called the report “fair and appropriate,” but not all the unions did.
Now four of the unions are holding out for better sick leave provisions, and it is likely that the unions will all walk out together if they go.
This threatens supply chains and the economy in general—down to the safety of water systems, since trains carry the chemicals that purify water systems—right before the holidays and as we try to stave off a recession. The deadline for agreeing to the deal is December 9.
This evening, President Joe Biden issued a statement calling on Congress to pass legislation to put the agreement into force to avert a “potentially crippling” railway shutdown. “Let me be clear,” he said, “a rail shutdown would devastate our economy. Without freight rail, many U.S. industries would shut down…[and] as many as 765,000 Americans—many union workers themselves—could be put out of work in the first two weeks alone. Communities could lose access to chemicals necessary to ensure clean drinking water. Farms and ranches across the country could be unable to feed their livestock.”
“As a proud pro-labor President,” he continued, “I am reluctant to override the ratification procedures and the views of those who voted against the agreement.” He wants laws to establish paid leave and stronger protections for workers, he said, “[b]ut at this critical moment for our economy, in the holiday season, we cannot let our strongly held conviction for better outcomes for workers deny workers the benefits of the bargain they reached, and hurl this nation into a devastating rail freight shutdown.” “[I]n this case,” he said, “where the economic impact of a shutdown would hurt millions of other working people and families—I believe Congress must use its powers to adopt this deal.” He asked lawmakers to get a bill to his desk immediately, well before December 9.
Railway Age, a trade magazine for the rail transport agency, reported that neither side in the negotiations could find a way to avoid a work stoppage, but since neither side wanted one, they were eager to have Congress overrule the small percentage of workers who opposed the deal and impose the one most workers have accepted. That way, neither side would have to face criticism from those who oppose the deal, and they would not have to deal with a Republican House as they seek to find a solution.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that the House would take up a bill adopting the agreement this week. “It is my hope that this necessary, strike-averting legislation will earn a strongly bipartisan vote, giving America’s families confidence in our commitment to protecting their financial futures,” she said.
Meanwhile, former president Trump appears to be increasingly nervous about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith to take over the investigations of Trump’s theft of national security documents and incitement of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump is lashing out wildly, calling Smith, for example, “a hit man for Obama.”
Of perhaps more concern for his lawyers was his post on his social media network saying: "When will you invade the other Presidents’ homes in search of documents, which are voluminous, which they took with them, but not nearly so openly and transparently as I did?"
Meanwhile, a reporter for ABC News spotted Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway going into the offices of the January 6th Committee. A recent book by Jon Lemire cites Trump’s query of Conway how he could have lost “to f*cking Joe Biden,” indicating he did, in fact, understand that he had lost the election.
Committee member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said on November 20 that the committee will release to the public its report and all the evidence it has gathered “within a month.”
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Today, after an eight-week trial and three days of deliberations, a jury of five women and seven men found Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, 57, the founder and leader of the right-wing Oath Keepers gang, and Kelly Meggs, 53, who led the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, guilty of seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. It found Rhodes guilty of obstruction of an official proceeding and tampering with documents and proceedings, and found Meggs guilty of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging duties, and tampering with documents or proceedings.
The jury also found three additional defendants from the organization—Kenneth Harrelson, 42; Jessica Watkins, 40; and Thomas Caldwell, 68—guilty of related felony charges.
The Department of Justice proved that after President Joe Biden won the November 3, 2020, election, Rhodes, Meggs, and others began plotting to use force to oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power.
Beginning in late December 2020, they planned to travel to Washington, D.C., on or around January 6, 2021, to stop Congress from certifying the electoral college vote that would officially elect Biden. They recruited others, organized combat training sessions, and smuggled paramilitary gear to the area around the Capitol. They planned to take control of the Capitol grounds and buildings on January 6.
According to the Department of Justice, on that day, “Meggs, Harrelson, and Watkins, along with other Oath Keepers and affiliates—many wearing paramilitary clothing and patches with the Oath Keepers name, logo, and insignia—marched in a ‘stack’ formation up the east steps of the Capitol, joined a mob, and made their way into the Capitol. Rhodes and Caldwell remained outside the Capitol, where they coordinated activities” and stayed in touch with quick reaction force teams outside the city, which were ready to bring in firearms to stop the transfer of power.
That a jury has now found two people guilty of seditious conspiracy establishes that a conspiracy existed. Former federal prosecutor Randall D. Eliason, who teaches law at George Washington University, told reporters Spencer S. Hsu, Tom Jackman, and Rachel Weiner of the Washington Post: “Now the only remaining question is how much higher did those plans go, and who else might be held criminally responsible.” While federal prosecutors sought only to tie Rhodes to the other Oath Keepers, both sides agreed that Rhodes communicated with Trump allies Roger Stone, Ali Alexander, and Michael Flynn after the election.
There are two more seditious conspiracy trials scheduled for December. One is for five other Oath Keepers; the other is against the leaders of the far-right gang the Proud Boys, led by Henry ‘Enrique’ Tarrio.
Yesterday, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election are not covered by presidential immunity as his lawyers argued. The judge noted that he was acting not as a president in defense of the Constitution, but rather in a different role as a candidate when he tried to overturn the election. Sullivan said: “Persuasive authority in this district specifically recognizes that there is no immunity defense for Former President Trump for ‘unofficial acts’ which ‘entirely concern his efforts to remain in office for a second term.’”
The South Carolina Supreme Court today unanimously ordered Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s last White House chief of staff, to testify before the Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Meadows was on the phone call Trump made to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger on January 2 to demand he “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” making his testimony key to the investigation. Meadows lives in South Carolina, where he tried to argue that he could not testify because of executive privilege. Lower South Carolina courts disagreed, and now the state’s supreme Court has said that Meadows’s arguments are “manifestly without merit.”
In Washington, Trump advisor Stephen Miller testified today before the grand jury investigating the events of January 6, 2021. The Justice Department subpoenaed Miller in September. He also testified before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Also in Washington today, the Senate passed the Respect for Marriage Act, which provides federal recognition of same-sex and interracial marriages for the purposes of federal benefits like Social Security, and requires states to recognize such marriages, although it does not require them to perform such marriages. The law is an attempt to get out in front of the Supreme Court, whose right-wing members have suggested they would invalidate marriage equality after ending protections for reproductive rights. Thirty-six Republicans voted against the bill, with 12 Republicans joining the Democrats to pass it.
The Senate bill amends one passed in July by the House, which will now have to agree to the changed measure and is expected to do so. House speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a vote for next week.
Today Pelosi also announced that Congress will take up the legislation Biden asked for yesterday: a law to put in place the deal between the railroad corporations and the railway unions. Four of 12 unions have rejected the deal because of its lack of paid sick days. In a letter to her colleagues, Pelosi expressed reluctance to bypass standard ratification procedures but said, “we must act to prevent a catastrophic strike that would touch the lives of nearly every family: erasing hundreds of thousands of jobs, including union jobs; keeping food and medicine off the shelves; and stopping small businesses from getting their goods to market.”
She promised to bring the measure up for a vote tomorrow.
But, in typical Pelosi fashion, she has found a way to demonstrate to union members and to lawmakers like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who are angry at Biden’s determination to avoid a strike, that those standing in the way of paid leave for the unions are not the Democrats. After the vote on the agreement, she will hold a “separate, up-or-down vote to add seven days of paid sick leave for railroaders to the Tentative Agreement.” Such a measure is likely to pass the House and die under a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
While the jury was handing down its verdict in the case of Stewart Rhodes, who said on tape that he would “hang f*ckin’ Pelosi from the lamppost,” Speaker Pelosi was lighting the Capitol Christmas tree with fourth-grader Catcuce Micco Tiger, who is a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and has ancestry from the Seminole Tribe of Florida and Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Tiger won the role of youth tree lighter with an essay sharing the Cherokee origin story for evergreen trees. “After creating all plants and animals,” Pelosi explained, “our Creator asked them to fast, pray, and stay awake for seven nights. But at the end, only a few were awake. The trees that stayed awake were rewarded with the ability to keep their leaves yearlong and with special healing powers. It is a story of faith and gratitude—of hope enduring through the dark night.”
“And,” Pelosi added, “it is hope that we celebrate each holiday season—that through the cold and dark winter, spring will someday come.”
Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, who defended the Capitol against the Oath Keepers on January 6, heard the jury's verdict, then watched the tree lighting.
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“Anecdotal data point,” conservative commentator Tom Nichols tweeted this afternoon, “Had lunch with an old friend, a fellow former [Republican] (but not in politics or media or anything) and he said that things feel different after the Pelosi attack. Not sure why. I feel the same thing; not sure that it'll matter, but have that same sense.”
Perhaps it is the echoes of lawyer Joseph Nye Welch, who in 1954 on television confronted Joseph McCarthy as the Wisconsin senator shredded people’s lives by accusing them of being communists: "Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
Perhaps it is the many observers pointing out that in a time when more than half the Republicans running for office have refused to acknowledge that Democratic President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and when Republican legislatures are claiming the right to choose presidential electors without the input of voters, “American democracy is on the line.”
Or perhaps it is the sheer horror of Republican politicians joking about a brutal attack on the Speaker of the House, the second in line for the presidency, an attack that left her elderly husband with a fractured skull, but Nichols is right: something feels different.
Tonight, President Joe Biden gave a speech on democracy. He began by describing the attack on Paul Pelosi, then noting that the attacker’s demand, “Where’s Nancy?”, echoed the words “used by the mob when they stormed the United States Capitol on January the 6th, when they broke windows, kicked in the doors, brutally attacked law enforcement, roamed the corridors hunting for officials and erected gallows to hang the former vice president, Mike Pence.”
That enraged mob had been whipped into a frenzy by former president Trump’s repeating the Big Lie that the 2020 election had been stolen. That lie, Biden said, has “fueled the dangerous rise in political violence and voter intimidation over the past two years.”
Biden urged us to “confront those lies with the truth,” for “the very future of our nation depends on it.” “We must with one overwhelming unified voice speak as a country and say there’s no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America. Whether it’s directed at Democrats or Republicans. No place, period. No place ever.”
“Democracy itself” is at stake in the upcoming election, Biden said. He appealed “to all Americans, regardless of party, to meet this moment of national and generational importance.” Nothing is guaranteed about democracy in America, he said, “Every generation has had to defend it, protect it, preserve it, choose it. For that’s what democracy is. It’s a choice, a decision of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
“We the people must decide whether we will have fair and free elections and every vote counts. We the people must decide whether we’re going to sustain a republic, where reality’s accepted, the law is obeyed, and your vote is truly sacred. We the people must decide whether the rule of law will prevail or whether we will allow the dark forces and thirst for power put ahead of the principles that have long guided us.”
Biden warned that the same forces that challenged the 2020 election, despite all the confirmations of its results, are setting out to question the legitimacy of the 2022 election. MAGA Republicans are “trying to succeed where they failed in 2020, to suppress the right of voters and subvert the electoral system itself. That means denying your right to vote and deciding whether your vote even counts.” They’ve encouraged violence and intimidation of voters and election workers, Biden said. “It’s damaging, it’s corrosive, and it’s destructive.”
“And I want to be very clear,” Biden said, “this is not about me, it’s about all of us. It’s about what makes America America. It’s about the durability of our democracy. For democracies are more than a form of government. They’re a way of being, a way of seeing the world, a way that defines who we are, what we believe, why we do what we do.”
Biden warned that “we can’t take democracy for granted any longer.”
“Democracy means the rule of the people, not the rule of monarchs or the moneyed, but the rule of the people. Autocracy is the opposite of democracy. It means the rule of one, one person, one interest, one ideology, one party…. [T]he lives of billions of people, from antiquity till now, have been shaped by the battle between these competing forces, between the aspirations of the many and the greed and power of the few, between the people’s right for self-determination and the self-seeking autocrat, between the dreams of a democracy and the appetites of an autocracy.”
“What we’re doing now is going to determine whether democracy will long endure and…whether the American system that prizes the individual bends toward justice and depends on the rule of law, whether that system will prevail. This is the struggle we’re now in, a struggle for democracy, a struggle for decency and dignity, a struggle for prosperity and progress, a struggle for the very soul of America itself.”
Biden listed the “fundamental values and beliefs that unite us as Americans.” First, “we believe the vote in America’s sacred, to be honored, not denied; respected, not dismissed; counted, not ignored. A vote is not a partisan tool, to be counted when it helps your candidates and tossed aside when it doesn’t.” “Second,” he said, “we…stand against political violence and voter intimidation.” “We don’t settle our differences…with a riot, a mob, or a bullet, or a hammer. We settle them peacefully at the ballot box.” Third, he said, “we believe in democracy…. History and common sense tell us that liberty, opportunity, and justice thrive in a democracy, not in an autocracy.”
“At our best,” the president said, “America is not a zero-sum society where for you to succeed, someone else has to fail. A promise in America is big enough…for everyone to succeed…. Individual dignity, individual worth, individual determination, that’s America, that’s democracy and that’s what we have to defend.”
He urged voters to judge the candidates by whether they would accept the legitimate will of the American people. “Will that person accept the outcome of the election, win or lose?” The answer to that question should be decisive. “Too many people have sacrificed too much for too many years for us to walk away from the American project and democracy…. It’s within our power, each and every one of us, to preserve our democracy.”
“You have the power, it’s your choice, it’s your decision, the fate of the nation, the fate of the soul of America lies where it always does, with the people, in your hands, in your heart, in your ballot.”
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While most of us have been watching the jockeying around the election, our legal system has continued to work on its own clock.
Yesterday morning, Kyle Cheney, Josh Gerstein, and Nicholas Wu of Politico reported more about the eight emails lawyer John Eastman, who wrote the memo outlining a plan by which then–vice president Mike Pence could steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump, tried to hide from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. The emails included discussions between Eastman, fellow Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, and others about how to stop Congress from counting the certified 2020 electoral ballots on January 6, 2021.
In the emails, Chesebro urged arranging to get a case before Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court so he could issue a stay that would cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election in Georgia. They should “frame things so that Thomas could be the one to issue some sort of stay or other circuit justice opinion saying Georgia is in legitimate doubt.” Thomas oversees the circuit court that includes Georgia, and he would “end up being key” to getting Biden’s victory overturned.
Eastman responded: “I think I agree with this.” Such a move by Thomas could “kick the Georgia legislature into gear.”
As a young lawyer, Eastman clerked for Thomas, and Dan Froomkin of PressWatchers noted that Eastman and others were in this same period of time writing to Thomas’s wife, Ginni, who was urging state legislators to overturn the election by submitting fake slates of electors.
Froomkin pointed to a New York Times article from June 15, 2022, which explained that on December 24, 2020, five days after Trump had announced a “protest” at the Ellipse to be held on January 6, Eastman wrote to Chesebro that Eastman had heard there was a “heated fight” among the Supreme Court justices about whether they should take up the election issue. Chesebro replied that the “odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”
So we seem to have a deliberate attempt to throw a court case to Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife was urging the overthrow of the election, and to pressure the Supreme Court to act by creating chaos in the streets, all in order to keep former president Trump in the White House.
In the case of the 11,000 government documents the former president took to Mar-a-Lago, the Department of Justice has offered immunity in the case to Kash Patel, a man closely tied to former president Trump, to testify about Trump’s handling of those documents. Patel has previously invoked his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, after telling the right-wing Breitbart media network that Trump declassified the documents before he left the White House in January 2021. Prosecutors cannot use anything Patel says against him at trial so long as he testifies truthfully. A federal judge ordered him to testify before a grand jury, which he did today.
In the case of the Trump Organization’s fraudulent business practices, New York Judge Arthur Engoron today ordered an independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization and blocked it from transferring assets without court approval. Trump lawyers complained that this move was “about seizing control of a successful company,” but the attorney general’s office said it was trying to guard against “ongoing fraudulent activity or deceptive activity.” In September, on the same day the New York attorney general’s office brought suit against the Trump Organization for fraudulent business practices, representatives from that organization created a new company called Trump Organization II. The judge has appointed a monitor to make sure the old company doesn’t transfer assets to the new company to avoid legal action.
Trump promptly attacked the decision, calling Engoron “a puppet judge” and saying the decision is “Communism come to our shores.” Later, he told a crowd that “a radical left lunatic judge in New York City who is totally controlled by my worst enemies in the Democrat Party…started a process of property confiscation that is akin to Venezuela, Cuba, or the old Soviet Union.”
The characterization of a decision to make sure the Trump Organization does not continue to break the law after a pattern of fraudulent behavior as “Communism” is a product of the U.S. interpretation of the 1991 fall of the USSR. Republicans then made the mistake of assuming that democracy and unfettered capitalism always traveled together. Over the years, Republicans have largely ignored the “democracy” part of that equation and continually doubled down on the idea that the American system means that businesses should be able to do whatever they wished. In that warped formulation, any oversight must be like Soviet-style communism.
Trump also called his followers on his social media site to “fight back against radical tyranny and save our Country!”
This call for violence echoes the former president’s calls to stop the counting of the certified electoral votes on January 6, 2021, and it illustrates why it is so important for the Department of Justice to enforce the laws. If there is no penalty for lawbreaking, there is no deterrent from breaking laws going forward. But, in fact, the Justice Department has been calling to account those who participated in the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol: in September, former New York City police officer Thomas Webster was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
With actual penalties mounting against those who answered to Trump’s previous calls for violence, it is unclear how many will answer again, although Trump appeared to be trying to rally them with what observers say is a frivolous lawsuit filed yesterday against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, complaining that “she attacks great and upstanding businesses.”
Penalties appear to be mounting for those breaking the law for Republican election victories. Republican operatives Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl pleaded guilty in October to a felony charge of telecommunications fraud for robocalls to depress the Black vote in Cleveland in 2020 and are facing fines and up to a year in prison. And earlier this week, a judge ordered two leaders of True the Vote, a right-wing organization pushing the voter fraud conspiracy theories at the heart of the debunked film 2000 Mules, to jail for contempt of court. An election logistics software company they have publicly accused of stealing the election for Biden has sued them for defamation; they claim to have evidence of election fraud but have refused to produce it.
Meanwhile, the Trump Organization is currently on trial in New York for criminal tax fraud. Prosecutors allege the company avoided taxes by paying executives with apartments, cars, and school tuitions.
While legal news has piled up, the upcoming midterm elections have not gone away. Tonight, television personality Oprah Winfrey, who was largely responsible for bringing Republican Mehmet Oz to national prominence on her television show, endorsed his Democratic opponent, John Fetterman, for senator from Pennsylvania.
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For all that they have tried to argue that the midterm election is a referendum on President Joe Biden’s handling of the nation’s high inflation, House Republicans today released a 1050-page “report” laying out their priorities for what they expect will be their takeover of the House.
The report begins as an attack on the FBI, claiming it has been politicized under the Biden administration and is now “broken.” It goes on to echo years of complaints from former president Trump, from his insistence that the FBI “spied on” his 2016 campaign through his complaints about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago to recover classified documents he took with him when he left office.
Only the first 50 pages of the report are new prose. Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo read the rest and noted that about 1000 of the pages simply reprint letters Republican representatives have sent to members of the Biden administration, including 93 copies of a 5-page letter they sent to U.S. attorneys.
The House Republicans’ plan was apparently to grab headlines with an apparently big “report” and make people uneasy about the Biden administration. The document makes it clear that their priorities if they take the House will be to investigate Hunter Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the evacuation of Afghanistan, immigration policies, and, perhaps above all, Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice (DOJ). But the report is a self-own in that it makes clear that the Republicans have no intention of actually trying to deal with inflation and are instead going to push the investigations that keep their grievances before the media and feed their base.
The House Republicans’ decision to double down on Trump just before the election shows exactly how they plan to govern after it. Leaders like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) would like to downplay the role of the former president and keep voters focused instead on the economy, an issue on which they feel they can make headway as the world is still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic. But extremists in the House are signaling that they are all in for Trump.
Indeed, the timing of the House Republicans’ warning that they plan to launch numerous investigations might well be an attempt to protect the former president by taking the spotlight off Trump’s growing legal troubles.
Today, the former president’s allies told media outlets that shortly after the midterm election, Trump expects to announce that he is running for president in 2024. Knowing he is a lightning rod, Republicans have wanted him to stay out of the spotlight before the midterms, but he now has a reason—aside from the fact that he can never seem to abide being in the shadows—to announce his candidacy.
As Maggie Haberman of the New York Times tweeted: “Trump is facing multiple investigations that his advisers anticipate will heat up again after next week’s midterms, particularly into the documents held for no clear explicable reason at Mar-a-Lago. His advisers say he thinks DOJ will move differently if he’s a candidate.” (The Department of Justice has said its procedures will not be affected by any such announcement.)
Trump’s dangling of a presidential bid is almost certainly related to his looming legal troubles. Yesterday, his ally Kash Patel testified with limited immunity before a grand jury investigating the handling of the classified documents Trump took to Mar-a-Lago, meaning he had the option of testifying honestly without penalties or lying and risking perjury charges on this topic. Patel has maintained he is a hostile witness, but there is reason to think he will not shield Trump. Constitutional lawyer and law professor Laurence Tribe commented: “This will break the dam.”
Also, today was the deadline for Trump to produce documents for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the committee this evening announced that it was in conversation with Trump’s lawyers about that production. It continued: “We have informed Trump’s counsel that he must begin producing records no later than next week and he remains under subpoena for testimony starting on November 14th.”
And the January 6th committee has continued its interviews, recently talking to the Secret Service agents who were in the presidential motorcade on January 6, 2021.
Trump has clearly made the calculation that his own interests are best served by teasing the idea of his running for office, despite the fact that many national Republican lawmakers have hoped he would keep his head down.
It is not clear that the idea of a resurgence of Trump will motivate Republican voters. Indeed, so far, election data for next week’s election is not showing the red wave that media has recently tried to argue was in the offing. Pollsters Simon Rosenberg and Tom Bonier both have focused less on polls and more on the early vote, which so far has shown Democrats overperforming. Races are still very close, but the idea of a red wave appears to be premature. The results of the election will come down to voter turnout.
In the midst of all this drama, the social media site Twitter, which was recently acquired by entrepreneur Elon Musk, appears to be imploding. Advertisers are fleeing, and this morning the company fired a raft of employees, apparently illegally in many jurisdictions because he did not give them the warning that laws require. They are now suing.
This afternoon, Jeff Seldin, the national security correspondent for Voice of America News, tweeted that two organizations representing state election officials who have used Twitter to get out reliable election information, including the National Association of State Election Directors, are watching Twitter’s changes with concern. The mass layoffs cut the teams dedicated to fighting election disinformation and communicating with campaign staff and journalists. Further, it currently appears that account verification, which makes it clear if an account is official or not, will end on Monday, the day before the election.
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One hundred and fifty years ago today, American women turned out to vote in the presidential election, exercising their right to have a say in their government by choosing either Democratic candidate Horace Greeley or Republican incumbent Ulysses S. Grant.
Except they didn’t have that right explicitly. They were claiming it.
After the Civil War, lawmakers discussed what a newly reconstructed nation would look like and who would get to decide its parameters. Women who had worked for the survival of the United States government, given their sons and husbands to it, invested their money in it, nursed and sometimes fought for it, believed they had demonstrated their right to have a say in it. When Congress began to discuss the Fourteenth Amendment, overturning the 1857 Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court denying that Black Americans could be citizens and protecting Black Americans from racially discriminatory laws in the South, suffragists demanded that their citizenship be included in that constitutional amendment.
Instead, the Fourteenth Amendment included the word “male” in the Constitution for the first time. The amendment specified that it protected the right of men—not women—to vote with its attempt to pressure states into allowing Black male suffrage by threatening to reduce congressional representation for any state that kept a significant number of men from the polls. It provided that “when the right to vote…is denied to any of the male inhabitants of [a] state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States…, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced [proportionally].”
Outraged that they had been excluded, suffragists set their sights on the Fifteenth Amendment, protecting the right to vote. But when Congress passed it and sent it off to the states for ratification in 1870, the amendment said nothing about women’s suffrage. Indeed, it distinctly avoiding the word “sex” when it established that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Fed up with trying to gain their rights through lawmakers, in 1872, suffragists took matters into their own hands. They decided to vote in the presidential election, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment recognized their citizenship by virtue of its first section, which said: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” They were born in the United States, they pointed out, and therefore, according to the Fourteenth Amendment, were citizens.
In Rochester, New York, suffragist Susan B. Anthony led a group of women to the polls in November and successfully cast her vote for Grant. But Anthony was already famous for her long career as a reformer, making her a perfect figure for officials to use as an example. Three weeks after the election, authorities arrested her for voter fraud. She could not testify at her own trial and the judge wrote his opinion before it began, directing the jury to find her guilty. Anthony was fined $100 but refused to pay it, instead going on a speaking tour of New York in which she declared: “This government is not…a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex….”
Anthony’s case grabbed headlines, but it was the story of Virginia Minor that would change the next hundred years of our history. Minor was a suffragist in St. Louis, Missouri. She and her husband, Francis, had been instrumental in developing and publicizing the idea that women had the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment and that they should force that issue in 1872 by showing up at the polls.
On October 15, 1872, Minor had tried to register to vote in her St. Louis district, but the registrar, Reese Happersett, refused to enroll her on the grounds that she was female. Virginia’s husband sued—as a married woman she had no standing to sue on her own account—and the case wound its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
On March 29, 1875, the court handed down the Minor v. Happersett decision.
“There is no doubt that women may be citizens,” it said, but it went on to say that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote. “[T]he constitutions and laws of the several States which commit that important trust to men alone are not necessarily void,” it wrote.
According to the Supreme Court, state governments, elected by white men, could discriminate against their citizens so long as that discrimination was not on the grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
The next year, white supremacists would take control of the South with the argument that Black men should not vote because they were poor and would vote for lawmakers who would promise roads, schools, and hospitals that could only be paid for with tax levies on white men. Such rules accumulated until in 1890, Mississippi codified this state-based system by putting into place a new constitution that limited voting to white men by imposing education requirements to be judged by white officials, lack of criminal record, and proof of tax paying. Soon, state constitutions across the country limited voting with all sorts of requirements that cut Black people out on grounds other than race.
In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” overruled Minor v. Happersett on the issue of women’s suffrage. But the Supreme Court continued to use its guidelines for other restrictions until the 1960s, upholding literacy tests, poll taxes, and other rules designed to keep Black people from voting.
Finally, in 1966, almost 100 years after Virginia Minor sued, the Supreme Court decided that voting was a fundamental right protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
And 50 years later—and 150 years after Anthony cast her vote—those of us who have not been cut out of the right to vote by one or another of the measures states are now imposing on their voters can exercise that right, and determine what our nation will look like, once again.
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I can't be the only one who needs a little calm before the storm of news and pundits and anger and charts and percentages and celebrations and reflections that this entirely unpredictable week seems likely to bring.
I asked my photographer friend Peter to send me something uplifting, and while a lot of images he offered were inspirational, this is the one that jumped out.
I'm going to take a few deep breaths, get a good night's sleep, and be back at it tomorrow. I hope you all can do the same.
[Photograph, "Satori," by Peter Ralston]
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Not sure if you’ve heard, but the U.S. midterm elections are tomorrow.
Just kidding, of course. Not sure anyone can think of much else.
Remember, though, this election is full of wild cards. Traditionally—but not always—the party of the president does poorly in the first midterm election. But we are in uncharted territory: never before in our history have more than half of Americans lost the recognition of a constitutional right, as the Supreme Court took from us with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision in June, overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the constitutional right to an abortion.
Never, too, have we had to vote in an election where more than half the candidates of one of the parties deny that the president was fairly elected. Those candidates have suggested that, had they been in power in 2020, they would have put former president Donald Trump in power even though he lost the popular vote by more than 7 million and lost in the Electoral College. Their position is a profound attack on our democracy.
For all the polls showing that Democrats are going to win in huge numbers or Republicans are, no one knows how it will turn out. The polls are deeply problematic this time around, and at least some of them are attempts by Republicans to boost the hopes of their donors and to keep Democrats from voting. Perhaps even more than most elections, this one will come down to turnout.
There are, though, some stories worth following:
There has been a crazy amount of money invested in this year’s contests, much of it by a very few people. Ronald Lauder, for example, the 78-year-old heir to the cosmetics fortune, has dumped at least $11 million into getting a Trump Republican, Representative Lee Zeldin, elected governor of New York. Billionaire Peter Thiel put $30 million into super PACs backing Republican senate candidates J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona.
Today, Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch and the leader of the private military company the Wagner Group, who is close to Russian president Vladimir Putin, boasted that Russians had interfered in U.S. elections and continue to do so. “We have interfered, we are interfering and we will continue to interfere. Carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do." He added: “During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once.”
Prigozhin is apparently behind the Russia-based “troll farms” that try to affect U.S. elections. Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times writes that Russians have indeed targeted the 2022 elections to make right-wing voters angry and undermine trust in U.S. elections. Their hope is to erode support for Ukraine’s struggle to repel Russian invasion by electing Republicans who side with Putin.
Republicans are not acting as if they expect big wins tomorrow. Many of the Republican candidates have refused to say they would accept the election results, and Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson is already saying that Democrats will steal the election.
Others are fighting to get Democratic mail-in ballots thrown out, especially in the swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Still others are trying to game the vote count already, claiming that results that are not announced by the end of the day on Tuesday are suspicious. But votes postmarked on Election Day can take days to arrive. In addition, a number of Republican-dominated states have made it illegal to count mail-in votes before Election Day, creating backlogs that take time to work through. It sounds as if they, like Trump in 2020, are expecting to lose the actual vote and to fight to steal it.
The Department of Justice will be monitoring the polls in 64 jurisdictions in 24 states to make sure those jurisdictions comply with federal voting rights laws. Officials remind voters that any disruptions at polling places should be reported to officials. Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson expressed thanks to the Department of Justice for “real support for protecting voters,” which she said was missing in 2020 under the former president.
Aside from tomorrow’s election, there is an epic fight brewing in the Republican Party. Former president Donald Trump threatened to announce tonight at a rally in Ohio that he is running for president in 2024, likely because he believes such an announcement will make it harder for the Department of Justice to indict him for his theft of classified documents when he left the White House. He is also concerned that Florida governor Ron DeSantis will steal his thunder and capture the 2024 nomination, but because they are competing for the same voters, an announcement from Trump will undercut DeSantis.
Republican Party leaders urged Trump to hold off on the announcement, worrying it would energize Democratic voters before Election Day. In the end, Trump’s announcement tonight was: “I’m going to be making a very big announcement on Tuesday, November 15, at Mar-a-Lago in Florida…. We want nothing to detract from the importance of tomorrow.”
Finally, for all the uncertainty surrounding tomorrow's election, there is one thing of which I am 100% certain. Far more Americans today are concerned about our democracy, and determined to reclaim it, than were even paying attention to it in 2016. There are new organizations, new connections, new voters, new efforts to remake the country better than it has ever been, and the frantic efforts of the Republicans to suppress voting, gerrymander the country, and now to take away our right to choose our leaders indicates we are far more powerful than we believe we are. No matter what happens tomorrow, that will continue to be true, and I am ever so proud to be one of you.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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I just got a text from a Gen Z voter in Michigan who has been in line to vote for more than an hour and predicts he will be there hours more. He has no intention of leaving.
If there is an obvious story from today with results still unknown, it is this: a new generation is picking up the torch of our democracy.
It puts me in mind of what poet Walt Whitman wrote about the momentous election of 1884. In that year the Republican Party had become so extremist that many of its members, disparagingly called "Mugwumps" by party loyalists, jumped ship to vote for a reformer, Democrat Grover Cleveland. It was a chaotic and consequential election, for it showed those Republicans who stayed with the party that they must moderate their stances or become a permanent minority.
Younger Republicans like Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, and Theodore Roosevelt of New York took notice and turned their party back toward its roots, protecting the rights of individuals rather than of corporations. By the end of the century, they had captured the imagination of the nation. Once in office, they ushered in the Progressive Era.
But on Election Day, 1884, all anyone could know was that there were currents and crosscurrents. What would come from any of them would not be clear for another decade or more. In that tense election the main point was that there was voting at all, for the right to choose our lawmakers was what made America, America.
Whitman wrote:
"If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show,
'Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon's white cones—nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes—nor Mississippi's stream:
—This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name—the still small voice vibrating—America's choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous'd—sea-board and inland—Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict,
The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict,
Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's:) the peaceful choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
—Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—while the heart pants, life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails."
I am not going to say any more tonight out of concern I will mislead people with incomplete information. I do feel comfortable saying that the youth vote will be a big story going forward.
With that I am going to stop obsessively refreshing my screen and go to bed.
I’ll see you tomorrow.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Yesterday was a good day for democracy. Americans turned out to defend our principles from those who denied our right to choose our own leaders. There was little violence, the election appears to have gone smoothly, and there are few claims of “fraud.” As I write tonight, control of the House and Senate is still not clear, but some outlines are now visible.
Usually, the party in power loses a significant number of congressional seats and state seats in the first midterm after it takes the presidency. Today, President Joe Biden spoke to reporters and noted that the Democrats had the best midterm elections for governors since 1986 and lost fewer House seats than they have in any Democratic president’s first midterm in 40 years.
That this election—the results of which are still coming in as I write—is so close is an endorsement of the nation’s current path, despite the shock of inflation. As Biden said: “the overwhelming majority of the American people support the elements of my economic agenda—from rebuilding America’s roads and bridges; to lowering prescription drug costs; to a historic investment in tackling the climate crisis; to making sure that large corporations begin to pay their fair share in taxes.”
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) agreed with Biden on the Fox News Channel tonight, but for him it was a complaint: “Why did Democrats do better than expected? Because they have governed as liberals.” And people appear to like a government that works on their behalf.
Voters appear to have been far more motivated to protect abortion rights than many pundits thought. In Michigan, California, and Vermont, voters amended their state constitutions to protect abortion rights. In Kentucky, voters rejected a state constitutional amendment that would have restricted abortion rights.
Former president Trump and his loyalists had a bad day. Trump endorsed more than 330 candidates in yesterday’s races, including a number of high-profile people he had urged to run. They were extremist candidates whose key attraction was that they backed Trump’s allegations that President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from him, and he remained bullish on their chances until the end, telling a host for NewsNation: “I think if they win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all.”
But when many of Trump’s candidates lost yesterday, former supporters did indeed blame Trump. Former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro tweeted: “Trump picked bad candidates, spent almost no money on his hand-picked candidates, and then proceeded to crap on the Republicans who lost and didn’t sufficiently bend the knee. This will have 2024 impact.”
It is not at all clear that the election results will, in fact, end Trump’s political career, but they do open up the possibility that Republican leaders will not be unhappy to see him moved offstage, particularly by events they can blame on opponents—events like indictments. In any case, Trump’s status as the party’s undisputed kingmaker is no longer secure.
This seems likely to bring the Republican Party’s simmering civil war into the open. Yesterday, Trump warned Florida governor Ron DeSantis not to run for president, hinting that he would tell reporters dirt about DeSantis if the governor did announce. (“I would tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering—I know more about him than anybody—other than, perhaps, his wife,” Trump said.)
But DeSantis came out of yesterday’s elections with a second term as Florida governor and looking strong indeed. He fared well with Hispanic voters and won his state with about 60% of the vote (it should not be overlooked that his new election security police clearly intimidated voters). If, in fact, the Republicans do end up taking control of the House of Representatives, presumptive speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will have a delicate dance between MAGA Republicans who back Trump and those trying to move beyond Trump while keeping his voters.
But the biggest winner yesterday was democracy.
More than half of the Republican candidates on ballots were election deniers and either would not say that they would honor election results going forward or openly said they would not. That position appears to have hurt their chances of winning their elections. While some election deniers won their elections, more lost.
Most notably, the story in Michigan was that of democracy, as Democrats won control of the state legislature for the first time since 1984. Governor Gretchen Whitmer was heavily targeted by former president Trump and made abortion rights central to her reelection. Both factors appeared to have helped her win, hold onto a Democratic attorney general and secretary of state, and flip both chambers of the legislature.
There is a larger story here. For decades the Republicans who controlled the Michigan legislature had drawn heavily gerrymandered districts, the most recent so extreme that in 2019, federal judges called them a “political gerrymander of historical proportions.” Voters amended the state constitution to require an independent, nonpartisan panel of 13 citizens to redraw the maps. While political competitiveness was not central to the criteria they used, it was the result.
Michigan Republicans have challenged that new map through the courts, but on Monday the Supreme Court dismissed their appeal. The outcome of yesterday’s elections suggests that what scholars have been saying for years is true: Republicans have won by gaming the system.
The importance of that partisan gerrymandering—and the importance of today’s Supreme Court in upholding that gerrymandering—showed up yesterday in the cases of four states in which Republican lawmakers simply refused to change maps that state courts had determined were illegal. In Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Ohio, heavily gerrymandered maps stayed in place despite state court decisions that they were unconstitutional.
Those four states make up almost 10% of the seats in the House of Representatives. According to congressional redistricting specialist David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, those illegal maps were likely to hand five to seven seats to the Republicans that they would not have won without them. At the same time, Florida governor Ron DeSantis put in place heavily gerrymandered districts—so extreme that the Republican legislature balked—that were expected to turn four seats Republican and create a House delegation more than 70% Republican from a state that Trump won with just over half the vote in 2020.
Gaming the system sets up a structural problem for democracy, of course, but also for the party in power. In safe districts, candidates don’t have to worry about attracting voters from the other party and so worry only about being challenged by those more extreme than they are in the primaries (which are always dominated by the most fervent partisans). The party becomes more and more extreme and can stay in power only by continuing to manipulate the system.
Eventually, though, they become so extreme they lose even members of their own party, as the Republican Party has done since Trump took it over. A new influx of voters—as we saw last night—can win elections, and then they will demand that the playing field be leveled back to fairness. Jack Lobel of Voters of Tomorrow, which is mobilizing Gen Z voters, told NPR’s Rachel Martin today: “The far right is trying to attack us, they’re trying to restrict our rights, and they’re trying to take us back in time. [Young people] want to go forward….”
Lobel mentioned abortion rights, economic rights, and building a better future, and he noted that the Democratic Party has stepped up for Gen Z. Certainly, organizers like strategy director of Voters of Tomorrow Victor Shi have been pounding the pavement to turn out their people.
Exit polls from last night show voters in the 18–29 age bracket making up about 12–13% of the vote and preferring Democrats by much larger margins than any other group: as much as 70%. In 25-year-old Maxwell Frost (D-FL), elected last night, Gen Z has its first member of Congress.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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Two days after an election in which the Republican Party attacked the Democrats for inflation, today’s consumer price index data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that inflation is slowing more quickly than expected. It rose just 0.4% in October, making the rate over the past twelve months also come in lower than expected at 7.7%.
The stock market had its biggest jump since 2020, with the different indexes observers use to measure the market all rising. The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped more than 1,200 points, or 3.7%; the S&P 500 jumped 5.54%; and the Nasdaq Composite surged 7.35%, the best it has done since March 2020.
In a statement, President Joe Biden promised to continue to work to get prices down but noted that his policies are having an effect. “[O]ur economy has reopened, new jobs are being created, new businesses are growing, and now, we are seeing progress in getting inflation under control—with additional measures taking effect soon.”
Then Biden appeared to reach out to Republicans interested in forging a way forward from their party’s politics of the recent past, while also recalling that for all their complaints about inflation, their only plan to fix the problem was to cut taxes for the wealthy again. Virtually no economist said cutting taxes would help inflation, and many said such a policy would actually make inflation worse.
Biden said: “I will work with anyone—Democrat or Republican—on ideas to provide more breathing room to middle-class and working families. And I will oppose any effort to undo my agenda or to make inflation worse. We are on the right path—we need to keep moving forward to build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out.”
Biden appeared to have wind under his wings, though, as with this recent vote of confidence he looks forward to the rest of his term. The 27th United Nations Climate Change conference is being held right now in Egypt, and the U.S. administration today announced a new policy for dealing with climate change. Arguing that climate change and the shortages and damage to supply chains it brings create significant financial risk for the government (that is, taxpayers), it advanced a plan to use the federal government’s power as the world’s largest buyer of goods and services—over $630 billion in the last fiscal year—to address climate change.
It would require any federal contractor who gets annual contracts worth more than $7.5 million a year to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, explain their climate-related financial risks, and set emissions reduction targets.
Climate change is a key issue for Gen Z, who came out for Biden strongly on Tuesday, but Biden’s other major initiative on their behalf ran into trouble today as U.S. District Court Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee, declared Biden’s student loan relief program illegal. The government has already appealed.
Meanwhile, the counting of votes continues, with control of both houses of Congress still unclear.
What is clear is that there is a war erupting in the Republican Party. After former president Trump surged to an unexpected victory in 2016, there appeared to be a sense in the Republican Party that he had figured out how to mobilize previously unengaged voters to deliver victories to the Republican Party, and established Republicans increasingly rallied to his standard.
But he has led the party to defeat now for the third time. In the 2018 midterms, Republicans lost control of the House, with Democrats picking up 41 seats. In 2020, of course, he lost the election, as well as control of the Senate. And while this year’s outcome is not yet clear, the Democrats have had one of the best midterm performances in recent memory. Suddenly, Trump no longer seems to have a magic formula.
White nationalist Nick Fuentes told his audience that the solution to the fact Republicans are in a minority and keep losing elections is to establish “a dictatorship.” "We need to take control of the media or take control of the government and force the people to believe what we believe or force them to play by our rules.”
Others seem to think the answer is just to dump Trump, although as Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) warned Republicans in his closing argument in Trump’s first impeachment trial: "If you find that the House has proved its case and still vote to acquit, your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel—and for all of history."
That his star is tarnished became clear today not just on cable television and Twitter, where right-wing users complained about his hand-picked candidates, and in Pennsylvania, where Republicans were stung by the loss of a Senate seat, but also on media owned by right-wing kingmaker Rupert Murdoch. Today the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal noted Trump’s perfect record of electoral defeat and said: “Trump is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.”
Apparently stung, Trump unleashed a furious rant on Truth Social, claiming credit for DeSantis’s start in politics. It included an astonishing claim: “I was all in for Ron, and he beat Gillum, but after the Race, when votes were being stolen by the corrupt Election process in Broward County, and Ron was going down ten thousand votes a day, along with now-Senator Rick Scott, I sent in the FBI and the U.S. Attorneys, and the ballot theft immediately ended, just prior to them running out of the votes necessary to win. I stopped his Election from being stolen….”
This is an apparent reference to the 2018 election that put DeSantis in the governor’s chair rather than his Democratic opponent Andrew Gillum. The race was very close: just 32,463 votes out of 9 million cast, about 0.4%, separated the two candidates. Considering what we now know about Trump’s approach to election results, a claim to having rigged the 2018 Florida election was one heck of a statement. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo noted that even though Trump “is a pathological liar… this requires some explanation, if only a clear and definitive confirmation that this did not happen.”
Pundits are already suggesting Florida governor Ron DeSantis as a replacement for Trump as a presidential candidate in 2024. This is terribly premature. If, in fact, the party is going to move beyond the Trump years, it seems it might well not turn to DeSantis, who, among other things, is still under investigation for flying a plane load of legal migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, an act not just cruel but possibly illegal.
There will be plenty of time to worry about 2024.
In the meantime, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to a Democratic National Committee Event today at the Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C. Harris told the audience members that their work sent a message to the entire world: Our democracy is intact…. [T]his what it looks like…. Some Democrats won and some Republicans won. That is what happens when more than 100 million Americans participate and vote in free and fair and open elections…. And the people in this room and around our country made that possible by standing up for basic American values: freedom, liberty, and the rule of law. And I believe when you know what you stand for, you know what to fight for.”
Biden told the attendees that Democrats “beat the odds” in the midterms “for one reason—this is not hyperbole—because of you…. I really mean it…. You believed in the system. You believed in the institutions. You fought like hell for it. And that’s the most important thing that happened, in my view, in this election. It was the first national election since January 6th, and there were a lot of concerns about whether democracy would meet the test.”
“It did. It did. It did.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
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another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
In 1918, at the end of four years of World War I’s devastation, leaders negotiated for the guns in Europe to fall silent once and for all on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. That armistice was not technically the end of the war, which came with the Treaty of Versailles. Leaders signed that treaty on June 28, 1919, exactly five years to the day after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off the conflict. But the armistice declared on November 11 held, and Armistice Day became popularly known as the day “The Great War,” which killed at least 40 million people, ended.
In November 1919, President Woodrow Wilson commemorated Armistice Day, saying that Americans would reflect on the anniversary of the armistice “with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations…."
In 1926, Congress passed a resolution noting that since November 11, 1918, “marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed,” the anniversary of that date “should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”
In 1938, Congress made November 11 a legal holiday to be dedicated to world peace.
But neither the “war to end all wars” nor the commemorations of it, ended war.
Just three years after Congress made Armistice Day a holiday, American armed forces were fighting a Second World War, even more devastating than the first. Then, in 1950, American forces went to Korea.
In 1954, to honor the armed forces of those later conflicts, Congress amended the law creating Armistice Day by striking out the word “armistice” and putting “veterans” in its place. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, himself a veteran who had served as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and who had become a five-star general of the Army before his political career, later issued a proclamation asking Americans to observe Veterans Day: “[L]et us solemnly remember the sacrifices of all those who fought so valiantly, on the seas, in the air, and on foreign shores, to preserve our heritage of freedom, and let us reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”
Central to Eisenhower’s vision, and to the American vision for world peace after World War II, was the idea of a rules-based international order. Rather than trying to push their own boundaries and interests whenever they could gain advantage, countries agreed to abide by a series of rules that promoted peace, economic cooperation, and security. The new system provided places for countries to discuss their differences—like the United Nations, founded in 1945—and mechanisms for them to protect each other, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), established in 1949, which has a mutual defense pact that says any attack on a NATO country will be considered an attack on all of them.
In the years since, these agreements have multiplied and been deepened and broadened to include more countries and more ties. While the U.S. has sometimes failed to honor them, their central theory remains important: no country should be able to attack its neighbor, slaughter its people, and steal its lands at will. It is a concept that has preserved decades of relative peace compared to the horrors of the early twentieth century, and it is one the current administration is working hard to reestablish as autocrats increasingly reject the idea of a rules-based international order and claim the right to act however they wish.
In the modern world, Ukraine’s battle to throw off a Russian invasion is a defense of the rules-based international system. Today, Ukrainians celebrated as Ukrainian soldiers forced Russian invaders out of the southern city of Kherson in one of the Ukrainian regions Russian president Vladimir Putin claimed for Russia just a month ago.
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a televised message for people in the United States today:
“On behalf of all Ukrainians, Happy Veterans Day and thank you for your service.
“For almost 250 years the men and women of the United States armed forces have prevailed against tyranny, often against great odds. Your example inspires Ukrainians today to fight back against Russian tyranny. Special thanks to the many American veterans who have volunteered to fight in Ukraine, and to the American people for the amazing support you have given Ukraine. With your help, we have stunned the world and are pushing Russian forces back. Victory will be ours. God bless America and Slava Ukraini.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
A little before 9:30 p.m. Eastern time, NBC called Nevada’s tight Senate race for the incumbent: Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto. Cortez Masto defeated Adam Laxalt, a former attorney general for the state, whom former president Trump had endorsed.
This means that the Democrats keep control of the Senate.
Democrats will have 50 votes in the new Congress just as they did in the current one, enabling Vice President Kamala Harris to break ties in their favor.
Harris may not need to break ties, though, if the last Senate seat goes to the Democrats. That last seat is the one outstanding seat from Georgia. In the election there, Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock garnered about 35,000 more votes than Trump-endorsed Republican Herschel Walker, but neither man won 50% of the vote. Under Georgia law, this forces a runoff, which will be held on December 6. Walker is a deeply flawed candidate, and now that his election cannot give the Republicans control of the Senate, it is not clear that voters will turn out for him.
As of late October, NPR reported that outside groups had spent almost a billion dollars on the campaigns of Republican Senate candidates, hoping to take control of that body. Key to that desire for control was control of the judiciary, where the right wing has entrenched itself as it has become increasingly extreme and unpopular. Even without control of the House—which is still unclear as election officials continue to count votes—Democratic control of the Senate means that President Joe Biden will be able to continue confirming judges.
After the Nevada race was called, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters that the victory was “a vindication for Democrats, our agenda, and…for the American people.” He explained: “The American people rejected the antidemocratic extremist MAGA Republicans.”
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My photographer friend Peter took this image of the full moon on Tuesday, November 8, Election Day. He calls it "Welcome Home."
It's been quite a week. I'll see you tomorrow.
[Photo “Welcome Home” by Peter Ralston.]
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The contours of last Tuesday’s midterm election continue to come into focus. They are good, indeed, for the Democrats and Democratic president Joe Biden. Foremost is that the Democrats have not lost a Senate seat and could well pick one up after the December 6 runoff election between Georgia senator Rafael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker.
Those results are strong. According to Axios senior political correspondent Josh Kraushaar, only in 1934, under Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt; 1962, under Democratic president John F. Kennedy; and 2002, under Republican president George W. Bush and just after the 9/11 attacks, has a president’s party not lost a Senate seat in the midterms and lost fewer than 10 House seats. Since World War II, midterms have cost the party in power an average of 28 seats.
Democrats also did well in state governments, picking up some state governorships—including Arizona’s tonight, as Democrat Katie Hobbs is projected to have beaten Trump-backed Republican election denier Kari Lake—and taking control in some legislative chambers, although again, it’s not clear yet how many. They also denied the Republicans veto-proof supermajorities in others.
Also crucial was the defeat of election deniers, who backed Trump’s false allegations that he won the 2020 election, in six key elections where those folks would have been in charge of certifying ballots for their states in the future. In Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico, voters rejected election deniers running to become secretary of state. Indiana voters elected as secretary of state election denier Diego Morales, who has been mired in scandal, securing Republican control of the state.
In Nevada, Republican Jim Marchant was personally recruited by Trump’s people to run for secretary of state, and they asked him to put together a group of those who thought like him across the nation. At a Trump rally in October, Marchant promised voters that “[w]hen my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re going to fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024.”
Instead, voters chose Democrat Cisco Aguilar, who told Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times: “People are tired of chaos…. They want stability; they want normalcy; they want somebody who’s going to be an adult and make decisions that are fair, transparent, and in the best interest of all Nevadans.”
While many of us have been focusing on events here at home, the outcome of the election had huge implications for foreign policy. As today’s column by conservative columnist Max Boot of the Washington Post notes, “Republicans lost the election—and so did [Russian president Vladimir] Putin, MBS [Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman], and [former/incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu.”
Autocrats and hard-right leaders liked Trump at the head of the U.S. government, for he was far more inclined to operate transactionally on the basis of financial benefits, while Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, have advanced a foreign policy based on democratic values. Leaders like MBS have ignored Biden or denigrated him, expecting that a reelected Trump in 2024 would revert to the system they preferred. Now those calculations have hit a snag.
Indeed, Russia put its bots and trolls back to work before the election to weaken Biden in the hope that a Republican Congress would cut aid to Ukraine, as Republican leaders had suggested they would. The Russian army is in terrible trouble in Ukraine, and its best bet for a lift is for the international coalition the U.S. anchors to fall apart. Russian propagandists suggested that Putin suppressed news that the Russians were withdrawing from the Ukrainian city of Kherson until after the election to avoid giving the Democrats a boost in the polls.
Today, Secretary of State Blinken announced more sanctions against Russian companies and individuals, in Russia and abroad, “to disrupt Russia’s military supply chains and impose high costs on President Putin’s enablers.” Director of the CIA William Burns met recently in Turkey with his Russian counterpart to convey “a message on the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons” and “the risks of escalation,” but said the U.S. is firmly behind “our fundamental principle: nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”
Also today, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved a resolution saying that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine violated international law and that Russia must pay war reparations. In Germany and Poland, the governments separately announced they were taking over natural gas companies that had been tied to Russia’s huge energy company, Gazprom, in order to guarantee energy supplies to their people.
On Friday, November 11, Biden spoke at the United Nations climate change conference in Egypt. He was the only leader of a major polluting nation to go to the meeting, and there he stressed U.S. leadership, pointing to the Inflation Reduction Act’s $370 billion investment in the U.S. shift to clean energy and other climate-positive changes. Also on Friday, his administration announced it would use the U.S. government’s buying power to push suppliers toward climate-positive positions. Protesters called attention to how little the U.S. has done for poorer countries harmed by climate change that has been caused by richer countries.
From Egypt, the president traveled to Cambodia for a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. In the past year, the U.S. has announced more than $250 million in new initiatives with ASEAN, investing especially in infrastructure in an apparent attempt to disrupt China’s dominance of the region by supporting counterweights in the region. The U.S. is now elevating the cooperation with ASEAN to a comprehensive strategic partnership to support a rules-based Indo-Pacific region, maritime cooperation, economic and technological cooperation, and sustainable development. “ASEAN is the heart of my administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy, and we continue to strengthen our commitment to work in lockstep with an empowered, unified ASEAN,” Biden said.
While in Cambodia, Biden also met with Japanese prime minister Kishida Fumio and reinforced the U.S. “ironclad commitment to the defense of Japan” after North Korea’s recent ballistic missile tests. Biden and Kishida reiterated their plan to strengthen and modernize the relationship between the U.S. and Japan to “address threats to the free and open Indo-Pacific.”
From there, Biden traveled to Bali, Indonesia, for a meeting of the G20, a forum of 19 countries and the European Union comprising countries that make up most of the nation’s largest economies.
Today the president met for more than three hours with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The main message from the meeting was that the two countries are communicating, and while each is standing firm on its national sovereignty, each sees room to cooperate on major global issues.
Biden made it a point to say that U.S. policies toward Taiwan have not changed—a concern that created ripples of uncertainty when House speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island nation last summer—and both he and Xi agreed that Russia should not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. In a sign that relations are easing, Biden said that Blinken and other U.S. officials will visit China to begin working on issues of mutual interest..
Meanwhile, authorities in Iran are cracking down on the protesters there, with news of torture and now of a death sentence for one of the 15,000 protesters who have been arrested. Today, national security advisor Jake Sullivan condemned the human rights abuses inflicted on its citizens by the Iranian government and called for “accountability…through sanctions and other means.”
In Bali today, the president reminded reporters: “On my first trip overseas last year, I said that America was back—back at home, back at the table, and back to leading the world. In the year and a half that’s followed, we’ve shown exactly what that means. America is keeping its commitments. America is investing in our strength at home. America is working alongside our allies and partners to deliver real, meaningful progress around the world. And at this critical moment, no nation is better positioned to help build the future we want than the United States of America.”
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Today, what appears to have been a Russian-made missile fell into eastern Poland near Ukraine, killing two civilians. Poland is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an organization formed in 1949 to stand against the expansion of the Soviet Union and now standing against the expansion of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
According to Article 5 of NATO’s founding document, an attack on one NATO member is considered an attack on all of them. But exactly what happened today remains uncertain: it is not clear if the missile was an intentional attack, an error, or an intercepted weapon that went off course. Poland could invoke Article 5 but doesn’t have to and indeed would have a hard time getting the necessary support for that escalation without absolute proof the attack was deliberate.
So far, Poland appears to have activated Article 4, which brings NATO leaders together for consultation “whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened.” A joint consultation shows the world that NATO is still unified and warns against further escalation (if indeed any was intended).
Biden spoke by phone with Polish president Andrzej Duda to express his condolences and reiterate the U.S. commitment to NATO while the investigation into what actually happened is ongoing. He also spoke with NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg.
Russian missile attacks on Ukraine have increased as world leaders are meeting at the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia. The G20 is a forum of the European Union and 19 countries that include most of the world’s largest economies. Meetings of the G20 focus on cooperation for development, financial stability, and addressing climate change.
After filing the paperwork earlier today, former president Donald Trump announced a run for the 2024 presidency tonight in a speech from Mar-a-Lago before an audience that included a number of far-right social media influencers, his wife Melania, and family members Eric, Lara, and Barron Trump and Jared Kushner, but, so far as I can tell, no members of the Republican Party leadership. Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who was a key advisor in the Trump White House, was not there, and said tonight she does “not plan to be involved in politics.”
The speech was a subdued version of his rallies, claiming he is a victim and offering a replay of his inaugural address, which focused on what he called “American carnage.” Tonight he warned “our country is in a horrible state, we’re in grave trouble” and said he was leading “a great movement” to take the country back. Compared with the midterms crowds yelling for their candidate, the lack of enthusiasm in the room seemed marked, and after about an hour, while Trump was ranting about former German chancellor Angela Merkel, the Fox News Channel cut the live feed.
Domenico Montanaro of NPR indicated that Trump might not enjoy the same uncritical coverage he received in 2016 when he began his story on the announcement: “Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, announced he is running again for president in 2024.”
According to Mark Sweney of The Guardian, after the Republicans’ poor showing on Tuesday, in which the high-profile candidates Trump backed lost, media mogul Rupert Murdoch has told Trump that he will not support Trump’s 2024 candidacy and will instead back Florida governor Ron DeSantis should he decide to run. If Murdoch follows through, this means Trump will lose the backing of the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Fox News Channel.
The party’s losses in the midterms appear to have opened the door for Trump's opponents to toss him under the bus. According to Jonathan Swan at Axios, at this morning’s annual meeting of the Republican governors, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie got “huge applause” from the room full of hundreds of politicians, consultants, and wealthy donors when he blamed Trump for three cycles of losses for the Republican Party. Christie said voters “rejected crazy.”
Trump has likely announced his candidacy so early either to try to stop DeSantis from announcing and attracting Trump’s voters, or to try to avoid indictments, or both.
There is no doubt the former president’s legal troubles are heating up. On Saturday, a legal filing from the Department of Justice to Special Master Judge Raymond Dearie, in charge of reviewing the documents the FBI seized on August 8 from Mar-a-Lago, revealed that Trump kept a document marked “SECRET” and another marked “CONFIDENTIAL” in a drawer together with personal documents from after his time in office. This suggests that he deliberately mishandled the documents at a time after he left office.
Meanwhile, Trump has told the special master that the president has the authority simply to declare which records are personal records, and that he declared all the seized documents to be personal records while in office. He suggests his careless handling of the classified documents proves he considered them personal records. The Department of Justice has responded with incredulity (that’s the gist of it, anyway).
Two days ago, Trump’s second chief of staff, 72-year-old former Marine Corps general John F. Kelly, told Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times that Trump wanted to use the Department of Justice and other government agencies against those he perceived to be his political enemies. Repeatedly, he told Kelly he wanted to use the Internal Revenue Service in that way; last summer the New York Times revealed that after Kelly had left the White House, the IRS selected former FBI director James Comey and his deputy Andrew McCabe, whom Trump blamed for the investigation into the ties of his 2016 campaign to Russian operatives, for rare and extensive audits.
Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington dismissed Kelly’s account, although others have made similar statements, saying: “It’s total fiction created by a psycho, John Kelly, who never said this before, and made it up just because he’s become so irrelevant.”
New documents from Trump’s former accounting firm, Mazars USA, released by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, showed that foreign governments including those of Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and China “spent more money than previously known at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., and did so at sensitive times for those countries’ relations with the United States.” The leader of Malaysia, for example, spent more than $250,000 over 9 days at the hotel, and Trump praised him highly while the leader was “publicly under investigation by the Department of Justice…for looting a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund and laundering the money through U.S. financial institutions.”
The House Committee on Oversight and Reform yesterday wrote to the acting archivist of the United States, Debra Steidel Wall, asking her for presidential records to determine whether Trump distorted foreign policy to serve his own financial interests. In a statement, the committee’s chair, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) said of the information from Trump’s accountants: “These documents, which the Committee continues to obtain from Mazars, will inform our legislative efforts to ensure that future presidents do not abuse their position of power for personal gain.”
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It turns out that caution was warranted before drawing conclusions about the missile that fell into Poland yesterday, killing two civilians. Today, Polish president Andrzej Duda told reporters that the missile was likely an “unfortunate accident” caused by Ukrainian attempts to counter a group of about 100 Russian missiles launched at Ukraine.
“We have no evidence at the moment that it was a rocket launched by Russian forces,” Duda said. “However, there are many indications that it was a missile that was used by Ukraine’s antimissile defense.”
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) secretary general Jens Stoltenberg agreed that there is currently no evidence that Russia had deliberately attacked Poland. Poland is a member of NATO, whose mutual defense pact requires members to see any attack on one NATO member as an attack on all of them. Nonetheless, Stoltenberg reiterated that, at the end of the day, the blame for the errant missile still fell on Russia. “Russia bears ultimate responsibility as it continues its illegal war against Ukraine.”
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky says he’s not convinced of this explanation.
Stoltenberg also participated today in a virtual meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, formed in April for defense chiefs and ministers from those countries supporting Ukraine to coordinate military assistance and train Ukrainian soldiers to use it. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin convened the group’s seventh meeting, days after the U.S. pledged more assistance that will bring its total so far up to $18.6 billion, and seven other countries also either delivered or pledged more military assistance.
Austin praised the Ukrainian determination “to live in a free and sovereign country” and said the group would discuss what is necessary to “ensure that Ukraine can continue to consolidate its gains and keep its momentum on the battlefield even throughout the winter.” At a press conference afterward, Austin called the meeting “highly successful” and noted that Sweden today offered another $287 million, Spain is sending 2 more HAWK launchers and missiles, and Canada is sending another $500 million in assistance and more in winter gear. Germany is sending more defense supplies, artillery, and ammunition. Greece and Poland are sending more ammunition as well.
Austin concluded: “[O]ur resolve is only strengthened by Russia's indefensible attacks on civilian targets, and we'll continue to stand together in common purpose because no member of this contact group wants to live in a world where big countries bulldoze their peaceful neighbors, and we won't just accept Putin's imperial aggression and erosion of international norms as some kind of new normal. Instead, we will continue to stand up for Ukraine's inalienable rights to defend itself. We'll continue to strengthen our unity and resolve. We'll continue to show the power of partnership.”
Taking the microphone, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said that Russia failed to achieve its strategic objectives with a quick strike at Ukraine in February. Then they changed their operational objectives to seize the Donbas. They failed. Then they tried to seize Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. They failed there, too.
“So across the entire front line trace of some 900 or so kilometers, the Ukrainians have achieved success after success after success and the Russians have failed every single time. They've lost strategically, they've lost operationally, and I repeat, they lost tactically.”
Milley said that Russia is now settling in to inflict suffering on the civilian population with strikes designed to cut electricity and heat. This, he points out, is a war crime.
Milley noted that Russia could stop the war at any time, and he pledged that the U.S. would stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes to keep them free, sovereign, independent with their territory intact.” That being said, he warned that while “the Russian military is suffering tremendously,” it is not going to withdraw entirely from Ukraine any time soon. He suggested that with the military “really hurting bad” there might be a possibility of a political solution to get Putin to withdraw his troops.
Meanwhile, election fallout continues.
The Republican civil war between the far right and the medium right is playing out in leadership struggles.
In the Senate, Rick Scott (R-FL) launched a challenge to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from the right, with Trump’s support. Scott told other senators that “it’s time for bold change.” For his part, McConnell in March struck out at Scott’s plan for the party, saying “We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.” One senator called today’s meeting “a rhetorical slugfest.” McConnell won the secret vote by 37 to 10 with 1 senator abstaining.
The media has now projected that the Republicans will take control of the House, where Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is also facing a challenge from the far right as he is seeking to become House speaker. Unlike Republican Senate leadership, though, the House speaker is elected by the full House. Yesterday the House Republican conference nominated McCarthy for speaker, over far-right MAGA Republican Andy Biggs (R-AZ). Biggs got 31 votes to McCarthy’s 188, suggesting that the far-right “Freedom Caucus” can command only 31 votes.
McCarthy has courted the far right by promising to strip Democrats of power, kicking Representatives Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) off the House Intelligence Committee, for example. Still, he needs 218 votes to become speaker, and MAGA Republican Matt Gaetz (R-FL) told CNN that McCarthy does not have the votes.
The election of a House speaker can be a way for different factions to test out their power at the beginning of a session. If McCarthy can’t muster the necessary votes, the speakership could open to a far more moderate Republican who could get Democratic votes. That shift might, in fact, look good to a number of Republicans who see how thoroughly voters in some areas rejected extremism in the midterms. Or the need for more moderate votes could swing McCarthy away from the MAGA crowd. It’s not clear yet, but it might tell us a lot. In 1856, at a time when party alignments were shifting markedly, it took the House two months and 133 ballots finally to choose Representative Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts, and by then, everyone knew exactly who backed whom.
Other fallout from the election suggests the election has created some immediate results. After asking Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to delay consideration of a bill to protect marriage equality until after the election, twelve—but only twelve—Senate Republicans have voted with all the Democrats to advance a bill to protect marriage equality for same-sex and interracial couples. The measure repeals the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage under federal laws as between one man and one woman, and guarantees that states recognize marriages that were legal in the states where they were performed.
“Love is love,” President Biden said in a statement as he returned from Indonesia, “and Americans should have the right to marry the person they love…. The Respect for Marriage Act will ensure that LGBTQI+ couples and interracial couples are respected and protected equally under federal law, and provide more certainty to these families since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs [v. Jackson Women’s Health, which challenged judicial protection of marriage equality].”
Biden thanked the members of Congress who worked together to move the measure forward, and asked them to “send this bill to my desk where I will promptly sign it into law.”
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Yesterday, midterm results gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives after a campaign in which they emphasized inflation; today, Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who has received his party’s nomination to become speaker of the House, along with other Republican leadership, outlined for reporters their plans for the session.
“We must be relentless in our oversight of this administration,” the number 2 Republican in the House, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, told his colleagues. They plan to begin a raft of investigations: into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, the origins of Covid-19, the FBI, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and so on. But not, apparently, inflation.
Republicans have relied on congressional investigations to smear the Democrats since 1994, the year after the Democrats passed the so-called Motor Voter Act, making it easier to register to vote. After that midterm election, they accused two Democratic lawmakers of being elected thanks to “voter fraud” and used their power in Congress to launch long investigations that turned up no wrongdoing but convinced many Americans that the country had a problem with illegal voting (which is vanishingly rare).
House Republicans also led six investigations of the 2012 attack on two United States government facilities in Benghazi, Libya. That attack by a militant Islamic group while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state left four Americans dead. After several committees had found no significant wrongdoing, Republicans in the House created a select committee to reopen the case, and Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) told Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity: “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee. A select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”
And then, of course, there were Secretary of State Clinton’s emails before the 2016 election, and former president Donald Trump’s attempt in 2019 to force Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into a company on whose board Joe Biden’s son Hunter sat in order to weaken Biden before the 2020 election.
House oversight of the executive branch is actually a really important part of the House’s role, and yet it is one that Trump Republicans have rejected when Democrats were at the helm. Just yesterday, former vice president Mike Pence did so, saying that Congress had “no right” to his testimony before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. In fact, presidents and vice presidents have acknowledged their responsibility to testify to Congress back as far as…George Washington.
It is not clear, though, that upcoming Republican investigations will have the teeth the older ones did. True believers are demanding the investigations—and some are already hoping for impeachments—but this tactic might not be as effective now that Americans have been reminded what it’s like to have a Congress that accomplishes major legislation. Democratic strategists are also launching a rapid-response team, the Congressional Integrity Project, to push back on the investigations and the investigators.
The switch in control of the House of Representatives has brought another historic change.
Today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) announced she is stepping down from party leadership, although she will continue to serve in the House. “The hour has come for a new generation to lead the Democratic Caucus that I so deeply respect,” she told her colleagues. Democratic majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) is also stepping away from a leadership position. Both of them are over 80.
Pelosi was elected to Congress in a special election in 1987, becoming one of 12 Democratic women (now there are more than 90). She was first elected speaker in 2007, the first woman ever to hold that role. She was speaker until the Democrats lost the House in 2011, then was reelected to the position in 2019, and has held it since. Jackie Calmes of the Los Angeles. Times tweeted: “As an ex–Congress reporter, I can speak to the records of 8 of the 55 House speakers, 4 Dem[ocrat]s & 4 R[epublican]s back to Tip O’Neill. I'm not alone in counting Pelosi as the best of the bunch. 2 Dem[ocratic] presidents owe their leg[islati]v[e] successes to her; 2 GOP presidents were repeatedly foiled by her.”
Pelosi began her speech to her colleagues by remembering her first sight of the U.S. Capitol when her father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., was sworn in for his fifth congressional term representing Baltimore. She was six.
She called attention to the Capitol in which they stood: “the most beautiful building in the world—because of what it represents. The Capitol is a temple of our Democracy, of our Constitution, of our highest ideals.”
“In this room, our colleagues across history have abolished slavery; granted women the right to vote; established Social Security and Medicare; offered a hand to the weak, care to the sick, education to the young, and hope to the many,” she reminded them, doing “the People’s work.”
“American Democracy is majestic—but it is fragile. Many of us here have witnessed its fragility firsthand—tragically, in this Chamber. And so, Democracy must be forever defended from forces that wish it harm,” she said, and she praised the voters last week who “resoundingly rejected violence and insurrection” and “gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.”
Despite our disagreements on policy, she said, “we must remain fully committed to our shared, fundamental mission: to hold strong to our most treasured Democratic ideals, to cherish the spark of divinity in each and every one of us, and to always put our Country first.”
She said it had been her “privilege to play a part in forging extraordinary progress for the American people,” and noted pointedly—because she worked with four presidents—“I have enjoyed working with three Presidents, achieving: Historic investments in clean energy with President George Bush. Transformative health care reform with President Barack Obama. And forging the future—from infrastructure to health care to climate action—with President Joe Biden. Now, we must move boldly into the future….”
“A new day is dawning on the horizon,” she said, “And I look forward—always forward—to the unfolding story of our nation. A story of light and love. Of patriotism and progress. Of many becoming one. And, always, an unfinished mission to make the dreams of today the reality of tomorrow.”
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The price of crude oil this morning was $78.47 a barrel, down from $92.61 a barrel on November 4, falling by at least 18% over the past two weeks. This should help to relieve high costs of gas for consumers, although when the price falls to around $70 a barrel, the administration will begin to refill the strategic petroleum reserve, the release of which has helped to bring down gas prices. Diesel prices, though, are going up because of shortages caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a shortage of refinery capabilities after a 2019 fire shut down a refinery in Pennsylvania.
Shipping prices are also coming down, getting back to a normal range after crazy heights after the pandemic that fed inflation. The dislocations of the coronavirus pandemic sent shipping costs as much as 547% over the usual range by last January, driving up the prices of consumer goods. The return of more normal costs for transportation should help bring those prices down.
As Americans head out of town for the holidays, President Biden reminded them today that his administration is taking on the hidden “junk fees” on airline tickets and hotel rooms.
In other economic news, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has already spurred dramatic investment in American manufacturing of battery equipment. Previously, China was dominating that industry, but now America is developing its own battery sector to help the nation move toward electrical vehicles and other climate-friendly technologies.
Biden pushed for the IRA to combat climate change, provide jobs, and compete with China. By passing the IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Biden administration “has basically seized the bull by the horns,” Sanjiv Malhotra, the chief executive of a company building a battery plant in rural West Virginia told Harry Dempsey and Myles McCormick of the Financial Times. Malhotra’s new plant will hire out-of-work coal miners.
Meanwhile, the two parties continue to try to organize themselves into new patterns after the midterms. The far-right, pro-gun “Second Amendment Caucus” today hosted Kyle Rittenhouse, the 19-year-old who shot three men, killing two of them, in summer 2020 during a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and who was later acquitted of homicide.
Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), whose Democratic opponent, Adam Frisch, conceded today rather than force a hand recount of their close election, told Emily Brooks of The Hill: “It was an honor to have Kyle join the Second Amendment Caucus. He is a powerful example of why we must never give an inch on our Second Amendment rights, and his perseverance and love for our country was an inspiration to the caucus.” Rittenhouse tweeted a photograph of himself at the Capitol with the caption: “T-minus 5 years until I call this place my office?”
Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is facing opposition from the far-right MAGA Republicans in his quest to be speaker of the House, and welcoming Rittenhouse signals to the base that they will have a strong voice in the new Congress.
New candidates for Democratic leadership in the House are stepping up now that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she is stepping down. Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) today launched a bid to become the Democratic leader. Emphasizing continuity from Pelosi, with whom he is close, Jeffries called for working with Republicans “where possible…to deliver results for the American people,” but noted that “the opposing party appears to have no plan to accomplish anything meaningful. If the Republican Conference continues to major in demagoguery and minor in disinformation, their bankruptcy of ideas must be aggressively exposed on an ongoing basis.”
Jeffries called for Democrats to “unify around an agenda designed to make life better for everyday Americans from all walks of life,” and to center Democratic “communication strategy around the messaging principle that values unite, issues divide. House Democrats are actually the party that defends freedom, promotes economic opportunity and values families by uplifting them. We must make sure that the perception of the Democratic brand matches up with the reality that we do in fact authentically share values that unite the Heartland, Urban America, Rural America, Suburban America and Small Town America.”
Massachusetts Representative Katherine Clark is running for the number two position in the party leadership—the place Steny Hoyer (D-MD) has held since 2003—and California Representative Peter Aguilar is running for the number 3 position. Both Clark and Aguilar are close to Jeffries, and the three are seen as a team.
The coming Republican control of the House means shifting of the investigation into former president Trump. Trump was subpoenaed on November 14 to testify before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol but didn’t acknowledge the subpoena. The committee said it would “evaluate next steps.”
Yesterday, committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said he established a subcommittee about a month ago to look at "all outstanding issues" and to consider criminal and civil referrals to the Department of Justice. The members of the subcommittee are all lawyers: Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Liz Cheney (R-WY), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).
Today, days after Trump announced he would seek reelection in 2024, Attorney General Merrick Garland said he had appointed a special counsel to assume control over the investigations of the former president. One is the investigation into Trump’s theft of United States documents, including some that were classified at the highest levels, when he left office. The other is Trump’s role in the events leading up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol in an attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election for Trump.
The Department of Justice has been investigating both of these issues since they came to light, but with Trump now in the political ring for 2024—in part because he hoped an announcement would stop his prosecution—and with Biden likely to announce later, Garland said he thought it was important to demonstrate that the investigations were independent. It is also of note that a special counsel can be removed only for misconduct, insulating the investigations from the new Republican majority in the House. The White House was not given advance notice of Garland’s action.
Garland appointed to the position Jack Smith, a graduate of Harvard Law School who served as a prosecutor for government corruption cases and since 2018 has been a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague. A former colleague said of him: “I have no idea what his political beliefs are because he’s completely apolitical. He’s committed to doing what is right.”
The appointment frustrated those who saw no reason to treat Trump differently than any other U.S. citizen and thought it would significantly slow the investigation; others saw it as a sign the Justice Department would indict the former president. Tonight, referring to the issue of the stolen documents, Trump’s attorney general William Barr told CNN, “I personally think they probably have the basis for legitimately indicting [Trump].... They have the case.”
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For three hot days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, more than 150,000 soldiers from the armies of the United States of America and the Confederate States of America slashed at each other in the hills and through the fields around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
When the battered armies limped out of town after the brutal battle, they left scattered behind them more than seven thousand corpses in a town with fewer than 2500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, the townspeople had to get the dead soldiers into the ground as quickly as they possibly could, marking the hasty graves with nothing more than pencil on wooden boards.
A local lawyer, David Wills, who had huddled in his cellar with his family and their neighbors during the battle, called for the creation of a national cemetery in the town, where the bodies of the United States soldiers who had died in the battle could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and Wills and an organizing committee planned an elaborate dedication ceremony to be held a few weeks after workers began moving remains into the new national cemetery.
They invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. To deliver the keynote address, they asked prominent orator Edward Everett, who wanted to do such extensive research into the battle that they had to move the ceremony to November 19, a later date than they had first contemplated.
And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Abraham Lincoln to make a few appropriate remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.
On November 19, 1863, about fifteen thousand people gathered in Gettysburg for the dedication ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln stood up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, speaking slowly, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln began.
While the southern enslavers who were making war on the United States had stood firm on the Constitution and said that its protection of property rights—including their enslavement of their Black neighbors— was the heart of the nation, Lincoln tied the country's meaning instead to the Declaration of Independence.
The men who wrote the Declaration considered the “truths” they listed “self-evident”: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But Lincoln had no such confidence. By his time, the idea that all men were created equal was a “proposition,” and Americans of his day were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Standing near where so many men had died four months before, Lincoln honored “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.” But he noted that those “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated” the ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.”
Instead, “[i]t is for us the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He urged the men and women in the audience to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion."
In November 1863, after more than two years of deadly fighting, Lincoln rallied Americans not just behind the idea of freedom for Black Americans that he had declared the previous January with the Emancipation Proclamation, but also behind a new concept of America, one that would bring to life the ideas the founders had put in the Declaration but never brought to life: that all men are created equal, and that governments "derive... their just powers from the consent of the governed."
Lincoln urged Americans "to here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
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November. Buttoning up the last of the summer season and hunkering down for winter.
Buddy caught some of the lobstermen heading out in November one cold morning a few years ago. He wrote: "Had a little 'sea smoke' in the harbor the other morning. Getting a little wintry feeling. Pleasure boats have pretty much disappeared, and at the rate some traps are coming ashore... the work boats won't be far behind."
And here we are, once again, as the seasons turn.
I'm aiming to have the new manuscript entirely wrapped before Thanksgiving, so am going to go to bed early to get a jump on the last of this round of edits in the morning.
I'll see you tomorrow.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
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Two big stories landed over the weekend.
The first harks back to the furor last May when the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—the decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized abortion rights as a constitutional right—was leaked to Politico before it was released. At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts called the leak a “singular and egregious breach of…trust” and ordered an investigation to find the leaker. In late October, Justice Samuel Alito told the Heritage Foundation that the leak was a “grave betrayal of trust by somebody, and it was a shock” that had made the court’s right-wing majority “targets for assassination.”
On Saturday, Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker of the New York Times reported that the Reverend Rob Schenck, formerly an antiabortion activist, wrote to Roberts in July (although the letter was dated June 7, 2022) to say that in 2014 he had received advance notice of the court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby—the decision allowing corporations to deny their employees contraceptive health care coverage—from a woman who had just had dinner with Justice and Mrs. Alito. The dinner guest told Schenck that she had learned that Alito was writing the decision and that it would favor evangelical Christians. Schenck, who has become an advocate of choice as he is trying to mark himself as a progressive evangelical leader, signed the letter to Roberts, “Yours in the interest of truth and fairness.”
Schenck provided the reporters with contemporary emails suggesting he knew the outcome of the Hobby Lobby case ahead of time, and they talked to four people who confirmed that he had confidential information about it before the court handed it down. He used that information to prepare a public relations push ready to go the minute the decision was public.
The leak of a Supreme Court decision is shocking and potentially illegal, but even more shocking than the revelation that there have been two major leaks from the court—both of right-wing opinions authored by Alito—was the story the reporters unraveled of the degree to which evangelical activists worked to become close to the justices, especially through participation in the court’s historical society, as well as religious events, a plan Schenck called “Operation Higher Court.” Their goal was to influence the justices quietly, and it appears to have been at least somewhat successful: in July, Peggy Nienaber, the executive director of Liberty Counsel’s D.C. ministry, who worked with Schenck, was caught on a hot mic saying she prayed with certain Supreme Court justices.
On Sunday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) wrote to Chief Justice John Roberts to say that if the court is not going to investigate the breaches, lawmakers will.
New York Times reporters were evidently busy this weekend, because Eric Lipton and Maggie Haberman reported Sunday that the Trump family has begun to work not just with foreign nationals, but with foreign governments themselves. The Trumps have recently signed a $4 billion deal with a Saudi Arabian real estate company that is backed by the government of Oman.
The Trumps are deeply tangled with the Saudis already, of course, hosting the LIV Golf tournaments backed by the Saudi government and—in Jared Kushner’s case—investing $2 billion of Saudi government funds, a deal that Saudi leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, personally approved after the panel that screens investments advised against the deal.
Meanwhile, prosecutors today called their last witness in the criminal trial of the Trump Organization for fraud and tax evasion. Key witness Allen Weisselberg, former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, has painted a picture of an organization that avoided taxes by paying officers with private school tuition, cars, and rent money. The company denies all charges and says the fraudulent movement of money can be tied to Weisselberg alone.
Finally tonight, on a lighter note, this morning President Joe Biden pardoned turkeys Chocolate and Chip, lucky turkeys indeed in this season where supply chain choke points and the late season, virulent avian flu meant the culling of 7.3 million birds earlier this year, at least 3.6% of the nation’s turkeys. Chocolate and Chip will live out their lives on the campus of North Carolina State University.
Later, the president and First Lady Jill Biden had a “Friendsgiving” dinner this afternoon at the Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, with service members and military families, greeting them table by table and then thanking both the “best fighting force in the history of the world” and those at home who, in the words of poet John Milton, “stand and wait.”
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For many Americans today, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, represents a dramatic break from what came before. Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets hacked a chasm between an idyllic Camelot and the chaos and division of the modern era.
But at the time, Americans were eager to see not a break, but continuity. And no one recognized this need more viscerally than the two presidents who served on either side of President Kennedy—Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower and Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson—although their goals were very different.
One of the first people to whom Johnson turned upon his sudden elevation to the presidency was former president Eisenhower. After all, Eisenhower had stepped down from the leadership of the free world less than three years before, and Johnson understood that having Ike’s stamp of approval on his own unexpected presidency would give it stability and enable him to move his policies forward. Johnson hoped to get Eisenhower to tell the press that he would stand behind the new president.
For his part, Eisenhower disliked Johnson and distrusted his familiarity and was too smart to let Johnson box him in. A transcript of the telephone call Johnson placed to Eisenhower on the evening of November 22 reveals Johnson coaxing: “You know how much I have admired you through the years.”
Eisenhower replied: “The country is far more important than any of us.”
Although he publicly and repeatedly pledged his support to the government, the Republican ex-president declined to issue a joint statement declaring his political support for the Democrat Johnson.
But, like the new president, Eisenhower saw the need to emphasize to Americans that the country would survive the first murder of a president since Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley in 1901. Pulled out of a meeting at the United Nations to address the news of Kennedy’s assassination, Eisenhower spoke to reporters off the cuff to insist that Americans were too solid and faithful to let fanatics derail their government.
“I’m sure the entire citizenry of this nation will join as one man in expressing not only their grief but their indignation at this act, and will stand faithfully behind the government,” Eisenhower said. Relying on the lessons of history, he went on to detail how the nation had responded to every other presidential murder or assassination attempt in American history: attacks on Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. In each case, regardless of the partisan affiliation of either the president or the assassin, Eisenhower noted, Americans had rallied behind the government, and the nation had moved on.
For Eisenhower, the American government stood above the president and above party. “These things have happened,” he said, “and it seems inexplicable to me, because Americans are loyal, and it is just this occasional psychopathic sort of accident that occurs and I don’t know what we can do about it…. In civilized countries of the world this doesn’t happen….”
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The past week has brought seven mass shootings in the United States. Twenty-two people have been killed and 44 wounded. I’ll have more to say later about our epidemic of gun violence, but tonight, on the night before Thanksgiving, when I traditionally post the story of the holiday’s history, I simply want to acknowledge the terrible sorrow behind tomorrow’s newly empty chairs.
Thanksgiving itself came from a time of violence: the Civil War.
The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.
In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady's Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slaveholding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.
And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.
Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.
In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.
The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.
New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”
The next year Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.
President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.
In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.
In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation.
They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming.
And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.
The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”
In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front to create a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.
And they won.
My best to you all for Thanksgiving 2022.
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Happy Thanksgiving.
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Yesterday, Representative Mary Peltola (D-AK) won Alaska’s House seat for a full term after taking it this summer in a special election to replace Representative Don Young (R-AK), who died in office in March after 49 years in Congress. Peltola is the first woman to represent Alaska and, as Yup’ik, is the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.
Peltola was endorsed by Alaskans of both parties, including Republicans like Senator Lisa Murkowski. Peltola promised to protect abortion and the salmon fisheries and was elected thanks to Alaska’s recent adoption of ranked choice voting, in which votes from poorly polling candidates are redistributed to those at the top until one gets more than 50%. This method of voting tends to favor moderates. Peltola’s reelection stopped former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, whom Trump endorsed, from reentering politics.
Murkowski has also won reelection, defeating a Trump-backed challenger endorsed by the Alaska Republican Party. Trump targeted Murkowski after she voted to convict him for incitement of insurrection during his second impeachment after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The reelections of Peltola and Murkowski illustrate that we are, in many different ways, at a sea change moment in American history.
In the past two years, Democrats have successfully pushed back on forty years of efforts to dismantle the business regulation, basic social safety net, promotion of infrastructure, protection of civil rights, and international cooperation that were the fundamental principles underpinning American government after the Depression and World War II. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with the Democratic Congress, have rebuilt some of the economic fairness of the old system and invested in infrastructure, while Biden, Harris, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have strengthened the foreign alliances that the former president had undermined.
Democratic leadership is also changing in the House of Representatives as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) have stepped out of the top three leadership roles in the House to make way for members of a new generation, presumably Representatives Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Katherine Clark (D-MA), and Pete Aguilar (D-CA). Pelosi’s team has defended the liberal consensus and expanded it into health care and measures to address climate change; the new generation of Democrats seems likely to center issues like childcare and racial equality more fully than their predecessors did.
These changes embrace the demographic change the last election made so clear. Gen Z—the generation born after 1997—is racially and ethnically diverse. Its members want the government to do more to solve problems than it has done in their lifetime, and they are now politically awake. That generation looks much like the Millennials from the generation preceding it—those born between 1981 and 1996—and both groups strongly favor Democratic policies.
Peltola reflects another change visible after the election: the record number of women elected to office this cycle. Peltola will add one more woman to the House of Representatives, bringing the total to 124, one more than the record set by the current Congress. Murkowski will bring the total of female senators to 25, which is one fewer than the record of 26, set in 2020 thanks to a few special appointments for unexpectedly empty seats.
But the place women’s representation really changed in 2022 was in the number of women elected to govern their states. In 2018, just 16 female candidates ran for governorships. In 2022, there were 36 governor’s contests, and 25 women ran in them. Until now there have been only 45 women governors in our history, and only 9 in office at one time.
Beginning in 2023, a record number of twelve women will hold governorships. Incumbent female governors in Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, New Mexico, Michigan and South Dakota were reelected. Voters in Arizona, Arkansas, Massachusetts, and Oregon elected new governors who are women. And New Yorkers elected Kathy Hochul, who took office initially in 2021 to replace resigning governor Andrew Cuomo.
Meredith Conroy and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux of FiveThirtyEight note that historically, voters are less likely to vote for women for solo offices than as group lawmakers, but Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics, told Jennifer Shutt of the Idaho Capital Sun that a number of factors fed the success rate of women candidates this cycle. First, there is now a long enough history of women in high positions of leadership that voters have confidence in them, especially as some of them—like Kay Ivey in Alabama and Hochul in New York—stepped into their positions after their male predecessors resigned in disgrace.
Even more key, perhaps, was the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion guaranteed in 1973 by Roe v. Wade. Women turned out to protect their right to healthcare in this election and, not surprisingly, they turned to women governors who made protecting abortion care central to their reelection campaigns.
The female governors have a great deal of legislative experience, perhaps in part because their rise through the political ranks has been slow as it has been hampered by resistance. Republicans reelected female governors in South Dakota, Iowa, and Alabama and added Trump’s former White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, as governor of Arkansas. While Sanders has no experience in elected office, the other three—South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, Iowa’s Kim Reynolds, and Alabama’s Kay Ivey—all have significant experience in their state governments and, in Noem’s case, in Congress.
The same is even more true on the Democratic side. Maine’s Janet Mills, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Arizona’s Katie Hobbs, New York’s Kathy Hochul, New Mexico’s Michelle Lujan Grisham, Oregon’s Tina Kotek, and Kansas’s Laura Kelly all have legislative experience; Maura Healey of Massachusetts twice won election as state attorney general.
While Noem made headlines for her fervent support of former president Trump, the new Democratic governors all ran as competent administrators who strongly opposed Trump-type politics. Maine’s Mills ran against a former governor who once described himself as “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular,” and Michigan’s Whitmer was such a target of the former president that she became the target of a kidnapping and murder plot.
This focus on competence and moderation clearly boosted Peltola and Murkowski, along with female candidates for governor, but the expansion of representation still does not come close to reflecting the actual percentage of women in the U.S. population. Nor does it reflect racial and ethnic identities. Women representatives are more diverse than in the Senate, but only two women senators—Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI)—are Asian American, and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) is Latina. Since Vice President Kamala Harris resigned from the Senate to take her current office, there have been no Black women in the Senate.
Of the women governors, only New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham is Latina, and voters have not yet put a Black women governor at the head of a state. They did, though, put Karen Bass, a Black former congressional representative, in charge of Los Angeles, with record voter turnout. Bass will be the first female mayor in the city’s 241-year history, and her charge is a big one: the city’s 3.8 million people give it more inhabitants than 22 U.S. states. Voters have also embraced other diversity: the new governors in Massachusetts and Oregon are openly lesbian.
That female candidates won so many seats—some contests had women running against each other—is “a really good reminder that women get to be as diverse in their viewpoints and perspectives, priorities, et cetera, as their male counterparts,” Dittmar told Jasmine Mithani of The 19th. “We get to see that being a woman candidate, being a woman doesn't mean the same thing for everybody.”
The expansion of our political representation to reflect the many different people in our diverse democracy can only be a good thing.
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I hate to break up a holiday weekend with a political post, but I want to put down a marker for the record.
On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, November 22, former president Trump hosted the antisemitic artist Ye, also known as Kanye West, for dinner at a public table at Mar-a-Lago along with political operative Karen Giorno, who was the Trump campaign’s 2016 state director in Florida. Ye brought with him 24-year-old far-right white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Fuentes attended the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in its wake, he committed to moving the Republican Party farther to the right.
Fuentes has openly admired Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is currently making war on Russia’s neighbor Ukraine. A Holocaust denier, Fuentes is associated with America’s neo-Nazis.
In February 2020, Fuentes launched the America First Political Action Conference to compete from the right with the Conservative Political Action Conference. In May 2021, on a livestream, Fuentes said: “My job…is to keep pushing things further. We, because nobody else will, have to push the envelope. And we’re gonna get called names. We’re gonna get called racist, sexist, antisemitic, bigoted, whatever.… When the party is where we are two years later, we’re not gonna get the credit for the ideas that become popular. But that’s okay. That’s our job. We are the right-wing flank of the Republican Party. And if we didn’t exist, the Republican Party would be falling backwards all the time.”
Fuentes and his “America First” followers, called “Groypers” after a cartoon amphibian (I’m not kidding), backed Trump’s lies that he had actually won the 2020 election. At a rally shortly after the election, Fuentes told his followers to “storm every state capitol until Jan. 20, 2021, until President Trump is inaugurated for four more years.” Fuentes and Groypers were at the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and at least seven of them have been charged with federal crimes for their association with that attack. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol subpoenaed Fuentes himself.
Accounts of the dinner suggest that Trump and Fuentes hit it off, with Trump allegedly saying, “I like this guy, he gets me,” after Fuentes urged Trump to speak freely off the cuff rather than reading teleprompters and trying to appear presidential as his handlers advise.
But Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2024 just days ago, and being seen publicly with far-right white supremacist Fuentes—in addition to Ye—indicates his embrace of the far right. His team told NBC’s Marc Caputo that the dinner was a “f**king nightmare.” Trump tried to distance himself from the meeting by saying he didn’t know who Fuentes was, and that he was just trying to help Ye out by giving the “seriously troubled” man advice, but observers noted that he did not distance himself from Fuentes’s positions.
Republican lawmakers have been silent about Trump’s apparent open embrace of the far right, illustrating the growing power of that far right in the Republican Party. Representatives Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) have affiliated themselves with Fuentes, and while their appearances with him at the America First Political Action Conference last February drew condemnation from Republican leader Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), now McCarthy desperately needs the votes of far-right Republicans to make him speaker of the House. To get that support, he has been promising to deliver their wish list—including an investigation into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter—and appears willing to accept Fuentes and his followers into the party, exactly as Fuentes hoped.
Today, after the news of Trump’s dinner and the thundering silence that followed it, conservative anti-Trumper Bill Kristol tweeted: “Aren’t there five decent Republicans in the House who will announce they won’t vote for anyone for Speaker who doesn’t denounce their party’s current leader, Donald Trump, for consorting with the repulsive neo-Nazi Fuentes?”
So far, at least, the answer is no.
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
November 27, 2022 (Sunday)
Another quick note at the end of this holiday weekend to mark yet another story that shouldn't be overlooked:
Protests have broken out across China after the country’s strict zero-Covid policies appear to have delayed firefighters responding to a deadly apartment fire Thursday night in Urumqi, the capital of China's Xinjiang region, which lies in the country’s vast northwest.
Official reports say at least ten people died and nine others were injured in the fire, and protesters took to the streets in anger at the lockdown and strict testing and quarantine policies the government insists are imperative to protect the country’s vulnerable elderly.
The protests quickly spread to cities around the country and have become political protests against Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who was reelected for an unprecedented third term as head of the Communist Party last month, and against the Communist Party itself. In Shanghai, protesters shouted, “Step down, Xi Jinping! Step down, Communist Party!” In Beijing, university students called for “Democracy and rule of law! Freedom of expression!”
Observers appear to have been surprised both by the rapid spread of the protests and by the relatively restrained response of authorities, who usually crack down on political protest fast and hard. Those observers note that the country’s zero-Covid policy has meant seemingly unending lockdowns, causing extraordinary hardship for ordinary citizens with no end in sight, even as cases in the country are at an all-time high and rising.
China’s approach to Covid has also exacerbated a harsh downturn in the Chinese economy. Its government focused on mass testing and isolation facilities to keep the virus away rather than on effective vaccines and new hospitals to treat those infected, locking itself into a policy that now appears unsustainable.
Observers attribute the protests to frustration over the lockdowns, concern over the economy, and even the World Cup, which has given the Chinese audience a look at more open and free societies outside China.
While these protests are unusual because of the many different factions that are working together—workers, students, rural protesters, and so on—scholars of China say it is far too early to make predictions about what will come next.
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Four of twelve unions have rejected the deal the administration brokered in mid-September between rail carriers and union workers to avert a national strike. They remain concerned about their lack of paid sick days. More generally, though, they oppose a new staffing system implemented after 2018, which created record profits for the country’s main rail carriers but cost the industry 40,000 jobs, mainly among the people who actually operate the trains, leading to brutal schedules and dangerous working conditions.
The new system, called Precision Schedule Railroading (PSR), made trains far more efficient by keeping workers on very tight schedules that leave little time for anything but work. Any disruption in those schedules—a family emergency, for example—brought disciplinary action and possible job loss. Although workers got an average of 3 weeks’ vacation and holidays, the rest of their time, including weekends, was tightly controlled, while smaller crews meant more dangerous working conditions.
Union leaders and railroad management negotiated for more than two and a half years for new contracts without success.
In July, Biden established a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to try to resolve the differences before the September 16 deadline by which the railway workers could legally strike. The PEB’s August report called for significant wage increases and health care benefits but kicked down the road the problems associated with PSR. The National Carriers Conference Committee, which represents the railroads, called the report “fair and appropriate,” but not all the unions did.
Now four of the unions are holding out for better sick leave provisions, and it is likely that the unions will all walk out together if they go.
This threatens supply chains and the economy in general—down to the safety of water systems, since trains carry the chemicals that purify water systems—right before the holidays and as we try to stave off a recession. The deadline for agreeing to the deal is December 9.
This evening, President Joe Biden issued a statement calling on Congress to pass legislation to put the agreement into force to avert a “potentially crippling” railway shutdown. “Let me be clear,” he said, “a rail shutdown would devastate our economy. Without freight rail, many U.S. industries would shut down…[and] as many as 765,000 Americans—many union workers themselves—could be put out of work in the first two weeks alone. Communities could lose access to chemicals necessary to ensure clean drinking water. Farms and ranches across the country could be unable to feed their livestock.”
“As a proud pro-labor President,” he continued, “I am reluctant to override the ratification procedures and the views of those who voted against the agreement.” He wants laws to establish paid leave and stronger protections for workers, he said, “[b]ut at this critical moment for our economy, in the holiday season, we cannot let our strongly held conviction for better outcomes for workers deny workers the benefits of the bargain they reached, and hurl this nation into a devastating rail freight shutdown.” “[I]n this case,” he said, “where the economic impact of a shutdown would hurt millions of other working people and families—I believe Congress must use its powers to adopt this deal.” He asked lawmakers to get a bill to his desk immediately, well before December 9.
Railway Age, a trade magazine for the rail transport agency, reported that neither side in the negotiations could find a way to avoid a work stoppage, but since neither side wanted one, they were eager to have Congress overrule the small percentage of workers who opposed the deal and impose the one most workers have accepted. That way, neither side would have to face criticism from those who oppose the deal, and they would not have to deal with a Republican House as they seek to find a solution.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that the House would take up a bill adopting the agreement this week. “It is my hope that this necessary, strike-averting legislation will earn a strongly bipartisan vote, giving America’s families confidence in our commitment to protecting their financial futures,” she said.
Meanwhile, former president Trump appears to be increasingly nervous about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith to take over the investigations of Trump’s theft of national security documents and incitement of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump is lashing out wildly, calling Smith, for example, “a hit man for Obama.”
Of perhaps more concern for his lawyers was his post on his social media network saying: "When will you invade the other Presidents’ homes in search of documents, which are voluminous, which they took with them, but not nearly so openly and transparently as I did?"
Meanwhile, a reporter for ABC News spotted Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway going into the offices of the January 6th Committee. A recent book by Jon Lemire cites Trump’s query of Conway how he could have lost “to f*cking Joe Biden,” indicating he did, in fact, understand that he had lost the election.
Committee member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said on November 20 that the committee will release to the public its report and all the evidence it has gathered “within a month.”
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Today, after an eight-week trial and three days of deliberations, a jury of five women and seven men found Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, 57, the founder and leader of the right-wing Oath Keepers gang, and Kelly Meggs, 53, who led the Florida chapter of the Oath Keepers, guilty of seditious conspiracy and other charges related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. It found Rhodes guilty of obstruction of an official proceeding and tampering with documents and proceedings, and found Meggs guilty of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging duties, and tampering with documents or proceedings.
The jury also found three additional defendants from the organization—Kenneth Harrelson, 42; Jessica Watkins, 40; and Thomas Caldwell, 68—guilty of related felony charges.
The Department of Justice proved that after President Joe Biden won the November 3, 2020, election, Rhodes, Meggs, and others began plotting to use force to oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power.
Beginning in late December 2020, they planned to travel to Washington, D.C., on or around January 6, 2021, to stop Congress from certifying the electoral college vote that would officially elect Biden. They recruited others, organized combat training sessions, and smuggled paramilitary gear to the area around the Capitol. They planned to take control of the Capitol grounds and buildings on January 6.
According to the Department of Justice, on that day, “Meggs, Harrelson, and Watkins, along with other Oath Keepers and affiliates—many wearing paramilitary clothing and patches with the Oath Keepers name, logo, and insignia—marched in a ‘stack’ formation up the east steps of the Capitol, joined a mob, and made their way into the Capitol. Rhodes and Caldwell remained outside the Capitol, where they coordinated activities” and stayed in touch with quick reaction force teams outside the city, which were ready to bring in firearms to stop the transfer of power.
That a jury has now found two people guilty of seditious conspiracy establishes that a conspiracy existed. Former federal prosecutor Randall D. Eliason, who teaches law at George Washington University, told reporters Spencer S. Hsu, Tom Jackman, and Rachel Weiner of the Washington Post: “Now the only remaining question is how much higher did those plans go, and who else might be held criminally responsible.” While federal prosecutors sought only to tie Rhodes to the other Oath Keepers, both sides agreed that Rhodes communicated with Trump allies Roger Stone, Ali Alexander, and Michael Flynn after the election.
There are two more seditious conspiracy trials scheduled for December. One is for five other Oath Keepers; the other is against the leaders of the far-right gang the Proud Boys, led by Henry ‘Enrique’ Tarrio.
Yesterday, Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election are not covered by presidential immunity as his lawyers argued. The judge noted that he was acting not as a president in defense of the Constitution, but rather in a different role as a candidate when he tried to overturn the election. Sullivan said: “Persuasive authority in this district specifically recognizes that there is no immunity defense for Former President Trump for ‘unofficial acts’ which ‘entirely concern his efforts to remain in office for a second term.’”
The South Carolina Supreme Court today unanimously ordered Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s last White House chief of staff, to testify before the Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Meadows was on the phone call Trump made to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger on January 2 to demand he “find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have,” making his testimony key to the investigation. Meadows lives in South Carolina, where he tried to argue that he could not testify because of executive privilege. Lower South Carolina courts disagreed, and now the state’s supreme Court has said that Meadows’s arguments are “manifestly without merit.”
In Washington, Trump advisor Stephen Miller testified today before the grand jury investigating the events of January 6, 2021. The Justice Department subpoenaed Miller in September. He also testified before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Also in Washington today, the Senate passed the Respect for Marriage Act, which provides federal recognition of same-sex and interracial marriages for the purposes of federal benefits like Social Security, and requires states to recognize such marriages, although it does not require them to perform such marriages. The law is an attempt to get out in front of the Supreme Court, whose right-wing members have suggested they would invalidate marriage equality after ending protections for reproductive rights. Thirty-six Republicans voted against the bill, with 12 Republicans joining the Democrats to pass it.
The Senate bill amends one passed in July by the House, which will now have to agree to the changed measure and is expected to do so. House speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a vote for next week.
Today Pelosi also announced that Congress will take up the legislation Biden asked for yesterday: a law to put in place the deal between the railroad corporations and the railway unions. Four of 12 unions have rejected the deal because of its lack of paid sick days. In a letter to her colleagues, Pelosi expressed reluctance to bypass standard ratification procedures but said, “we must act to prevent a catastrophic strike that would touch the lives of nearly every family: erasing hundreds of thousands of jobs, including union jobs; keeping food and medicine off the shelves; and stopping small businesses from getting their goods to market.”
She promised to bring the measure up for a vote tomorrow.
But, in typical Pelosi fashion, she has found a way to demonstrate to union members and to lawmakers like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who are angry at Biden’s determination to avoid a strike, that those standing in the way of paid leave for the unions are not the Democrats. After the vote on the agreement, she will hold a “separate, up-or-down vote to add seven days of paid sick leave for railroaders to the Tentative Agreement.” Such a measure is likely to pass the House and die under a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
While the jury was handing down its verdict in the case of Stewart Rhodes, who said on tape that he would “hang f*ckin’ Pelosi from the lamppost,” Speaker Pelosi was lighting the Capitol Christmas tree with fourth-grader Catcuce Micco Tiger, who is a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and has ancestry from the Seminole Tribe of Florida and Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
Tiger won the role of youth tree lighter with an essay sharing the Cherokee origin story for evergreen trees. “After creating all plants and animals,” Pelosi explained, “our Creator asked them to fast, pray, and stay awake for seven nights. But at the end, only a few were awake. The trees that stayed awake were rewarded with the ability to keep their leaves yearlong and with special healing powers. It is a story of faith and gratitude—of hope enduring through the dark night.”
“And,” Pelosi added, “it is hope that we celebrate each holiday season—that through the cold and dark winter, spring will someday come.”
Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn, who defended the Capitol against the Oath Keepers on January 6, heard the jury's verdict, then watched the tree lighting.
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