While we wait to learn more about a possible budget deal under which Republicans would agree to raise the debt ceiling before June 5, the date Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says will see the U.S. run out of funds, there is an interesting story coming out of Texas that might well shed light on the current dynamics in the Republican Party.
On Wednesday, witnesses testified before the Republican-led Texas House General Investigating Committee about how the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, has committed crimes in office, including trying to hide an affair, using his office to help a donor, building a culture of fear in his office, using his power to retaliate against opponents, misusing official information, and abusing his office. As attorney general, Paxton is in charge of overseeing the enforcement of the law in the state.
On Thursday the committee voted unanimously to recommend that Paxton be impeached and removed from office, citing 20 counts, including bribery and retaliating against whistleblowers, for his impeachment.
Paxton is not unused to trouble. He has been under a felony indictment for securities fraud since 2015, successfully holding off the charges through repeated delays. In 2020, eight of his top advisors accused him of abusing his office to help a wealthy donor, Nate Paul, resist an FBI investigation. But he has maintained his popularity with Republican voters in Texas by standing as a fervent Trump supporter and attacking the Biden administration, and party leaders would not turn on him.
That formula appears to be less potent than it used to be. It turns out that the House committee began investigating Paxton in March, after he tried to get $3.3 million of taxpayer money to settle a lawsuit with four whistleblowers who said he retaliated against them after they tried to expose his unsavory relationship with Paul.
Apparently aware of what was about to drop, Paxton on Tuesday accused House speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican, of being drunk at a public hearing and said he should resign. Once news of the committee vote dropped, Paxton on Friday attacked the “illegal impeachment scheme” and asked supporters to descend on the Texas Capitol for the impeachment vote. Paxton accused those calling for his impeachment of helping President Biden.
“The House is poised to do exactly what Joe Biden has been hoping to accomplish since his first day in office: sabotage our work, my work, as attorney general of Texas,” Paxton said. He refused to take questions. Right-wing figures, including the head of the Texas Republican Party and key Trump advisors—but not Trump himself—have declared their support for him. Texas governor Greg Abbott has stayed silent.
The full House will take up the question of Paxton’s impeachment tomorrow, with both Paxton’s supporters and Democratic supporters coming for the event.
Patrick Svitek of the Texas Tribune noted today that the impeachment effort has set off “a political earthquake in Texas.” “Republicans have chosen to remain largely silent during years of alleged misconduct and lawbreaking by the attorney general. Now they will have to take a public stand,” he wrote. Local observers recognize the battle as one between far-right extremists, represented by Paxton, and Republicans who are trying to recover the party from the Trump wing.
There is likely a political calculation behind this move. Texas is a crucially important state for 2024, and voters are angry at the apparent corruption of prominent Republican figures like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Some leaders are likely eager to cut loose some big fish to reassure voters that they are not, in fact, the party of corruption. But in states that are currently dominated by Republicans so thoroughly that they are essentially one-party states, there are indeed systemic corruption problems because there is not the oversight that a healthy opposition party brings.
Both Paxton’s actions and his attempt to dismiss his Republican accusers as working for Biden appear to be a classic example of the behavior of political leaders in a one-party state. He has allegedly used his office to reward friends, retaliate against enemies, and avoid accountability for apparent lawbreaking. This pattern is common in authoritarian governmental systems; it was also common in the American South from about 1874 to 1965, when the Voting Rights Act that protected Black voting finally broke the one-party region dominated by white men.
Tomorrow, as Republican leaders in Texas look toward the 2024 election, they are going to have to decide whether to back an apparently corrupt attorney general who is popular with the Republican base or appeal to Republicans turned off by how extreme the party has become and get rid of him.
It will take a majority of the 149-member House to send the articles of impeachment to the Texas Senate for a trial. All 64 House Democrats will likely vote for impeachment. It is not clear what the Republicans will do.
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While we wait to learn more about a possible budget deal under which Republicans would agree to raise the debt ceiling before June 5, the date Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says will see the U.S. run out of funds, there is an interesting story coming out of Texas that might well shed light on the current dynamics in the Republican Party.
On Wednesday, witnesses testified before the Republican-led Texas House General Investigating Committee about how the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, has committed crimes in office, including trying to hide an affair, using his office to help a donor, building a culture of fear in his office, using his power to retaliate against opponents, misusing official information, and abusing his office. As attorney general, Paxton is in charge of overseeing the enforcement of the law in the state.
On Thursday the committee voted unanimously to recommend that Paxton be impeached and removed from office, citing 20 counts, including bribery and retaliating against whistleblowers, for his impeachment.
Paxton is not unused to trouble. He has been under a felony indictment for securities fraud since 2015, successfully holding off the charges through repeated delays. In 2020, eight of his top advisors accused him of abusing his office to help a wealthy donor, Nate Paul, resist an FBI investigation. But he has maintained his popularity with Republican voters in Texas by standing as a fervent Trump supporter and attacking the Biden administration, and party leaders would not turn on him.
That formula appears to be less potent than it used to be. It turns out that the House committee began investigating Paxton in March, after he tried to get $3.3 million of taxpayer money to settle a lawsuit with four whistleblowers who said he retaliated against them after they tried to expose his unsavory relationship with Paul.
Apparently aware of what was about to drop, Paxton on Tuesday accused House speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican, of being drunk at a public hearing and said he should resign. Once news of the committee vote dropped, Paxton on Friday attacked the “illegal impeachment scheme” and asked supporters to descend on the Texas Capitol for the impeachment vote. Paxton accused those calling for his impeachment of helping President Biden.
“The House is poised to do exactly what Joe Biden has been hoping to accomplish since his first day in office: sabotage our work, my work, as attorney general of Texas,” Paxton said. He refused to take questions. Right-wing figures, including the head of the Texas Republican Party and key Trump advisors—but not Trump himself—have declared their support for him. Texas governor Greg Abbott has stayed silent.
The full House will take up the question of Paxton’s impeachment tomorrow, with both Paxton’s supporters and Democratic supporters coming for the event.
Patrick Svitek of the Texas Tribune noted today that the impeachment effort has set off “a political earthquake in Texas.” “Republicans have chosen to remain largely silent during years of alleged misconduct and lawbreaking by the attorney general. Now they will have to take a public stand,” he wrote. Local observers recognize the battle as one between far-right extremists, represented by Paxton, and Republicans who are trying to recover the party from the Trump wing.
There is likely a political calculation behind this move. Texas is a crucially important state for 2024, and voters are angry at the apparent corruption of prominent Republican figures like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Some leaders are likely eager to cut loose some big fish to reassure voters that they are not, in fact, the party of corruption. But in states that are currently dominated by Republicans so thoroughly that they are essentially one-party states, there are indeed systemic corruption problems because there is not the oversight that a healthy opposition party brings.
Both Paxton’s actions and his attempt to dismiss his Republican accusers as working for Biden appear to be a classic example of the behavior of political leaders in a one-party state. He has allegedly used his office to reward friends, retaliate against enemies, and avoid accountability for apparent lawbreaking. This pattern is common in authoritarian governmental systems; it was also common in the American South from about 1874 to 1965, when the Voting Rights Act that protected Black voting finally broke the one-party region dominated by white men.
Tomorrow, as Republican leaders in Texas look toward the 2024 election, they are going to have to decide whether to back an apparently corrupt attorney general who is popular with the Republican base or appeal to Republicans turned off by how extreme the party has become and get rid of him.
It will take a majority of the 149-member House to send the articles of impeachment to the Texas Senate for a trial. All 64 House Democrats will likely vote for impeachment. It is not clear what the Republicans will do.
Shouldn’t even be a question but, you know, Tejas.
Today the Texas House voted to impeach Texas attorney general Ken Paxton on 20 counts of corruption and bribery, removing him from office temporarily while the Senate prepares to try him.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) sided with Paxton, saying “No attorney general has battled the abuses of the Biden admin more ferociously—and more effectively—than has Paxton.” Former president Trump also backed Paxton, calling the Republican speaker of the Texas House “barely a Republican at all,” and threatened to target any Republican who voted for impeachment.
During the hearing, Republican state representative Charlie Green said that Paxton, too, had been calling representatives to warn them they would suffer political consequences for voting to impeach.
Paxton is a Trump loyalist who after the 2020 presidential election sued Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to try to stop the counting of their electoral votes, charging that their elections saw widespread fraud. The Supreme Court threw out the case, saying that Texas did not have standing to sue, but not before it attracted the support of 17 state attorneys general and at least 126 members of Congress, including Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
McCarthy is now speaker of the House and beholden to that extremist right-wing. In the fight over raising the debt ceiling so the nation can pay bills already incurred, the extremist Republicans have threatened to default on the nation’s bills in order to force the Democrats to defund their signature measures.
Tonight, President Biden and McCarthy announced they have agreed to a budget deal in principle, opening the way for the House to pass a measure to raise the debt ceiling. Now the key question is: do they have the votes to pass such a measure?
McCarthy continues to appeal to the extremists by attacking Biden, saying inaccurately that the president “wasted time and refused to negotiate for months” when, in fact, it was the Republicans who could not agree on what to bring to the table until April 26. But this may well not be enough; already Kyle Griffin of MSNBC reports that two Republican sources have said that the far right is already balking at the deal and is “plotting ways to gum up passage of the bill or add amendments to make it more appealing to hardliners.”
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Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the day Americans have honored since 1868, when we mourn those military personnel who have died in the service of the country—that is, for the rest of us.
For me, one of those people is Beau Bryant.
When we were growing up, we hung out at one particular house where a friend’s mom provided unlimited peanut butter and fluff sandwiches, Uno games, iced tea and lemonade, sympathetic ears, and stories. She talked about Beau, her older brother, in the same way we talked about all our people, and her stories made him part of our world even though he had been killed in World War II 19 years before we were born.
Beau’s real name was Floyston, and he had always stepped in as a father to his three younger sisters when their own father fell short.
When World War II came, Beau was working as a plumber and was helping his mother make ends meet, but in September 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He became a staff sergeant in the 322nd Bomber Squadron, 91st Bomb Group, nicknamed "Wray's Ragged Irregulars" after their commander Col. Stanley T. Wray. By the time Beau joined, the squadron was training with new B-17s at Dow Army Airfield near Bangor, Maine, and before deploying to England he hitchhiked three hours home so he could see his family once more.
It would be the last time. The 91st Bomb Group was a pioneer bomb group, figuring out tactics for air cover. By May 1943 it was experienced enough to lead the Eighth Air Force as it sought to establish air superiority over Europe. But the 91st did not have adequate fighter support until 1944. It had the greatest casualty rate of any of the heavy bomb squadrons.
Beau was one of the casualties. On August 12, 1943, just a week before his sister turned 18, while he was on a mission, enemy flak cut his oxygen line and he died before the plane could make it back to base. He was buried in Cambridge, England, at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, the military cemetery for Americans killed in action during WWII. He was twenty years old.
I grew up with Beau’s nephews and nieces, and we made decades of havoc and memories. But Beau's children weren't there, and neither he nor they are part of the memories.
Thinking about our untimely dead is hard enough, but I am haunted by the holes those deaths rip forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born.
I know of this man only what his sister told me: that he was a decent fellow who did what he could to support his mother and his sisters. Before he entered the service, he once spent a week’s paycheck on a dress for my friend’s mother so she could go to a dance.
And he gave up not only his life but also his future to protect American democracy against the spread of fascism.
I first wrote about Beau when his sister passed, for it felt to me like another kind of death that, with his sisters now all gone, along with almost all of their friends, soon there would be no one left who even remembered his name.
But something amazing happened after I wrote about him. People started visiting Beau’s grave in England, leaving flowers, and sending me pictures of the cross that bears his name.
So he, and perhaps all he stood for, will not be forgotten after all.
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Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed "to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers."
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.” And if “we want to make certain that fascism does not come to America, we must make certain that it does not thrive anywhere in the world.”
Seventy-eight years after the publication of “FASCISM!” with its program for recognizing that political system and stopping it from taking over the United States, President Joe Biden today at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, honored those who gave their lives fighting to preserve democracy. “On this day, we come together again to reflect, to remember, but above all, to recommit to the future our fallen heroes fought for, …a future grounded in freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, opportunity, and…justice.”
“[T]he truest memorial to their lives,” the president said, is to act “every day to ensure that our democracy endures, our Constitution endures, and the soul of our nation and our decency endures.”
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“[O]ne of the things that I hear some of you guys saying is, ‘Why doesn’t Biden say what a good deal it is?’” President Joe Biden said to reporters yesterday afternoon before leaving the White House on the Marine One helicopter. “Why would Biden say what a good deal it is before the vote? You think that’s going to help me get it passed? No. That’s why you guys don’t bargain very well.”
Biden’s unusually revealing comment about the budget negotiations was actually a statement about his presidency. Unlike his Republican opponents, he has refused to try to win points by playing the media and instead has worked behind the scenes to govern, sometimes staying out of negotiations, sometimes being central to them.
The result has been, as Daily Beast columnist David Rothkopf summarized today, historic. Biden has worked to replace 40 years of supply-side economics with policies to rebuild the nation’s economy and infrastructure by supporting ordinary Americans. The American Rescue Plan gave the United States a faster economic recovery from the COVID pandemic than any other major economy. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has already funded more than 32,000 projects in more than 4,500 communities in all 50 states, Washington D.C., and U.S. territories.
The Inflation Reduction Act made the biggest investment in addressing climate change in our history, and according to University of Washington transportation analyst Jack Conness, it and the CHIPS and Science Act have already attracted over $220 billion in private investment, much of it going to Republican-dominated states: Tennessee, Nevada, North Carolina, and Oklahoma have each attracted more than $4 billion; Ohio, more than $6 billion; Arizona, more than $7 billion; South Carolina, more than $9 billion; and Georgia, more than $13 billion.
Victoria Guida in Politico yesterday reported that the reordering of the economy under Biden and the Democrats has reversed the widening income gap between wage workers and upper-income professionals that has been growing for the past 40 years. The pay of those making an average of $12.50 an hour grew by almost 6% from 2020 to 2022, even after inflation.
Those gains are now at risk as pandemic measures end and the Fed raises interest rates to bring down inflation, although the wage increases are only a piece of the inflation puzzle: Talmon Joseph Smith and Joe Rennison of the New York Times today reported that companies raising their prices to “protect…profits” are “adding to inflation.” In other words, companies pushed prices beyond normal profit margins during the pandemic and the economic recovery, then maintained those higher profit margins with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and continue to maintain them now.
The fight over the debt ceiling is both an example of the different approaches to negotiation on the part of Biden and Republicans like House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and part of the larger question about the direction of the country.
On January 13, 2023, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned McCarthy that the Treasury was about to hit the borrowing limit established by Congress and that she would have to resort to extraordinary measures in order to meet obligations until Congress raised the debt ceiling.
On March 9, as part of the usual budget process, Biden produced a detailed budget, which was a wish list of programs that would continue to build the country from the bottom up. He told McCarthy he would meet with the speaker as soon as he produced his own budget, which McCarthy could not do because the far-right House Freedom Caucus (these days being abbreviated as HFC) wanted extreme cuts to which other Republicans would never agree.
On April 26 the House Republicans passed a bill that would require $4.8 trillion in cuts but was quite vague about how it would do so apart from getting rid of much of the legislation the Democrats had just passed. HFC members said they would not raise the debt ceiling until the Senate passed their bill. That is, they would drive the United States into default, crashing the U.S. and the global economy, until the president and the Democrats agreed to their policies. Even then, they would raise it only until next spring, with the expectation that it would then become a key factor in the 2024 election.
Biden insisted all along that he would not negotiate over the debt ceiling, which pays for money already appropriated under the normal process of Congress and which Congress raised three times under former president Trump even as he added $7.8 trillion to the national debt. Biden said he would happily negotiate over the budget. McCarthy, meanwhile, was out in front of the cameras and on social media insulting Biden and insisting that it was Biden’s fault that talks took so long to get started.
Late Saturday, the two sides announced an agreement “in principle” to raise the debt ceiling for two years—clearing the presidential election. As the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell noted, it protects current spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; keeps tax rates as they are; increases spending on defense and veterans’ programs; leaves most other domestic spending the same; cuts a little from the expanded funding of the Internal Revenue Service; and tweaks both the permitting process for energy projects and the existing work requirements in the food assistance program.
As Rampell points out, “this much-ballyhooed ‘deal’ doesn’t seem terribly different from whatever budget agreement would have materialized anyway later this year, during the usual annual appropriations process, under divided government. To President Biden’s credit, the most objectionable ransoms that Republicans had been demanding are all gone.”
Now the measure has to get through both parties, with congressmembers back in Washington today after the holiday weekend. Freedom Caucus members are howling at the deal. Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) is threatening to bottle the measure up in the House Rules Committee, which decides what bills make it to the floor. The Freedom Caucus forced McCarthy to stack that committee with far-right extremists as part of his deal for the speakership (it has nine Republicans but only four Democrats on it). But Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggests that McCarthy’s alliance with Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) might pay off here, since the two have thrown their weight behind the measure.
Even if the measure does pass before the June 5 deadline when the Treasury runs out of money, it has had an important effect. As Rampell noted, it has weakened the United States. It has enabled both China and Russia to portray the U.S. as unstable and an unreliable partner. As if to prove that criticism, Biden had to cancel a trip to Australia and Papua New Guinea, where he was strengthening the Indo-Pacific alliances designed to weaken Chinese dominance of the region. (And Russia continues to involve itself in U.S. politics: today Tara Reade, the woman who in 2020 accused Biden of sexually assaulting her, appeared on Russian television next to alleged spy Maria Butina to say she has fled to Russia out of fear for her life in the U.S.)
Writing in Foreign Policy, Howard W. French sees a more sweeping problem with the debt ceiling fight: it “highlights America’s warped priorities.” “[W]hen a rich and powerful country finds it easier to cut back on the way that it invests in its people, in education, in science, and in making sure that the weakest among them are not completely left behind than to curtail useless and profligate weapons spending,” he said, “there are reasons to worry about the foundations of its power.”
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Tonight the House passed a bill to suspend the debt ceiling for two years, enabling the Treasury to borrow money to prevent a default. More Democrats than Republicans rallied to the measure, with 165 Democrats and 149 Republicans voting in favor, for a final vote of 314 to 117. Seventy-one Republicans and 46 Democrats opposed the bill.
The votes revealed a bitter divide in the Republican Party, as the far-right House Freedom Caucus fervently opposed the measure; Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) for example, called it a “turd sandwich.” Florida governor Ron DeSantis also came out against it, saying it leaves the country “careening toward bankruptcy.”
The far right insists the measure does not provide the cuts they demand. Last night’s nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office scoring of the bill offered them ammunition when it said that the additional work requirement imposed on able-bodied people aged 18–54 without dependents to receive food benefits is outweighed by the expansion of those benefits to veterans, unhoused people, and children aging out of foster care. The CBO estimates that the measure will add 78,000 people a month to food assistance programs, adding $2.1 billion in spending over the next ten years.
Despite their fury, though, the far right in the House appears to be backing down from challenging Representative Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) speakership. Their angry news conferences seem mostly to be performances for their base, and to answer them, McCarthy today said on the Fox News Channel that he was creating a “commission” to “look at” cutting the budget that the president “walled off” from cuts, including the mandatory spending on Medicare and Social Security.
But, as Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo today, the Republican base no longer seems to care much about fiscal issues. Instead, they are pushing the cultural issues at the heart of illiberal democracy: anti-LGBTQ laws, antiabortion laws, anti-immigration laws.
Former president Trump is making those themes central to his reelection campaign. Yesterday he released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. Our current policy that anyone born in the United States is a citizen, he claims, is “based on a historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.” He promises to make “clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic US citizenship.”
Trump is picking up an idea from his presidential term that immigrants are flocking to the U.S. as “birth tourists” so their children will have dual citizenship, but the estimate from the immigration-restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies that birth tourism accounts for 26,000 of the approximately 3.7 million births in the U.S. each year has been shown to be wildly high. Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is an attack on immigration itself, echoing people like Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who insists that immigration weakens a nation by diluting its native-born people with outsiders.
Trump’s attack on the idea of birthright citizenship as a “historical myth” is a perversion of our history. It matters. In the nineteenth century, the United States enshrined in its fundamental law the idea that there would not be different levels of citizenship in this country. Although not honored in practice, that idea, and its place in the law, gave those excluded from it the language and the tools to fight for equality. Over time, they have increasingly expanded those included in it.
The Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race—not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans faced discriminatory state laws. Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
In 1868, after the Civil War had ended the legal system of human enslavement, the American people added to the Constitution the Fourteenth Amendment, whose very first sentence reads: “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.” Congress wrote that sentence to overturn the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”
The Fourteenth Amendment legally made Black men citizens equal to white men.
But did it include the children of immigrants? In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, the Chinese Exclusion Act declared that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens. But what about their children who were born in the United States?
Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.
Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.
That decision has stood ever since, as a majority of Americans have recognized the principle behind the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as the one central to the United States: “that all men are created equal” and that a nation based on that idea draws strength from all of its people. Over time, we have expanded our definition of who is included in that equality.
Now the right wing is trying to contract equality again, excluding many of us from its rights and duties. The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision makes women a separate and lesser class of citizen; anti-LGBTQ legislation denigrates sexual minorities. Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship makes that attack on equality explicit, calling equality a “myth” and attempting to enshrine inequality as the only real theme of our history.
The concept of equality means we all have equal rights. It also means we all owe an equal allegiance to the country and that we all should be equal before the law, a principle the former president has reason to dislike.
Today, Katelyn Polantz, Paula Reid, and Kaitlan Collins of CNN today broke the story that federal prosecutors have an audio recording of the former president admitting he kept a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran. The material on the tape, which was recorded at his Bedminster, New Jersey, property and appears to indicate that the document was in his hands, shows that Trump understood he had taken a classified document and that he understood that there were limits to his ability to declassify records.
The recording also appears to suggest that at least one of the documents Trump took when he left office had enormous monetary value. As former Senior Foreign Service member Luis Moreno tweeted: “You can bet that if the TS/SCI dox involved military action against Iran, there would be a couple of countries willing to pay a king’s ransom for it.”
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Late tonight the Senate passed H.R. 3746, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, suspending the debt ceiling and cutting certain federal spending. President Joe Biden has promised to sign it tomorrow, preventing a government default. Forty-four Democrats and two Independents—Angus King (I-ME) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ)—voted yes, along with 17 Republicans. Four Democrats and Independent Bernie Sanders (I-VT) voted no, along with 31 Republicans. The final tally to pass the measure was 63 to 36.
“Democrats are feeling very good tonight,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “We’ve saved the country from the scourge of default.”
Republicans brought the nation to the brink of default with their insistence that they opposed runaway government spending, but their demands did not square with that argument. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said that the $21 billion cut in funding to the Internal Revenue Service, for example, will result in $40 billion in lost revenue, increasing the deficit by $19 billion.
In other economic news, the Biden administration today announced actions designed to address racial bias in the valuation of homes.
This sounds sort of in the weeds for administration action, I know, but it is actually an important move for addressing the nation’s wealth inequality. In 2019 a study from the Federal Reserve showed that white American families had a median net worth of $188,100, Hispanic or Latino families had a net worth of $36,200, and Black American families had a median net worth of $24,100.
Homeownership is the most important factor in creating generational wealth—that is, wealth that passes from one generation to the next—both because homeownership essentially forces savings as people pay mortgages, and because homes tend to appreciate in value.
But a 2021 study by the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, more popularly known as Freddie Mac, showed that real estate appraisers are twice as likely to undervalue minority-owned property relative to contract price for which the home sells, than they are to undervalue homes owned by white Americans.
The story of lower valuation came to popular attention after a Black couple living near San Francisco applied for a loan and received an initial valuation far too low for them to qualify for that loan. Shocked, since the same house had been appraised at almost a half a million dollars higher the year before, the couple removed all traces of their ownership of the house and asked a white friend to stand in as the owner before a new appraiser evaluated the worth of the property. That new appraisal came back a half a million dollars higher than the lowball one.
(The couple sued, and the case was settled in February 2022).
Two years ago, the Biden administration announced a sweeping effort to “root out racial and ethnic bias in home evaluations.” Today it bolstered those efforts to “ensure that every American who buys a home has the same opportunities to build generational wealth through homeownership.” They call for fixing algorithms to ensure that home values are accurately assessed, creating pathways for consumers to challenge low assessments, and increasing the numbers of trained appraisers.
There is a reason that the administration has centered its housing policies on June 1. This is the anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, when in 1921 white gangs destroyed the prosperous Greenwood district of that city, which was home to more than 10,000 Black Americans. It wiped out 35 blocks with more than 1,200 homes and businesses and took hundreds of Black lives, robbing Black families of generational wealth and the opportunities that come with it.
In 1921, Greenwood, known as “Black Wall Street,” was estimated to be the richest Black community in the United States. The destruction of May 31 to June 1, 1921, changed all that. Residents of Greenwood filed $1.8 million in damage claims—more than $27 million in today’s dollars—against the city, but all but one of the claims were denied when the city was found not liable for damages caused by mobs. (A white pawnshop owner was compensated for the guns stolen from his store.) Insurance didn’t help, either: insurance companies claimed that damage caused by “riots” was not covered by their policies.
In a 2018 article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Chris M. Messer, Thomas E. Shriver, and Alison E. Adams estimated that the destruction in Tulsa might well have amounted to more than $200 million in today’s dollars.
Greenwood’s Black residents nonetheless pooled their resources and rebuilt the district, despite the system of “redlining” by mortgage companies that deemed parts of Greenwood to be credit risks and made it impossible for residents to get mortgages. “Urban renewal” then destroyed the area again in the 1960s through the 1980s as white city planners rezoned the district, built highways through it, and took property through eminent domain.
Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged the destruction of Greenwood today in a call with reporters. Noting that “[h]omeownership is one of the single most powerful engines of wealth-building available to American families,” she explained that ‘[m]illions rely on the equity in their homes to put their children through college, to fund a startup, to retire with dignity, to create intergenerational prosperity and wealth.” But “for generations, many people of color have been prevented from taking full advantage of the benefits of homeownership.”
The inequalities of the past have persisted in the home appraisal system, Harris said. “[B]ecause their homes are undervalued, Black and Latino people often pay more for their mortgage, receive less when they sell, and are less able to get access to home equity lines of credit—all of which widens the racial wealth gap and deepens longstanding financial inequities.”
“Today,” her Twitter account said, “our Administration is announcing new actions to root out racial bias in home valuations to ensure that all hardworking families can realize the true value of their investment and have a fair shot at the American dream.”
Jonathan Lemire, Adam Cancryn, and Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico reported today that White House officials urged allies to downplay their substantial victory on the debt ceiling crisis and the related budget negotiations, afraid of sparking Republican opposition and eager to be seen as the adults in the room.
But they needn’t have worried. Today, President Biden tripped over a sandbag left in his path as he was jogging away from the center stage of the U.S. Air Force Academy graduation in Colorado after giving the commencement address. He appeared fine after the fall, but it is dominating right-wing social media, the debt ceiling crisis already forgotten.
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We need a special counsel appointed to investigate who left the sand bag there and why. Clearly it was an assassination attempt. Falls can be fatal, you know.
Three years ago today, on June 2, 2020, days after then–Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, Martha Raddatz of ABC snapped the famous and chilling photograph of law enforcement officers in camouflage, their names and units hidden, standing in rows on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Mr. Floyd’s murder sparked protests across the country, and Trump used those protests as a pretext to crack down on his opponents. Just the day before, after a call with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump told state governors on a phone call: “You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time.... You’ve got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again.” Then he used a massive police presence wielding tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang explosives to clear peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters from Lafayette Square across from the White House.
Tonight, President Joe Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office to emphasize that democracy depends on bipartisanship.” [W]hen I ran for President,” he began, “I was told the days of bipartisanship were over and that Democrats and Republicans could no longer work together. But I refused to believe that, because America can never give in to that way of thinking…. [T]he only way American democracy can function is through compromise and consensus, and that’s what I worked to do as your President…to forge a bipartisan agreement where it’s possible and where it’s needed.”
While he noted that he has signed more than 350 bipartisan laws in his time in office, his major focus today was on the bipartisan budget agreement passed by the House and Senate after months of wrangling to get House Republicans to agree to lift the debt ceiling. Biden will sign it tomorrow, averting the nation’s first-ever default.
Biden characterized those threatening to force the U.S. into default as “extreme voices,” who were willing to cause a catastrophe. The economy, which continues to add jobs at a cracking pace—another 339,000 in May, according to the numbers released today by the U.S. Bureau of Labor—would have been thrown into recession. As many as 8 million Americans would have lost their jobs, retirement savings would have been decimated, borrowing for everything from mortgages to government funding would have become much more expensive, and “America’s standing as the most trusted, reliable financial partner in the world would have been shattered.”
“It would have taken years to climb out of that hole,” he said.
But the extremists were sidelined, and the House Republicans and the White House reached an agreement. Biden went out of his way to praise House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and his team, saying that the two negotiating teams “were able to get along and get things done. We were straightforward with one another, completely honest with one another, and respectful with one another. Both sides operated in good faith. Both sides kept their word.”
This was not entirely true—McCarthy constantly attacked Biden in the media—but Biden was hammering on the image of bipartisanship. Yesterday, Jonathan Lemire, Adam Cancryn, and Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico reported that Biden and his team plan to make the case for reelection on their ability to negotiate deals that get things done for the American people, acting as the “adults in the room” in contrast to Republican extremists. The budget deal that led to the suspension of the debt ceiling is a major illustration of that position.
Biden also praised House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), claiming that “[t]hey acted responsibly and put the good of the country ahead of politics.”
The solution to the debt ceiling crisis is a major victory for Biden’s team not only because it happened, but also because it leaves Biden’s key priorities intact, not least because they are popular and Republicans did not want to go into 2024 having demanded unpopular cuts.
Biden noted that the measure will cut spending as Republicans wanted (although not necessarily through the measures they insisted on adding), but reiterated that it is the Republican Party that has been on a spending spree. “We’re all on a much more fiscally responsible course than the one I inherited when I took office,” Biden said. “When I came to office, the deficit had increased every year the previous four years. And nearly $8 trillion was added to the national debt in the last administration,” while the deficit fell by $1.7 trillion in his first two years in office.
Biden laid out that the deal protects his reworking of the U.S. economy to support ordinary Americans. It protects Social Security and Medicare, as well as healthcare and veterans’ services. It protects the investments in the economy that have enabled the country to add more than 13 million new jobs, including 800,000 jobs in manufacturing. It protects investments in addressing climate change.
Finally, Biden vowed to make the wealthy—those who earn more than $400,000 a year—pay their fair share in taxes.
“I know bipartisanship is hard and unity is hard,” he concluded, “but we can never stop trying, because in moments like this one—the ones we just faced, where the American economy and the world economy is at risk of collapsing—there is no other way.
“No matter how tough our politics gets, we need to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans. Treat each other with dignity and respect. To join forces as Americans to stop shouting, lower the temperature, and work together to pursue progress, secure prosperity, and keep the promise of America for everybody.”
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Spring has sprung here, and everything is a bright young green.
Going to leave you with a photo from this year's first trip out on the water, late one afternoon this week, while I see about catching up on some sleep.
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Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, a staunch supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, last week awarded the First Degree of the Order of Glory and Honor from the Russian Orthodox Church to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.
Orbán has dismantled Hungary’s liberal democratic government in favor of what he calls “illiberal” or “Christian” democracy that rejects LGBTQ and women’s rights, claiming that the equality valued by liberal democracies undermines traditional virtue. Kirill called out for praise Orbán’s “great attention to the preservation of Christian values in society and the strengthening of the institution of family and marriage.”
This award makes explicit the link between the Putin regime, which has been committing war crimes against Ukraine’s people, and Orbán, who is such a hero to America’s right wing that the Conservative Political Action Conference has twice gathered in Hungary, most recently just last month. Orbán has called for Trump’s reelection.
The common thread among these groups is a rejection of democracy, with its emphasis on equality before the law, and the embrace of a hierarchical world in which some people are better than others and have the right to rule.
In Poland today, an estimated half a million people marched in the streets to protest the loss of rights for women and LGBTQ people amid an attack on democracy by the nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS), which condemned the protest as a “march of hate.” Leaders for PiS claim they are only trying to protect traditional Christian values from Western ideas.
Today is the 34th anniversary of the first democratic elections in Poland in 1989 as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. Former Polish prime minister and president of the European Council Donald Tusk, who called for the march, told the crowd: "Democracy dies in silence but you've raised your voice for democracy today, silence is over, we will shout.”
Today is also the 34th anniversary of the Chinese government’s crackdown on demonstrations for democracy in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, with troops firing on their own citizens.
For 22 weeks now, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been protesting in the streets against the plans of right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to overhaul the judiciary, weakening the country’s system of checks and balances by shifting power to Netanyahu, and threatening the rights of minorities and marginalized groups.
In Sudan today, the war between two military generals who seized power from a democratic government continues. Tens of thousands of Sudan’s people have fled the country since the fighting broke out in April.
The political career of Florida governor Ron DeSantis is the epitome of Orbán’s “Christian democracy” come to the United States. DeSantis has imitated Orbán’s politics, striking at the principles of liberal democracy with attacks on LGBTQ Americans, abortion rights, academic freedom, and the ability of businesses to react to market forces rather than religious imperatives. Last week he told an audience that “the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth so we will wage a war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of congress. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. We will make woke ideology leave it to the dustbin of history; it’s gone.”
But DeSantis’s speech was a perversion of the real speech on which he based it.
On June 4, 1940, nine months into the Second World War, British prime minister Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons. British, Canadian, and French destroyers along with dozens of merchant ships and a flotilla of small boats had just managed to evacuate more than 338,000 Allied soldiers from Dunkirk, in northern France, as German troops advanced.
Britain was fighting fascism, and Churchill warned his people that the war would be neither easy nor quick. But, he promised, “we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender....”
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This morning, CBS News cameras captured on video the sight of former president Trump’s lawyers entering the Department of Justice.
Shortly after their two-hour meeting ended, a message appeared on the Trump-affiliated social media site Truth Social, in all caps: “HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENT’S [sic] WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WON’T BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACT THAT HE HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED, AND SOME DATING BACK TO HIS SENATE DAY WHEN EVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS ARE SHOCKED. ALSO, PRESIDENT CLINTON HAD DOCUMENTS, AND WON IN COURT. CROOKED HILLARY DELETED 33,000 EMAILS, MANY CLASSIFIED, AND WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING CHARGED! ONLY TRUMP - THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
It appears there is reason to suspect Trump’s lawyers delivered to the former president bad news about Trump’s refusal to return to the government—that is, to the American people—the classified documents he stole when he left the White House.
The Twitter account of the Republican National Committee promptly tweeted footage of House Oversight Committee chair Representative James Comer (R-KY) suggesting that the “Biden family” has engaged in “a pattern of bribery, where payments would be made through shell accounts and multiple banks,” in a system of “money laundering.” There is no evidence of these accusations, and their framing of Biden as part of a “family corruption scandal” is pretty transparently designed to make the Bidens look like the Trumps, although there is no Biden family business as there is a Trump Organization.
Republican leaders have tiptoed around former president Trump even if they were hoping to move him offstage, but that caution broke today when the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, who in February said he would vote for Trump if he is the 2024 nominee, warned in a Washington Post op-ed that the Republican Party must break free of Trump and the culture wars or face “electoral irrelevance.”
Sununu announced that he would not seek the party’s presidential nomination himself, keeping his powder dry to try to correct the Republican Party’s course. In a clear shot at the many Republicans jumping into the race, he warned that “candidates should not get into this race to further a vanity campaign, to sell books or to audition to serve as Donald Trump’s vice president.” He promised to work for whichever candidate he thought best positioned to win in 2024.
Sununu called for returning the party to “classic conservative principles of individual liberty, low taxes and local control,” saying that Republicans need to “expand beyond the culture wars that alienate independents, young voters and suburban moms” and appeal to new voters on substantive issues. He also took on the issue of abortion, which has created a groundswell of opposition to Republicans, saying that “Republicans should recognize that every time they open their mouths to talk about banning abortion, an independent voter joins the Democrats.”
Indeed, as Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo wrote today, the abortion issue is suddenly toxic for Republicans. After years of calling for the end of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, Republicans got their wish almost a year ago with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. Republican-dominated states promptly began to pass antiabortion laws at the state level. But a majority of voters actually support abortion access, even in Republican-dominated states. They are eager to restore abortion rights, while the evangelical base of the Republican Party wants a federal abortion ban.
Republicans running for president are now trying to avoid the issue, since they need to support a federal ban on abortion to win base voters but will repel a majority of general voters if they do. Putting Republicans into power will likely mean a federal ban that will run badly against the popular will. It is not clear how Republican candidates will square this circle, but it is unlikely to go away simply because Republicans try not to talk about it.
While many eyes in the United States are focused on domestic political events, today’s news also included reports that the Ukrainian military may have begun its counteroffensive to push Russian invaders out of Ukraine (although Ukrainian officials denied it, saying that no single action would indicate that a counteroffensive had begun).
The U.K. Ministry of Defence reported that there has been a “substantial increase in fighting along numerous sectors of the front, including those which have been relatively quiet for several months.” It also said that the feud between the mercenary Wagner Group and the Russian Ministry of Defence has “reached an unprecedented level.” It is not clear they will continue to cooperate.
Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, and Kylie Atwood of CNN reported today that Ukraine has encouraged sympathizers and agents in Russia to sabotage targets there, diverting Russian attention from Ukraine and bringing the threat of war home to Russians.
Tonight, part of the Nova Kakhovka Dam was breached, sending a flood down the Dnipro River. The breach will create flooding downstream. It will also affect drinking water, and the electricity for more than 3 million people. It threatens the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, whose reactors are cooled with water from the reservoir above the dam, but tonight the Ukrainian state nuclear energy company Energoatom said the situation is under control.
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Far-right Republican representatives from the House Freedom Caucus today launched a battle against House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), accusing him of violating the agreement he made with them in order to get their backing for the speakership. Angry at the passage of the deal to suspend the debt ceiling and keep the United States from defaulting, they blocked two bills today and apparently have decided to oppose all legislation that comes before the House unless McCarthy puts in writing what they understand to be the deal they made.
Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) said: “The end game is freedom, less government, less spending.”
If the far right is trying to dismantle the federal government, the White House is working to advertise the effects of its use of the federal government for the American people.
Today the administration unveiled a new website called “Investing in America.” The site tracks both the public infrastructure and the private investments sparked by the laws like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, breaking those investments down by category.
While the Republicans since 1980 have claimed that tax cuts and deregulation would spur private investment in the economy, it appears that Biden’s policy of public investment to encourage private investment has, in fact, worked. So far, during his term, private companies have announced $479 billion in investments under the new system, while the government has directed more than $220 billion towards roads, bridges, airports, public transportation, addressing climate change, and providing clean water. The website locates and identifies the more than 32,000 new projects underway.
The site also highlights the high rates of employment in the U.S. and the addition of new manufacturing jobs, as well as lower costs for prescription drugs and health insurance.
Separately, the administration noted that its plan for migration across the border is “working as intended.” The pandemic-era Title 42, put in place by Trump in early 2020 to stop the spread of COVID, went out of operation at midnight on May 12, and while Republicans insisted the reversion to the normal laws governing immigration would create a crisis, in fact unlawful crossings have dropped more than 70%. Still, the administration emphasized yet again today that Congress must address “our broken immigration and asylum system.”
While President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are returning to the traditional idea—embraced by members of both parties before 1980—that investing in the country benefits everyone, much of the Freedom Caucus has thrown in its lot with former president Donald Trump, who calls the Democrats’ ideology “communism.” So convinced were Trump’s supporters that Democrats should not be allowed to govern that they tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
One of the key figures in that attempt was Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, who as a representative from North Carolina was a founder of the House Freedom Caucus (along with Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Ron DeSantis of Florida, among others). As Trump’s chief of staff, Meadows was close to the center of the attempt to keep former president Trump in the White House. His aide Cassidy Hutchinson provided some of the most compelling—and damning—testimony before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Meadows refused to cooperate with that committee and was found in contempt of Congress, but the Department of Justice declined to prosecute. When he seemed largely to drop out of public view, there was speculation about his role in the investigations into Trump’s role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
This afternoon, Jonathan Swan, Michael S. Schmidt, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Meadows has testified before a federal grand jury in the investigations led by Special Counsel Jack Smith. It is not clear if Meadows testified in the matter of the election sabotage or in the matter of documents taken from the White House when Trump left office, or both. One of his lawyers refused to comment but told the New York Times reporters that “Mr. Meadows has maintained a commitment to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so.”
I cannot help but contrast that statement with one from another American leader seventy-nine years ago.
On June 5, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was preparing to send Allied troops across the English Channel to France, where he hoped they would push the German troops back across Europe. More than 5,000 ships waited to transport more than 150,000 soldiers to France before daybreak the following morning. The fighting to take Normandy would not be easy. The beaches the men would assault were tangled in barbed wire, booby trapped, and defended by German soldiers in concrete bunkers.
On the afternoon of June 5, as the Allied soldiers, their faces darkened with soot and cocoa, milled around waiting to board the ships, Eisenhower went to see the men he was almost certainly sending to their deaths. He joked with the troops, as apparently upbeat as his orders to them had been when he told them Operation Overlord had launched. “The tide has turned!” his letter had read. “The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!”
But after cheering his men on, he went back to his headquarters and wrote another letter. Designed to blame himself alone if Operation Overlord failed, it read:
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
The letter was never delivered. Operation Overlord was a success, launching the final assault in which western democracy, defended by ordinary men and women, would destroy European fascism.
A year later, General Eisenhower was welcomed home as the hero who had won World War Two. But for all those noisy accolades, it was the letter of June 5, that he wrote in secret, alone and unsure whether the future would find him right or wrong but willing to take both the risk and the blame if he failed, that proved his heroism.
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Three more candidates have entered the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination this week. Former vice president Mike Pence, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and current North Dakota governor Doug Burgum join former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, as well as a few others and former president Donald Trump in their hope of winning the nomination.
Taken together, the different candidates offer a window into the current Republican Party. Haley and DeSantis are embracing the cultural issues to which the Trump base is wedded. At a CNN town hall on Sunday, Haley singled out transgender girls as one of her key issues, linking (without any evidence) their presence on girls’ sports teams to an April study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed a rise in the number of teenaged girls contemplating self-harm between 2019 and 2021, years that covered the height of the pandemic. (In fact, LGBTQ teenagers have a higher rate of thoughts of self-harm than their straight, gender-conforming peers.)
DeSantis has reached for the Trump base by focusing on immigration. That focus has backfired as unlawful border crossings have dropped more than 70% since President Biden’s ending of the pandemic-related Title 42, and as a new Florida law designed to “scare people from coming to Florida” has resulted in immigrants, whose labor is vital to the state, leaving it.
Apparently trying to reclaim the narrative, in the last week, DeSantis has sent two charter flights taking migrants who have legally applied for asylum in the U.S. from the Texas border to Sacramento, California. While the DeSantis administration claims the migrants went “voluntarily,” they say they were tricked into thinking they would get work in California. One set of the migrants were dropped off outside the Catholic Archdiocese of Sacramento, which had not been alerted they were coming and was closed.
Pence, Hutchinson, and Christie are directly attacking Trump, Pence by saying the events of January 6, 2021, make Trump unfit to be president, Hutchinson by saying Trump should withdraw because of the criminal charges he’s facing, and Christie by attacking Trump and his family as grifters. At Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire yesterday, Christie reminded the audience: “Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis…. You think it’s because he’s some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it’s because he was sitting next to the President of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis?... That’s your money he stole and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic.”
Scott and Burgum seem to be trying to offer exhausted Republican voters a rest. Scott is trying to offer an optimistic vision of the United States amidst the apocalyptic narratives of his rivals, denying that systematic racism is a societal problem, for example, while Burgum’s chief attribute seems to be an embrace of pre-2016 Republicanism and a low-key presentation.
That scrum of Republican hopefuls—none of whom is polling well—is the backdrop to this evening’s story from Andrew Feinberg of the Independent that prosecutors from the Department of Justice are ready to ask a grand jury in Washington, D.C., to indict former president Trump on charges that he has violated the Espionage Act and obstructed justice.
Aside from anything else, the Espionage Act includes language that anyone who “willfully retains…any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation… and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it” can be punished by as many as ten years in prison.
The story says the jury could vote as early as tomorrow, but it could also be delayed until next week, or beyond. It is worth remembering that this Department of Justice has not been known to leak, and that the sooner Trump is indicted—which certainly looks likely, at least in the case of the missing documents—the sooner his supporters can jump to another candidate, which might suggest a rival camp pushing the story that an indictment will come soon. That same calculation might have been part of what was behind Trump’s insistence to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that he has “NOT been told he’s getting indicted.” And, he added on Truth Social, “I shouldn't be because I’ve done NOTHING wrong.”
Troubles in the Republican Party are not limited to the 2024 hopefuls. House Republicans continue to fight against House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), angry over the budget deal under which he pushed through a measure to suspend the debt ceiling. McCarthy tried to head off their protests with a promise to establish a commission to cut Social Security and Medicare, but it was not enough. Yesterday, members of the House Freedom Caucus said they would not permit votes on anything until he put in writing what they believed was the deal he made to get their votes for the speakership; that revolt continued today.
Tonight, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported that McCarthy appears to have agreed to let appropriators write bills that come in below the agreed-upon spending levels. Sherman’s colleague John Bresnahan noted: “The Fiscal Responsibility Act isn’t even a week old & Republicans in the House and Senate are already trying to redo it.”
In other news, CNN has parted ways with Chris Licht, its chief executive officer and chair, who had sought to move the network to what he considered the center of American politics. He had done so by highlighting “both sides” of today’s political arguments, firing leading journalists he thought too far on the left and centering Trump in a town hall that became the former president’s triumphant reentry to the political stage as he lied and bullied the interviewer. Some pundits have taken Licht’s fall as a sign that there is no longer a powerful center in American politics, but my own guess is the opposite: that most of us want news based in reality rather than media giving platforms to people who are openly lying.
Yale scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder today applied this idea to coverage of the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine, which has rained down humanitarian, ecological, and economic disaster on Ukrainians as they appear to be launching a counteroffensive to the Russian invasion of their country.
Snyder warned journalists not to “bothsides” the story by offering equal time to both sides. “What Russian spokespersons have said has almost always been untrue, whereas what Ukrainian spokespersons have said has largely been reliable. The juxtaposition suggests a false equality,” he wrote. “The story doesn't start at the moment the dam explodes. For the last fifteen months Russia has been killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, whereas Ukraine has been trying to protect its people and the structures that keep them alive.” “Objectivity does not mean treating an event as a coin flip between two public statements,” he said. “It demands thinking about the objects and the settings that readers require for understanding amidst uncertainty.”
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This morning the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Allen v. Milligan, a case that challenged the Alabama legislature’s redistricting of the state after the 2020 census on the grounds that the new districts had been configured to pack the state’s growing numbers of Black voters into a single district and thus dilute their vote. Such discrimination based on race, plaintiffs charged, violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA).
District courts agreed with the plaintiffs and told the state it couldn’t use the new map, but in February 2022 the Supreme Court issued a stay of the injunction prohibiting that map. The Supreme Court ruling left the Alabama map intact for the 2022 election. Legal scholar Stephen Vladeck noted that the decision was part of the court’s recent use of the “shadow docket,” unsigned, unexplained orders issued without a hearing.
Today’s 5–4 decision upheld the verdicts of the lower courts, agreeing that the new Alabama map was, after all, illegal, because it violates Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits the denial of the right to vote on account of race. This leaves intact the ability of plaintiffs to sue when states appear to discriminate against minority voters. Similar lawsuits are pending in ten different states.
But, as Vladeck notes, the Supreme Court’s February 2022 decision leaving the discriminatory map in Alabama, as well as similar maps in other states, in place for the November election, is likely responsible for the Republicans’ current majority in the House of Representatives. The Cook Political Report, which follows elections, immediately changed their ratings for the leanings of five House districts after news of the Supreme Court decision.
That House majority is currently at an impasse that makes it impossible to conduct business. The extremist House Freedom Caucus (HFC) has revolted against House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) because of the budget deal he cut with President Biden before he would agree to raise the debt ceiling. Members of the HFC are demanding deeper cuts than McCarthy agreed to. The revolt of the far right puts into danger crucial spending bills, raising fears of a government shutdown in the fall.
To placate the extremists, McCarthy has apparently agreed to take up two bills: one to kill a Biden-backed gun regulation and another to push even more strongly against abortion rights. This move, which flies in the face of popular opinion, has angered Republicans in battleground districts, who are revolting against measures that will hurt them at home. It also runs the risk of alienating Democrats McCarthy will need to pass spending measures if the far right refuses to vote for them.
The extremism of today’s Republican Party grew in large part from the work of televangelist Pat Robertson, who died today at age 93. The son of a segregationist southern Democratic senator, Baptist minister Robertson urged evangelical Christians to vote and made them a core constituency of the Republican Party. Paving the way for those today calling for an end to liberal democracy, Robertson blamed LGBTQ Americans and women for secularizing the United States, which he saw as a tragedy and frequently blamed for natural disasters.
That political ideology depended on creating a false picture of what was really going on in the country. The Republican Party has become so wedded to lying about reality that today we saw Florida governor and Republican candidate for president Ron DeSantis circulating fake images of rival candidate Donald Trump embracing right-wing nemesis Dr. Anthony Fauci as a way to discredit Trump.
Trump’s team cried foul at the fake images, but the former president himself relies on manipulating reality to garner political support. CNN national correspondent Kristen Holmes reported today that Trump’s people reached out this week to congressional allies to encourage them to flood the airwaves with a defense of Trump and attacks on special counsel Jack Smith before a possible indictment of the former president.
To that end, Trump’s supporters spent the week trying to gin up outrage over a document they claimed shows that President Biden had taken a bribe as vice president. The document in question appears to be an unverified report that came to the Department of Justice through Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, one that the Trump Department of Justice dropped after it determined that the allegation was not supported by facts. But the practice of influencing politics through sham investigations is one of the Republicans’ key tools, and Trump allies have flooded social media this week insisting that this document is a smoking gun.
They were, of course, trying to set up a defense for the former president’s possible indictment on charges related to his refusal to hand over national security documents he had taken when he left the White House.
This evening, news broke that Trump has, indeed, been indicted by a grand jury in South Florida in connection with the documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago. The indictment is sealed, but there are reports that it includes seven counts of lawbreaking, including at least one related to the Espionage Act. These charges are serious indeed.
Trump is now the first former U.S. president in history to face federal criminal charges (his first indictment, on March 30, was at the state level). As The Guardian’s David Smith puts it, “he really might be going to jail.” Smith—who is a keen observer of American politics—notes that it is hard to figure out what is important and what is not in the general drama around the former president, but this indictment is “genuinely monumental.”
According to Trump’s outraged posts on social media, he has been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami next Tuesday.
Trump’s team asked his allies to jump to his defense, and they did. Trump loyalists implied that the “sham indictment” was destined to distract from the blockbuster story they had invented about Biden. House speaker McCarthy implied that Biden, who has had nothing to do with the Department of Justice investigation, special counsel in charge of the investigation Jack Smith, or the grand jury deliberations, was responsible for launching a political attack on a rival. The third Republican in House leadership, New York representative Elise Stefanik, also defended Trump…in a fundraising email that assured donors their money would go to the “OFFICIAL TRUMP DEFENSE FUND” though, in fact, most of it would be diverted to Stefanik’s operations. Trump, too, lost no time in fundraising off the indictment.
Significantly, though, all Republicans who do not identify with the far right have remained steadfastly silent in the face of the day’s news. The exception has been long-shot presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson, who has called for Trump to end his campaign.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who communicates with the Trump camp, says he holed up tonight not with his legal team but with political advisors. CBS News correspondent Robert Costa reports tonight that the camps of Republican rivals think that this news will actually help Trump in the short term, as his base rallies to him, but that the news of what is at stake in the theft of national security documents might well lose him support over time. If another indictment comes from Georgia concerning his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election there, rival camps say he might “bleed out.”
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At 3:00 today, Washington D.C., time, Special Counsel Jack Smith delivered a statement about the recently unsealed indictment charging former president Donald J. Trump on 37 counts of violating national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Although MAGA Republicans have tried to paint the indictment as a political move by the Biden administration over a piddling error, Smith immediately reminded people that “[t]his indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida, and I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.”
The indictment is, indeed, jaw dropping.
It alleges that during his time in the White House, Trump stored in cardboard boxes “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.” The indictment notes that “[t]he unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”
Nonetheless, when Trump ceased to be president after noon on January 20, 2021, he took those boxes, “many of which contained classified documents,” to Mar-a-Lago, where he was living. He “was not authorized to possess or retain those classified documents.” The indictment makes it clear that this was no oversight: Trump was personally involved in packing the boxes and, later, in going through them and in overseeing how they were handled. The employees who worked for him exchanged text messages referring to his personal instructions about them.
Mar-a-Lago was not an authorized location for such documents, but he stored them there anyway, “including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.” They were stacked in public places, where anyone—including the many foreign nationals who visited Mar-a-Lago—could see them. On December 7, 2021, Trump’s personal aide Waltine Nauta took two pictures of several of the boxes fallen on the floor, with their contents, including a secret document available only to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, spilled onto the floor.
The indictment alleges that Trump showed classified documents to others without security clearances on two occasions, both of which are well documented. One of those occasions was recorded. Trump told the people there that the plan he was showing them was “highly confidential” and “secret.” He added, “See, as president I could have declassified it….Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
This recording undermines his insistence that he believed he could automatically declassify documents; it proves he understood he could not. In addition, the indictment lists Trump’s many statements from 2016 about the importance of protecting classified information, all delivered as attacks on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, whom he accused of mishandling such information. “In my administration,” he said on August 18, 2016, “I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”
The indictment goes on: When the FBI tried to recover the documents, Trump started what Washington Post journalist Jennifer Rubin called a “giant shell game”: he tried to get his lawyer to lie to the FBI and the grand jury, saying Trump did not have more documents; worked with Nauta to move some of the boxes to hide them from Trump’s lawyer, the FBI and the grand jury; tried to get his lawyer to hide or destroy documents; and got another lawyer to certify that all the documents had been produced when he knew they hadn’t.
Nauta lied to the grand jury about his knowledge of what Trump did with the boxes. Both he and Trump have been indicted on multiple counts of obstruction and of engaging in a conspiracy to hide the documents.
Eventually, Trump had many of the boxes moved to his property at Bedminster, New Jersey, where on two occasions he showed documents to people without security clearances. He showed a classified map of a country that is part of an ongoing military operation to a representative of his political action committee.
Trump has been indicted on 31 counts of having “unauthorized possession of, access to, and control over documents relating to the national defense,” for keeping them, and for refusing “to deliver them to the officer and employee of the United States entitled to receive them”: language straight out of the Espionage Act. Twenty-one of the documents were marked top secret, nine were marked secret, and one was unmarked.
These documents are not all those recovered—some likely are too sensitive to risk making public—but they nonetheless hold some of the nation’s deepest secrets: “military capabilities of a foreign country and the United States,” “military activities and planning of foreign countries,” “nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,” “military attacks by a foreign country,” “military contingency planning of the United States,” “military options of a foreign country and potential effects on United States interest,” “foreign country support of terrorist acts against United States interests,” “nuclear weaponry of the United States,” “military activity in a foreign country.”
Smith put it starkly in his statement, “The men and women of the United States intelligence community and our armed forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people. Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”
On Twitter, Bill Kristol said it more clearly: “These were highly classified documents dealing with military intelligence and plans. What did Trump do with them? Who now has copies of them?” Retired FBI assistant director Frank Figliuzzi noted that there is a substantial risk that “foreign intelligence services might have sought or gained access to the documents.”
There is also substantial risk that other countries will be reluctant to share intelligence with the United States in the future. At the very least, it is an unfortunate coincidence that the Central Intelligence Agency in October 2021 reported an unusually high rate of capture or death for foreign informants recruited to spy for the United States.
Since Trump supporters have taken the position that Trump’s indictment over the stolen documents is the attempt of the Biden administration to undermine Trump’s presidential candidacy, it is worth remembering that Trump’s early announcement of his campaign was widely suspected to be an attempt to enable him to avoid legal accountability. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith precisely to put arms length between the administration and the investigations into Trump.
Smith noted today, “Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice. And our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone. Applying those laws. Collecting facts. That’s what determines the outcome of an investigation. Nothing more. Nothing less.
“The prosecutors in my office are among the most talented and experienced in the Department of Justice. They have investigated this case hewing to the highest ethical standards. And they will continue to do so as this case proceeds.”
Smith added: “It’s very important for me to note that the defendants in this case must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. To that end, my office will seek a speedy trial in this matter. Consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused. We very much look forward to presenting our case to a jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida.”
Likely responding to MAGA attacks on the FBI and the rule of law, Smith thanked the “dedicated public servants of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with whom my office is conducting this investigation and who worked tirelessly every day upholding the rule of law in our country,” before closing his brief statement.
The indictment revealed just how much detailed information Smith’s team has uncovered, presenting a shockingly thorough case to prove the allegations. Trump’s lawyers will have their work cut out for them…although the team has shifted since this morning: two of Trump’s lawyers quit today. The thoroughness of the indictment also suggests that Trump and his allies might have reason to be nervous about Smith’s other investigation: the one into the attempt to overturn results of the 2020 election.
Some of Trump’s supporters are calling for violence. After Louisiana representative Clay Higgins appeared to be egging on militias to oppose Trump’s Tuesday arraignment, Democratic senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) issued a joint statement calling for “supporters and critics alike to let the case proceed peacefully in court.” Legal scholar Joyce White Vance noted that it was “extremely sad for our country that this isn’t a bipartisan statement being made by leaders from both parties.”
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Taking the evening off, as I spent the entire day with my family (which was a really nice antidote to the firehose of this week’s events). But there is some personal news to share….
People have noted that I have been posting the letters earlier than usual lately, and have wondered if everything is okay. First of all, thank you for your concern, and second, yes, it is.
When I first started writing these letters in September 2019, they concerned only Trump’s first impeachment. I wrote them after teaching and posted them usually no later than 10:00. I vividly remember the first time I stayed in the office until midnight, thinking that was really too much and it couldn’t happen again.
But then, as the letters began to involve more aspects of the news, they got later and later. Stories from the Trump White House often dropped after Hannity’s show went off the air at 10:00, and then, once Biden took office and news dumps went back to normal hours, I started writing a book. That meant the letter writing stayed late. And got later.
And that is my personal news. The reason the letters are posting earlier again is that the book is done.
It is called Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, and in 30 short chapters in three sections for a total of 250 pages of text, it tries to explain how we got to this political moment…and how we get out. There is a lot of material in it you all will recognize—on the Trump years, for example, and how we got to them and how we got through them—but there is a lot that is new, too, reflecting how the last several years have made me reconceive the way I think about the meaning of history. In the end, this book makes an argument for a new understanding of U.S. history as an explicitly democratic history, kept alive primarily by marginalized Americans who have worked to expand our rights and bring the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life.
Writing the book was a very odd experience. Because I was writing so much else, I could never focus on the book exclusively as I have done for previous books. I would write in the mornings, but every afternoon I would have to pack up whatever was in front of me and start working on the nightly letter. When one chapter was done, I would throw it aside and ignore it while working on the next. It was almost as if I was seeing the project only in my peripheral vision while looking intently at what was in front of me.
I took a break from the manuscript before picking it up for the second draft, and when I did turn back to it, I discovered something curious: it was almost as if the chapters had been chatting together while I ignored them, and they demanded an entire reworking. In the end, I rewrote close to 80% of the manuscript and developed a much different thesis than I had set out to write two years ago. It was rather as if I had seen things more clearly out of the corner of my eye than if I had been looking directly at them.
The manuscript turned into a voyage of discovery for me, and it ended up feeling very much like I didn’t have a lot of control over it: I was just bringing a definitive shape to the questions, comments, concerns, and hopes of so many people who have been part of the crazy journey of the past three and a half years.
It will come out in mid-September and I think it is…not bad, which is about as far as any writer will—or should—go on a new book.
I am extraordinarily relieved to have this project off my desk, and hope to write earlier going forward, although always with an eye to the idea that each letter tries to encapsulate a full 24-hour period in the nation’s historical record.
There are new projects in the works, but for now a heartfelt thank you to all of you who have cheered me, the letters, and this new book on, all in the midst of trying to protect our democracy. It’s been quite a journey already, and I am eager to see what comes next.
Oh, and here’s the cover. It’s not an accident that it’s a sunrise.
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All weekend, Trump supporters have flooded media channels with accusations that President Joe Biden has weaponized the Department of Justice to use as a political cudgel against former president Trump, whom they characterize as the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
On Thursday the Department of Justice indicted Trump on 37 counts of hanging onto classified national security documents, deliberately hiding those documents from his lawyers and the government after a subpoena, lying about them, and showing them to people without security clearances and without any need to know about them.
Trump and his loyalists insist the indictment makes the United States a “banana republic,” by which they appear to mean a country with a corrupt ruling elite that uses the machinery of government against political opponents (though the historical meaning of that term actually is much more complicated). Sometimes in the same breath they call for arresting members of the Biden administration in retaliation; on the Fox News Channel on Friday, personality Greg Gutfield added First Lady Jill Biden as a potential target after Jesse Watters called for arresting “all of them, [former House speaker Nancy] Pelosi, too.”
There are a number of problems with their characterization of what is going on.
First of all, Biden’s Department of Justice has operated as it is supposed to: independently. While Trump apparently tried to use the department for his own political ends—we learned just last month, for example, that the Department of Justice kept an investigation of the Clinton Foundation open for almost Trump’s entire term, although prosecutors thought the rumors about the foundation were bogus from the start—Biden has gone out of his way to emphasize that he will not interfere with the Justice Department.
To underline that independence, after Trump announced his candidacy for president last November—an early announcement many thought was an attempt to avoid criminal prosecution—Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee the two federal investigations that touched on the former president, thus deliberately moving those investigations outside the department. The special counsel is Jack Smith, and those investigations are the one into the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the documents case currently in the news.
Still, the indictment came not from Smith, but from a federal grand jury of ordinary American citizens in Florida who reviewed evidence and determined that there was probable cause to believe that Trump committed crimes and should be tried for them. Trump’s defenders are trying to blur this reality by saying it was Biden who charged Trump, when it was really the members of a grand jury.
Trump supporters’ evidence for Biden’s corruption is that the Justice Department has indicted neither President Biden nor former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for what they claim are similar offenses. (It hasn’t charged Republican former vice president Mike Pence, either, but they are not talking about that.) The crucial difference in all three of those cases is that Biden, Clinton, and Pence did not try to hide the documents found in their possession and they cooperated fully with the Department of Justice to return them. (In addition, in Clinton’s case, most of the 110 emails that contained classified information did not bear classified markings.)
As Devlin Barrett of the Washington Post notes, Trump was not charged for illegally keeping any of the 197 documents he returned. He was charged only for ones he kept, lied about, showed to other people, and hid.
Republicans who are trying to pick up Trump’s voters, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, are not defending Trump but are instead trying to argue that the Democrats are discriminating against Trump. "Is there a different standard for a Democrat secretary of state versus a former Republican president?" DeSantis asked.
That line of reasoning is swaying Republican primary voters, 88% of whom, according to a CBS News poll, say the indictment was politically motivated, although 24% of them agree that the loose handling of the documents was a national security risk. Trump and key supporters are playing to that base, using thinly veiled calls for violence. Meanwhile, Republicans who are likely hoping this will sink Trump are either dodging questions about the issue or, like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, remaining steadfastly silent.
But for all the focus on the politics of this moment and the apparent attempt to rally the Republican base to violence, this is a legal case. Trump is accused of serious crimes that endangered—and likely continue to endanger—our national security, which means the safety of every American.
His alleged criminal activity endangers the operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (in charge of imagery, maps, and intelligence concerning them), the National Reconnaissance Office (in charge of space-based surveillance and reconnaissance), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
It is notable that the two Republican presidential candidates who have served as U.S. attorneys—Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson—have both spoken out against Trump over it. So has Trump’s former attorney general William Barr, who told Shannon Bream of the Fox News Channel today: “I think the counts under the Espionage Act, that he willfully retained those documents, are solid counts… I do think we have to wait and see what the defense says, and what proves to be true, but I do think that…if even half of it is true, then he’s toast. I mean, it’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning.”
Trump is reportedly having trouble finding lawyers to represent him in this matter, with Marc Caputo of The Messenger reporting today that one federal criminal defense lawyer he contacted in the Southern District of Florida said: “The problem is none of us want to work for the guy…. He’s a nightmare client.”
While committed Republican partisans seem to believe Trump is a victim, according to the CBS News poll, 38% of likely Republican primary voters do, in fact, believe Trump endangered our security—and national security, after all, is the primary job of the president.
Smith said on Friday that the department would seek a “speedy trial,” and if that indeed happens, the American people will hear Trump’s own lawyers and aides—for all the witnesses are his own hand-picked team members—testify under oath about Trump’s behavior. Under similar conditions, the testimony of Trump’s people before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol effectively countered Trump’s propaganda. That Republican leaders see Trump as vulnerable is evidenced by how many candidates are already in the presidential race.
The question is how much damage the fight for control will do to the Republican Party, especially in light of the fact that Smith’s other investigation, the one into the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, has not yet been concluded. There is reason to suspect those congress members involved in that effort might have been spooked by just how thorough the investigation of the documents case turned out to be.
Guided by President Biden, the Democrats are refusing to comment on the indictment, likely in part to undermine the argument that it is about politics and also because they recognize that many Americans are just tired of drama.
Overall, though, they seem determined to redirect people’s attention to the reality that the Biden administration and the Democrats are actually governing according to the principles of a democracy. Frustrating as this tactic is to partisans, scholars who study how to restore democratic norms in a faltering democracy suggest that emphasizing those norms is crucial.
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On Friday, while the political world was focused on the federal indictment of a former president, the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee released their new tax plan.
Not two weeks after threatening to refuse to raise the debt ceiling because of their stated concerns over the nation’s mounting debt, Republicans are calling for tax cuts. The nonprofit public policy organization the Committee for a Responsible Budget estimates that over a decade those cuts will cost $80 billion as written and more than $1.1 trillion if made permanent. The frontloading in the measure, they estimate, will make it cost $320 billion by the end of 2025.
Meanwhile, the House Freedom Caucus is also demanding steeper cuts in spending than House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to in the budget deal he cut with President Joe Biden before agreeing to suspend the debt ceiling. The extremist Republicans have shut down House business for a week to protest what they considered a betrayal. But they cannot admit they want to cut Social Security and Medicare (although McCarthy has promised a commission to study such cuts).
Neither one of their measures will make it through the Senate. Even Republicans there are unhappy with the extremists’ attack on defense spending.
It feels like the end of an era. The idea that tax cuts and spending cuts will automatically expand the economy—the argument that Ronald Reagan rode to the White House in 1981—is no longer believable.
In the last week, two of the key architects of President Ronald Reagan’s administration have died. One was religious broadcaster and minister Pat Robertson, who ushered evangelicals into the Republican Party and blamed feminism, abortion, homosexuality, and “liberal” college professors for what he considered the decline of America.
The other was evangelical James G. Watt, Reagan’s first secretary of the interior. Watt embraced the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement to privatize federal lands in the West or, barring that, to hand them to states to lease as they saw fit. Watt took the theme of privatization to Washington, D.C., where he reversed the government’s policy of protecting the environment and embraced the commercial exploitation of resources, opening nearly all of the nation’s coastal waters to drilling, for example, and easing regulations on strip mining.
Like Robertson, Watt believed he was a warrior in a crusade to save the United States from those who believed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. “I never use the words Democrats and Republicans,” he often said, “It’s liberals and Americans.” He called environmentalists “a left wing cult which seeks to bring down the type of government I believe in.” “Compromise,” he added, “is not in my vocabulary.”
People like Robertson and Watt believed they were at war with those Americans of both parties who approved of the democratic system that had ushered the nation through the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War and had promoted greater economic, racial, and gender equality than the country had ever known before.
That battle to divide the American people along cultural lines in order to dismantle the federal government has, after forty years, led to a Republican Party that has embraced Christian nationalism, abandoning not only the policies of democracy but also democracy itself.
The conclusion of that movement is playing out now over the defense of former president Trump from charges that he committed crimes that threaten our national security. He and some of his most fervent supporters have urged his base toward violence—in words not unlike the ones Trump used before the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, actually—and there is concern that there might be trouble tomorrow in Miami, Florida, where Trump is scheduled to be arraigned.
Miami mayor Francis Suarez, a Republican who reportedly is himself considering a run for the White House, spoke to the press today to make it clear law enforcement officers and emergency personnel are working closely with federal and state partners and are prepared for whatever might happen.
But the Trump base is not what it was in 2016, when Trump commanded the federal government. Right-wing personality Tucker Carlson is off the air and the Fox News Channel is apparently considering legal action against him to keep him from competing with his old employer. The leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who organized the Capitol attack, are scattered or in prison, and hundreds of those who were at the Capitol that day have discovered the weight of the law.
The number of candidates challenging him suggests Trump is no longer the undisputed leader of the Republican Party. Republican leaders are beholden to his base, though, and they either came out swinging over the weekend to defend Trump or kept silent.
But they, too, appear to have been thinking a bit about the weight of the law as information comes out that key evidence against Trump has come from his former lawyer M. Evan Corcoran, who apparently took notes of Trump’s requests that Corcoran break the law. While Republican presidential candidates former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and South Carolina senator Tim Scott are still defending Trump, Haley today said that “Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security,” and Scott said the case is “serious.”
They, and politicians like them, are likely making a political calculation. Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination but is unlikely to win a general election—a network tied to billionaire Charles Koch has begun to target him as unelectable—and they need to appeal to those who dislike Trump as well as those who like him.
But there is something else going on, too. As Trump and his loyalists sound more and more unhinged, both in his defense and in their attacks on everyone who isn’t in their club, people seem to be sick of them. As Charles C. W. Cooke asked in the conservative National Review, “Aren’t you all tired of this crap?”
In contrast, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have steadfastly refused to engage with the Trump drama and have quietly worked to rebuild the government that forty years of austerity and ideological attacks have undermined. Their determination to rebuild the middle class has led to strong economic growth, high employment, and now inflation at its lowest level since May 2021. Government investment in new technologies and in returning supply chains to the U.S. has led to private investment of more than $220 billion in the economy and the creation of more than 77,000 new jobs, largely in Republican-dominated states. Manufacturing construction has more than doubled in the past year.
As the architects of Reagan’s revolution exit stage right, Republican calls for more tax cuts are barely making the news, while the traditional idea of government investment in the American people appears to be showing its strength.
“The wind is shifting,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin tweeted today after listening to Haley and Scott backtrack. “Remember: change happens slowly and then all at once.”
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It was quite a chyron from CNN, marking the first time in the history of the United States that a former president has been charged with federal crimes. And in this case, what crimes they are: the willful retention, sharing, and hiding of classified documents that compromise our national security. Trump’s own national security advisor John Bolton said, “This is material that in the hands of America's adversaries would do incalculable damage to the United States. This is a very serious case and it's not financial fraud, it's not hush money to porn stars, this is the national security of the United States at stake. I think we've got to take the politics out of this business when national security is at stake.”
Cameras were barred in the courtroom as Trump pleaded not guilty to the 37 charges in Miami today. Presiding magistrate judge Jonathan Goodman ordered Trump not to communicate with witnesses about the case, including co-defendant Waltine Nauta, then released him on his own recognizance, that is, without needing to post bail. Special prosecutor Jack Smith was in the courtroom; ABC’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott reported that Trump did not look at Smith.
Then Trump went back to his residence in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he gave a speech that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who is close to the Trump camp, described as low energy, focusing on his insistence that he had a right to keep the classified documents (which experts agree is nonsense and amounts to a confession) and that the indictment was "the most evil and heinous abuse of power." Right-wing Newsmax and the Fox News Channel (FNC) carried the speech; CNN and MSNBC did not.
FNC has been hemorrhaging viewers since it fired Tucker Carlson, a threat to its bottom line that might have been behind its chyron tonight attacking Biden by claiming “WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.”
In statements similar to the one from FNC, right-wing pundits spent the day flooding Twitter and other social media with furious insistence that Trump is being unfairly prosecuted, followed by attacks on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and with allegations that there are tapes of President Biden accepting bribes—allegations that Biden openly laughed at this evening.
But that performative outrage among leaders did not translate into support on the ground in Miami. Law enforcement had been prepared for as many as 50,000 protesters, but only a few hundred to a thousand turned out (one wearing a shirt made of an American flag and carrying the head of a pig on a pole).
The lack of supporters on the ground was significant. Since the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, much of Trump’s power has rested on his ability to call out his base to silence opponents by threatening violence. That power was in full force on January 6, 2021, when his loyalists set out to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president, believing they were operating under the orders of then-president Trump.
Since then, though, more than 1,000 people who participated in the events of January 6 have been charged with crimes, and many have been sentenced to prison, while Trump, who many defendants say called them to arms, has skated. That discrepancy is likely dampening the enthusiasm of Trump’s supporters for protest.
Today Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out that the audacity of Nevada’s militia-related Bundy family simply grew as family members launched successive stands against the federal government without significant legal repercussions. Republican politicians cheered on their attacks on federal officials for political gain, while Democratic politicians didn’t push to go after them out of concern that a show of federal power would alienate Nevada voters.
Trump’s threats and determination to stir up his base seem to reflect a similar consideration: if he can just rally enough support, he might imagine, the federal government will back off.
Federal officials permitting politics to trump the rule of law in our past have brought us to this moment.
After the Civil War, officials charged Confederate president Jefferson Davis and 38 other leading secessionists with treason but decided not to prosecute when the cases finally came to trial in 1869. They wanted to avoid the anger a trial would provoke because they hoped to reconcile the North and South. They also worried they would not get convictions in the southern states where the trials were assigned.
In the end, between President Andrew Johnson’s pardons and Congress’s granting of amnesty to Confederates, no one was convicted for their participation in the attempt to destroy the country. This generosity did not create the good feeling men like General Ulysses S. Grant hoped it would. Instead, as Civil War scholar Elizabeth Varon established in her book on the surrender at Appomattox, it helped to create the myth that the southern cause had been so noble that even the conquering northern armies had been forced to recognize it. The ideology of the Confederacy never became odious, and it has lived on.
The same quest for reconciliation drove President Gerald R. Ford to grant a pardon to former president Richard M. Nixon for possible “offenses against the United States” in his quest to win the 1972 election by bugging the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Washington, D.C., Watergate Hotel.
Ford explained that the “tranquility” the nation had found after Nixon’s resignation “could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States.” The threat of a trial would “cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.”
In an echo of 100 years before, Ford’s generosity did not bring Nixon or his supporters back into the fold. Instead, they doubled down on the idea that Nixon had done nothing wrong and had been hounded from office by his “liberal” enemies. Nixon himself never admitted wrongdoing, telling the American people he was resigning because he no longer had enough support in Congress to advance the national interest. Although his support had collapsed because even members of his own party believed he was guilty of obstructing justice, violated constitutional rights of citizens, and abused his power, Nixon blamed the press, whose members had destroyed him with “leaks and accusations and innuendo.”
The willingness of government officials to ignore the rule of law in order to buy peace gave us enduring reverence for the principles of the Confederacy, along with countless dead Unionists, mostly Black people, killed as former Confederates reclaimed supremacy in the South. It also gave us the idea that presidents cannot be held accountable for crimes, a belief that likely made some of the presidents who followed Nixon less careful about following the law than they might have been if they had seen Nixon indicted.
Holding a former president accountable for an alleged profound attack on the United States is indeed unprecedented, as his supporters insist. But far from being a bad thing to stand firm on the rule of law at the upper levels of government, it seems to fall into the category of “high time.”
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On Monday, the World Day Against Child Labor, Democrats led by Representatives Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Raul Ruiz (D-CA) introduced into Congress the Children's Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety, or CARE Act. It seeks to raise the minimum age for farm work from 12 to 14, repairing a carveout from the era of the Jim Crow 1930s that permitted children to work on farms at two years younger than in other sectors.
Democrats have introduced similar bills since 2005, but the measures have failed because opponents say such rules would hurt family farms. Kristi Boswell, a lobbyist for the agricultural industry and former member of the agricultural bureau under Trump, said at a hearing that her “niece and nephews would not have been able to detassel corn at ages 12 and 13, despite their parents knowing they were mature enough to handle the job.”
This bill, Ruiz notes, has exemptions for family farms. It is intended not to stop the passing of farming knowledge from parents to kids, but to protect Latinx children “who are working in the fields because they’re living in extreme poverty.”
Pressure for federal legislation to protect children is mounting, in part because of the recent effort of Republican-dominated state legislatures to weaken child labor laws. As recently as 2017 a historical review of the history of child labor from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said that “child labor like that…in the decades leading up to the passage of the [Fair Labor Standards Act] no longer exists.” But, now, thanks to a red-hot labor market that is driving up wages, immigration bans, and an influx of unaccompanied minor children who have been released to sponsors after arriving in the U.S., child labor is on the rise.
In February 2023 the Department of Labor reported that it had seen a 69% increase—note that these were only cases that were caught—in “children being employed illegally by companies.” In the same month it announced a $1.5 million settlement with Packers Sanitation Services, Inc., one of the nation’s largest food safety sanitation services providers, after officials found the company employed at least 102 children aged 13–17 during overnight shifts at thirteen meat-processing facilities in eight states, where they used hazardous chemicals and cleaned dangerous meat processing equipment. At least three got hurt.
The federal government has vowed to crack down on violations of child labor laws, but the Economic Policy Institute, which examines the economic impact of government policies, reports that in the last two years, at least fourteen states have either passed or introduced measures to weaken the laws protecting children from dangerous working conditions. They permit longer work hours and more dangerous work, lower the ages for work around alcohol, or introduce new subminimum wages for children.
Those calling for rollbacks of child labor protections say they are protecting parents’ rights from an intrusive state. They portray child labor as family oriented and good work experience. But the measures are backed—and sometimes written—by the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), a right-wing Florida think tank founded in 2011 whose goal is to cut the social safety net and antipoverty programs. Far-right donors who want to dismantle the federal government provide the financial support for the FGA.
David Campbell, professor of American democracy at the University of Notre Dame, told Jacob Bogage and María Luisa Paúl of the Washington Post, “When you say that a bill will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions, it sounds wildly unpopular…. You have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights, a very carefully chosen term that’s really hard to disagree with.”
A January 2022 FGA white paper provides talking points for weakened child labor laws, including the ideas that “teenagers are a critical source of labor for businesses struggling to find help” and that “with a national labor crisis and teenagers opting to join the workforce at record-high rates, cutting bureaucratic red tape can help stabilize the economy.” “THE BOTTOM LINE: States should restore decision-making to parents by eliminating youth work permits.”
This language echoes that of the early 1900s, when factories and mines employed children because they earned lower wages than adults and their small bodies could fit more easily into tight spaces, and when parents pushed their children to work because, in an era when most men made below-subsistence wages and there was no social safety net, families needed the money children earned to survive. In 1900 a quarter of the workers in the South’s textile factories were children under 16; by 1904, that number had climbed to a half, with 20,000 of them under age 12.
Factory fires and mine collapses, as well as the frequent injuries that cost children fingers or legs, brought popular attention to the dangers of child labor, but children could not vote and had no power to change legislation. Mill and mine owners lobbied legislators against regulating child labor, insisting that child labor laws would ruin their businesses by strengthening the power of unions as adult workers no longer had to worry about being undercut by cheaper child workers. And laws put children firmly under the control of their parents, who had the right to their children’s wages and who needed that income to make ends meet.
What would eventually throw a monkey wrench into this economic system was the recognition by Republican progressive reformers that children growing up in factories without education would never have the opportunity to become good citizens, whose education was crucial to a democracy. They would never learn to read or write, leaving them at the mercy of employers, and immigrant children caught in this system would never fully integrate into society.
Reformers worried that the nation would develop a permanent underclass that threatened the continued survival of democracy. In 1904 they organized as the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) to work against child labor in factories. In 1906, progressive senator Albert Beveridge (R-IN) introduced a federal child labor law, using the Constitution’s Commerce Clause to ban the transport of any products mined or manufactured by children under 14.
“We cannot permit any man or corporation to stunt the bodies, minds, and souls of American children,” Beveridge said. “We cannot thus wreck the future of the American Republic.”
When Beveridge’s bill failed, the NCLC hired photographer Lewis Hine to take the now-iconic pictures of the nation’s children in the streets, mines, and factories. In 1908, Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, who shared Beveridge’s concerns that the stunted children from the factories and mines would not grow up to become the foundation for a strong democracy, told Congress: “Child labor should be prohibited throughout the Nation.”
By 1916, Congress was ready to pass the Keating-Owen Act, a law prohibiting the shipment of goods produced by children across state lines. The Supreme Court struck it down in 1918, saying such federal legislation was unconstitutional. Congress then tried to stop child labor by levying a ten percent tax on businesses that hired children; the Supreme Court struck that down, too.
Finally, in 1938, as part of the New Deal effort to level the playing field between workers and employers, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). It established a federal minimum wage, a 44-hour work week, and an end to work for those under 16. During his quest for the legislation, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Congress, "A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling worker's wages or stretching workers' hours."
By the time the FLSA passed, laws requiring children to attend school had joined with the high unemployment of the Depression years to shift the idea that children should work to the idea that they should stay in school, and worker protections and Social Security, passed in the same era, meant that parents no longer needed their children’s wages to survive.
In the years after World War II, when people in the United States were determined to stand strong against both fascism and communism, the nation embraced the idea that children should be in school rather than in factories. An education would permit them to be upwardly mobile economically, thus lessening the likelihood that they would be tempted by authoritarian leaders who promised to improve their standard of living, and it would guarantee that they would be informed citizens who would work to advance democracy.
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Yesterday, the Republican Study Committee, a 175-member group of far-right House members, released their 2024 “Blueprint to Save America” budget plan. It calls for slashing the federal budget by raising the age at which retirees can start claiming Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, privatizing Medicare, and enacting dramatic tax cuts that will starve the federal government.
I’m actually not going to rehash the 122-page plan. Let’s take a look at the larger picture.
This budget dismisses the plans of “President Joe Biden and the left” as a “march toward socialism.” It says that “[t]he left’s calls to increase taxes to close the deficit would be…catastrophic for our nation.” Asserting that “the path to prosperity does not come from the Democrats’ approach of expanding government,” it claims that “[o]ver the past year and a half, the American people have seen that experiment fail firsthand.”
Instead, it says, “the key to growth, innovation, and flourishing communities” is “[i]ndividuals, free from the burdens of a burdensome government.”
It is?
Our history actually tells us how these two contrasting visions of the government play out.
Grover Norquist, one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”
Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross national product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States.
The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity.
When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people.
The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in painters and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism.
That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic, a high from which it is still coming down), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.
So why is there a growing debt?
Because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic. The United States is nowhere close to the average tax burden of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations.
Republicans who backed those tax cuts now insist that the only way to deal with the growing debt is to get rid of the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and eventually promoted civil rights, all elements that stabilized the nation after the older system gave us the Depression. Indeed, the Republican Study Committee calls for making the Trump tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2025, permanent.
“There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his acceptance speech. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”
When the Republican Study Committee calls Biden’s policies—which have led to record employment, a booming economy, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor— “leftist,” they have lost the thread of our history. The system that restored the nation after 1933 and held the nation stable until 1981 is not socialism or radicalism; it is one of the strongest parts of our American tradition.
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In one of the quirky coincidences that history deals out, Daniel Ellsberg died today at age 92 on the eve of the fifty-first anniversary of the break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Ellsberg was a military analyst in the 1960s, disturbed by the gulf between what the government was telling the public about the war in Vietnam and what he was seeing behind the scenes.
After serving as a Marine, Ellsberg earned his doctorate at Harvard and joined the RAND Corporation, where he learned to apply game theory to warfare. By 1964 he was an advisor to Robert McNamara, who served as defense secretary under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In 1967, Ellsberg was part of the team tapped by McNamara to compile a history of the conflict in Vietnam to evaluate the success of different programs.
Ellsberg was concerned by investigators’ conclusions. The 7,000-page secret government study detailed U.S. involvement in Vietnam from Harry Truman’s presidency to Lyndon Johnson’s. It outlined how successive presidents had lied to the American people, expanding the war with promises of victory even as the costs of the war mounted and the chances of victory moved farther and farther away.
Ellsberg copied the secret study and shared it with congressmen, who buried it. Finally, Ellsberg shared the report with a New York Times correspondent on the condition the reporter would only take notes and would not copy the pages. But the correspondent broke the agreement, believing the documents were “the property of the people” who had paid for them with “the blood of their sons.”
On June 13, 1971, the New York Times began to publish what became known as the Pentagon Papers, showing how presidents had lied to the American people about the nation’s involvement in Vietnam. President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, warned the New York Times that the publication was jeopardizing national security and warned that the government would prosecute. The editors decided to continue publication—the Supreme Court later agreed that the newspaper had the right to publish the information—while Ellsberg leaked the report to other newspapers.
The study ended before the Nixon administration, but the president was deeply concerned about it. The report showed that presidents had lied to the American people for years, and Nixon worried that the story would hurt his administration by souring the public on his approach to the Vietnam War. Worse, if anyone looked at his own administration, they might well find evidence of his own secret actions in the Vietnam arena: the Chennault affair, in which a Nixon ally undermined peace talks before the 1968 presidential election in order to undercut Johnson’s reelection campaign, and what was then the undisclosed bombing of Cambodia.
News of either could, at the very least, destroy Nixon’s reelection campaign.
Nixon became obsessed with the idea that the Pentagon Papers proved that opponents were trying to sink his campaign for reelection.
Frustrated when the FBI did not seem to be taking an investigation into Ellsberg seriously enough, in July 1971, Nixon put together in the White House a special investigations unit to stop leaks. And who stops leaks?
Plumbers.
Officially known as the White House Special Investigations Unit, Nixon’s “plumbers” burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist on September 9, 1971, hoping to find damaging information about him that would discredit the Pentagon Papers. (Their burglary, showing gross governmental misconduct, was later key to the dismissal of charges against Ellsberg for leaking the report.)
Some of the plumbers began to work with the Committee to Reelect the President (aptly called “CREEP” as its methods came to light) to sabotage Nixon’s Democratic opponents by “ratf*cking” them, as they called it, planting fake letters in newspapers, hiring vendors for Democratic rallies and then running out on the unpaid bills, and planting spies in Democrats’ campaigns.
Finally, CREEP turned back to the plumbers.
Early in the morning on June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard at the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C., noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.
The White House denied all knowledge of what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and most of the press took the denial at face value. But two young reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, followed the sloppy money trail behind the burglars directly to the White House.
The fallout from the burglary gained no traction before the election, which Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7 percent of the vote. But the scandal erupted in March 1973, when one of the burglars, James W. McCord, Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing, saying that he had lied at his trial, under pressure to protect government officials. McCord had been the head of security for CREEP, and Sirica, known by reporters as “Maximum John,” later said, “I had no intention of sitting on the bench like a nincompoop and watching the parade go by.”
Sirica made the letter public, White House counsel John Dean promptly began cooperating with prosecutors, and the Watergate scandal was in full swing. On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in American history to resign.
Ellsberg decided to release the Pentagon Papers to alert the American people to the fact that their government was lying to them about the Vietnam War. But he helped set in motion a series of events that determined the shape of the political world we live in today.
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It's not officially summer yet, but it sure feels like the seasons are changing. And it doesn't matter how long these late spring days are, they are never, never, never long enough.
Going to hit bed early and be back at it tomorrow.
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Tomorrow is the federal holiday honoring Juneteenth, the celebration of the announcement in Texas on June 19th, 1865, that enslaved Americans were free.
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army, but it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.
Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived to take charge of the soldiers stationed there. On June 19, he issued General Order Number 3. It read:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
The order went on: “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
While the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing enslavement except as punishment for a crime had passed through Congress on January 31, 1865, and Lincoln had signed it on February 1, the states were still in the process of ratifying it.
So Granger’s order referred not to the Thirteenth Amendment, but to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that Americans enslaved in states that were in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” Granger was informing the people of Galveston that, Texas having been in rebellion on January 1, 1863, their world had changed. The federal government would see to it that, going forward, white people and Black people would be equal.
Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought for the United States and worked in the fields to grow cotton the government could sell. Those unable to leave their homes had hidden U.S. soldiers, while those who could leave indicated their support for the Confederacy and enslavement with their feet. They had demonstrated their equality and their importance to the United States.
The next year, after the Thirteenth Amendment had been added to the Constitution, Texas freedpeople gathered on June 19, 1866, to celebrate with prayers, speeches, food, and socializing the coming of their freedom. By the following year, the federal government encouraged “Juneteenth” celebrations, eager to explain to Black citizens the voting rights that had been put in place by the Military Reconstruction Act in early March 1867, and the tradition of Juneteenth began to spread to Black communities across the nation.
But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.
In summer 1865, as white legislators in the states of the former Confederacy grudgingly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, they also passed laws to keep freedpeople subservient to their white neighbors. These laws, known as the Black Codes, varied by state, but they generally bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in the fields owned by white men; prohibited Black people from meeting in groups, owning guns or property, or testifying in court; outlawed interracial marriage; and permitted white men to buy out the jail terms of Black people convicted of a wide swath of petty crimes, and then to force those former prisoners into labor to pay off their debt.
In 1865, Congress refused to readmit the Southern states under the Black Codes, and in 1866, congressmen wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Its first section established that “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.” It went on: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That was the whole ball game. The federal government had declared that a state could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.
The addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 remade the United States, but those determined to preserve a world that discriminated between Americans according to race, gender, ability, and so on, continued to find workarounds.
On Friday the Department of Justice—created in 1870 to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment—released the report of its investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department and the City of Minneapolis in the wake of the April 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer. The 19-page document found systemic “conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law,” discriminating against Black and Native American people, people with behavioral health disabilities, and protesters. Those systemic problems in the MPD’s institutional culture enabled Floyd’s killing. Minneapolis police performed 22% more searches, 27% more vehicle searches, and 24% more uses of force on Black people than on white residents behaving in similar ways. They conducted 23% more searches and used force 20% more on Indigenous Americans.
The Justice Department’s press release specified that the city and the police department “cooperated fully.” The two parties have “agreed in principle” to fix the problem with sweeping reforms based on community input, with an independent monitor rather than litigation.
While the Senate unanimously approved the measure creating the Juneteenth holiday last year, fourteen far-right Republicans voted against it, many of them complaining that such a holiday would be divisive.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in China, where he has met in the past two days for a total of more than ten hours with China’s top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, and with Foreign Minister Qin Gang. Today, he met for 35 minutes with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Blinken called the talks “candid, substantive, and constructive.“
The backdrop to the talks is that under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the United States has taken steps to bring supply chains back to the United States and has also limited the export to China of technology that can be used for the development of military weapons. Those actions have led Chinese leaders to accuse the U.S. of seeking to “decouple” from China and to contain China’s economic development. China’s economy is reeling after shutting down for the pandemic, raising concerns about a global economic slowdown.
In the past two and a half years, the U.S. has also worked hard to create and deepen alliances around the world. Those alliances, especially in the Indo-Pacific region and in Africa, have shifted the balance of global power at the same time that China’s support for Russia has tied China to an epic mess. As David Ignatius put it this week in the Washington Post, Biden is trying to create a more stable strategic balance between China, India, and Japan. “Rather than walking a bipolar tightrope between Washington and Beijing,” Ignatius notes, “the administration is trying to build a matrix of relationships, with the United States as a key interlocutor in each node.”
Those relationships include the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—an international organization that includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—and an alliance with the Pacific Islands Forum, an 18-member organization, with which the U.S. held its first summit ever in September 2022. They also include AUKUS, a trilateral security pact between the U.S., Australia, and the United Kingdom, designed to “promote a free and open Indo-Pacific that is secure and stable.”
For the U.S. these alliances have meant stronger military cooperation with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as well as with India, whose prime minister, Narendra Modi, will make a state visit to Washington, D.C., this week in a demonstration of India’s deepening ties to the U.S. just as both India and China have revoked the credentials of each other’s journalists. China has been building up its military presence on India’s border, pushing India toward the U.S.
While Blinken was in China, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was in Japan for a trilateral meeting with Japan and the Republic of Korea, and other meetings with the U.S., Japan, the ROK, and the Philippines.
Of his meetings in China, Blinken told reporters that he emphasized to his Chinese counterparts that the U.S. is interested in reducing the risk of economic cooperation, not in “decoupling.” The U.S. and China engaged in almost $700 billion in trade last year, he said, and that trade benefits both countries. But the U.S. is “investing in our own capacities and in secure, resilient supply chains; pushing for level playing fields for our workers and our companies; defending against harmful trade practice; and protecting our critical technologies so that they aren’t used against us.” Blinken also emphasized that the U.S. does “not support Taiwan independence” and opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo there, noting that if China provokes a crisis there, it could produce an economic crisis that affects the entire world. With 70% of the world’s semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan and 50% of commercial container traffic going through the Taiwan Strait, there is no room for a conflict there.
The U.S. is pushing China to stop violating human rights and to release the U.S. citizens it holds. It is also calling for China to cooperate on stopping its exportation of the precursor chemicals that enable drug lords to manufacture synthetic opioids and street fentanyl, which is the number one killer of Americans from ages 18 to 49.
Blinken told reporters that he had emphasized “direct engagement and sustained communication at senior levels,” to avoid conflict, but China has, so far, refused to reinstate communication between military leaders. Blinken also noted that China is in a unique position to play a constructive role in working toward a just peace in Ukraine, and in pressing North Korea to stop its nuclear program and to start engaging responsibly with the rest of the world.
When a reporter asked why the U.S. should continue to engage in talks when China won’t agree to military-to-military channels of communication, Blinken answered: “Because, as we’ve seen, we’re not going to have success on every issue between us on any given day, but in a whole variety of areas—on the terms that we set for this trip, we have made progress and we are moving forward…. At the end of the day, the best way that we can advance our interests, stand up for our values, and make sure that we are very clear about our intent—the best way to do that is through direct engagement, through diplomacy.”
The other big news today was an eye-popping interview of former president Trump by Bret Baier of the Fox News Channel, in which Trump seemed to agree that he had broken the law by retaining documents, saying he had not handed over to the National Archives the documents he kept because he wanted to take his personal material out of the boxes and was “very busy.” Legal commentator and former U.S. acting solicitor general Neal Katyal tweeted: “The breaking news is that the Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, has a new addition to his legal team tonight. An unpaid new deputy Special Counsel. His name is Donald J. Trump.”
In the interview, Trump also denied that he had the secret document he claimed to have on a recorded tape, saying he is up against “dishonest…thugs.”
Today, U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart ordered Trump’s lawyers not to disclose evidence to the public about the classified documents at the heart of the case involving Trump’s refusal to return those documents. He also limited Trump’s access to that material, saying he may review the materials only “under the direct supervision” of his lawyers and that he “shall not retain copies.”
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in China, where he has met in the past two days for a total of more than ten hours with China’s top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, and with Foreign Minister Qin Gang. Today, he met for 35 minutes with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Blinken called the talks “candid, substantive, and constructive.“
The backdrop to the talks is that under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the United States has taken steps to bring supply chains back to the United States and has also limited the export to China of technology that can be used for the development of military weapons. Those actions have led Chinese leaders to accuse the U.S. of seeking to “decouple” from China and to contain China’s economic development. China’s economy is reeling after shutting down for the pandemic, raising concerns about a global economic slowdown.
In the past two and a half years, the U.S. has also worked hard to create and deepen alliances around the world. Those alliances, especially in the Indo-Pacific region and in Africa, have shifted the balance of global power at the same time that China’s support for Russia has tied China to an epic mess. As David Ignatius put it this week in the Washington Post, Biden is trying to create a more stable strategic balance between China, India, and Japan. “Rather than walking a bipolar tightrope between Washington and Beijing,” Ignatius notes, “the administration is trying to build a matrix of relationships, with the United States as a key interlocutor in each node.”
Those relationships include the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—an international organization that includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—and an alliance with the Pacific Islands Forum, an 18-member organization, with which the U.S. held its first summit ever in September 2022. They also include AUKUS, a trilateral security pact between the U.S., Australia, and the United Kingdom, designed to “promote a free and open Indo-Pacific that is secure and stable.”
For the U.S. these alliances have meant stronger military cooperation with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as well as with India, whose prime minister, Narendra Modi, will make a state visit to Washington, D.C., this week in a demonstration of India’s deepening ties to the U.S. just as both India and China have revoked the credentials of each other’s journalists. China has been building up its military presence on India’s border, pushing India toward the U.S.
While Blinken was in China, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was in Japan for a trilateral meeting with Japan and the Republic of Korea, and other meetings with the U.S., Japan, the ROK, and the Philippines.
Of his meetings in China, Blinken told reporters that he emphasized to his Chinese counterparts that the U.S. is interested in reducing the risk of economic cooperation, not in “decoupling.” The U.S. and China engaged in almost $700 billion in trade last year, he said, and that trade benefits both countries. But the U.S. is “investing in our own capacities and in secure, resilient supply chains; pushing for level playing fields for our workers and our companies; defending against harmful trade practice; and protecting our critical technologies so that they aren’t used against us.” Blinken also emphasized that the U.S. does “not support Taiwan independence” and opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo there, noting that if China provokes a crisis there, it could produce an economic crisis that affects the entire world. With 70% of the world’s semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan and 50% of commercial container traffic going through the Taiwan Strait, there is no room for a conflict there.
The U.S. is pushing China to stop violating human rights and to release the U.S. citizens it holds. It is also calling for China to cooperate on stopping its exportation of the precursor chemicals that enable drug lords to manufacture synthetic opioids and street fentanyl, which is the number one killer of Americans from ages 18 to 49.
Blinken told reporters that he had emphasized “direct engagement and sustained communication at senior levels,” to avoid conflict, but China has, so far, refused to reinstate communication between military leaders. Blinken also noted that China is in a unique position to play a constructive role in working toward a just peace in Ukraine, and in pressing North Korea to stop its nuclear program and to start engaging responsibly with the rest of the world.
When a reporter asked why the U.S. should continue to engage in talks when China won’t agree to military-to-military channels of communication, Blinken answered: “Because, as we’ve seen, we’re not going to have success on every issue between us on any given day, but in a whole variety of areas—on the terms that we set for this trip, we have made progress and we are moving forward…. At the end of the day, the best way that we can advance our interests, stand up for our values, and make sure that we are very clear about our intent—the best way to do that is through direct engagement, through diplomacy.”
The other big news today was an eye-popping interview of former president Trump by Bret Baier of the Fox News Channel, in which Trump seemed to agree that he had broken the law by retaining documents, saying he had not handed over to the National Archives the documents he kept because he wanted to take his personal material out of the boxes and was “very busy.” Legal commentator and former U.S. acting solicitor general Neal Katyal tweeted: “The breaking news is that the Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, has a new addition to his legal team tonight. An unpaid new deputy Special Counsel. His name is Donald J. Trump.”
In the interview, Trump also denied that he had the secret document he claimed to have on a recorded tape, saying he is up against “dishonest…thugs.”
Today, U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart ordered Trump’s lawyers not to disclose evidence to the public about the classified documents at the heart of the case involving Trump’s refusal to return those documents. He also limited Trump’s access to that material, saying he may review the materials only “under the direct supervision” of his lawyers and that he “shall not retain copies.”
What? No meeting with Little Rocket Man and an exchange of beautiful love letters? FAIL!
Comments
While we wait to learn more about a possible budget deal under which Republicans would agree to raise the debt ceiling before June 5, the date Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says will see the U.S. run out of funds, there is an interesting story coming out of Texas that might well shed light on the current dynamics in the Republican Party.
On Wednesday, witnesses testified before the Republican-led Texas House General Investigating Committee about how the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, has committed crimes in office, including trying to hide an affair, using his office to help a donor, building a culture of fear in his office, using his power to retaliate against opponents, misusing official information, and abusing his office. As attorney general, Paxton is in charge of overseeing the enforcement of the law in the state.
On Thursday the committee voted unanimously to recommend that Paxton be impeached and removed from office, citing 20 counts, including bribery and retaliating against whistleblowers, for his impeachment.
Paxton is not unused to trouble. He has been under a felony indictment for securities fraud since 2015, successfully holding off the charges through repeated delays. In 2020, eight of his top advisors accused him of abusing his office to help a wealthy donor, Nate Paul, resist an FBI investigation. But he has maintained his popularity with Republican voters in Texas by standing as a fervent Trump supporter and attacking the Biden administration, and party leaders would not turn on him.
That formula appears to be less potent than it used to be. It turns out that the House committee began investigating Paxton in March, after he tried to get $3.3 million of taxpayer money to settle a lawsuit with four whistleblowers who said he retaliated against them after they tried to expose his unsavory relationship with Paul.
Apparently aware of what was about to drop, Paxton on Tuesday accused House speaker Dade Phelan, a Republican, of being drunk at a public hearing and said he should resign. Once news of the committee vote dropped, Paxton on Friday attacked the “illegal impeachment scheme” and asked supporters to descend on the Texas Capitol for the impeachment vote. Paxton accused those calling for his impeachment of helping President Biden.
“The House is poised to do exactly what Joe Biden has been hoping to accomplish since his first day in office: sabotage our work, my work, as attorney general of Texas,” Paxton said. He refused to take questions. Right-wing figures, including the head of the Texas Republican Party and key Trump advisors—but not Trump himself—have declared their support for him. Texas governor Greg Abbott has stayed silent.
The full House will take up the question of Paxton’s impeachment tomorrow, with both Paxton’s supporters and Democratic supporters coming for the event.
Patrick Svitek of the Texas Tribune noted today that the impeachment effort has set off “a political earthquake in Texas.” “Republicans have chosen to remain largely silent
during years of alleged misconduct and lawbreaking by the attorney general. Now they will have to take a public stand,” he wrote. Local observers recognize the battle as one between far-right extremists, represented by Paxton, and Republicans who are trying to recover the party from the Trump wing.
There is likely a political calculation behind this move. Texas is a crucially important state for 2024, and voters are angry at the apparent corruption of prominent Republican figures like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Some leaders are likely eager to cut loose some big fish to reassure voters that they are not, in fact, the party of corruption. But in states that are currently dominated by Republicans so thoroughly that they are essentially one-party states, there are indeed systemic corruption problems because there is not the oversight that a healthy opposition party brings.
Both Paxton’s actions and his attempt to dismiss his Republican accusers as working for Biden appear to be a classic example of the behavior of political leaders in a one-party state. He has allegedly used his office to reward friends, retaliate against enemies, and avoid accountability for apparent lawbreaking. This pattern is common in authoritarian governmental systems; it was also common in the American South from about 1874 to 1965, when the Voting Rights Act that protected Black voting finally broke the one-party region dominated by white men.
Tomorrow, as Republican leaders in Texas look toward the 2024 election, they are going to have to decide whether to back an apparently corrupt attorney general who is popular with the Republican base or appeal to Republicans turned off by how extreme the party has become and get rid of him.
It will take a majority of the 149-member House to send the articles of impeachment to the Texas Senate for a trial. All 64 House Democrats will likely vote for impeachment. It is not clear what the Republicans will do.
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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Today the Texas House voted to impeach Texas attorney general Ken Paxton on 20 counts of corruption and bribery, removing him from office temporarily while the Senate prepares to try him.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) sided with Paxton, saying “No attorney general has battled the abuses of the Biden admin more ferociously—and more effectively—than has Paxton.” Former president Trump also backed Paxton, calling the Republican speaker of the Texas House “barely a Republican at all,” and threatened to target any Republican who voted for impeachment.
During the hearing, Republican state representative Charlie Green said that Paxton, too, had been calling representatives to warn them they would suffer political consequences for voting to impeach.
Paxton is a Trump loyalist who after the 2020 presidential election sued Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to try to stop the counting of their electoral votes, charging that their elections saw widespread fraud. The Supreme Court threw out the case, saying that Texas did not have standing to sue, but not before it attracted the support of 17 state attorneys general and at least 126 members of Congress, including Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
McCarthy is now speaker of the House and beholden to that extremist right-wing. In the fight over raising the debt ceiling so the nation can pay bills already incurred, the extremist Republicans have threatened to default on the nation’s bills in order to force the Democrats to defund their signature measures.
Tonight, President Biden and McCarthy announced they have agreed to a budget deal in principle, opening the way for the House to pass a measure to raise the debt ceiling. Now the key question is: do they have the votes to pass such a measure?
McCarthy continues to appeal to the extremists by attacking Biden, saying inaccurately that the president “wasted time and refused to negotiate for months” when, in fact, it was the Republicans who could not agree on what to bring to the table until April 26. But this may well not be enough; already Kyle Griffin of MSNBC reports that two Republican sources have said that the far right is already balking at the deal and is “plotting ways to gum up passage of the bill or add amendments to make it more appealing to hardliners.”
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Tomorrow is Memorial Day, the day Americans have honored since 1868, when we mourn those military personnel who have died in the service of the country—that is, for the rest of us.
For me, one of those people is Beau Bryant.
When we were growing up, we hung out at one particular house where a friend’s mom provided unlimited peanut butter and fluff sandwiches, Uno games, iced tea and lemonade, sympathetic ears, and stories. She talked about Beau, her older brother, in the same way we talked about all our people, and her stories made him part of our world even though he had been killed in World War II 19 years before we were born.
Beau’s real name was Floyston, and he had always stepped in as a father to his three younger sisters when their own father fell short.
When World War II came, Beau was working as a plumber and was helping his mother make ends meet, but in September 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He became a staff sergeant in the 322nd Bomber Squadron, 91st Bomb Group, nicknamed "Wray's Ragged Irregulars" after their commander Col. Stanley T. Wray. By the time Beau joined, the squadron was training with new B-17s at Dow Army Airfield near Bangor, Maine, and before deploying to England he hitchhiked three hours home so he could see his family once more.
It would be the last time. The 91st Bomb Group was a pioneer bomb group, figuring out tactics for air cover. By May 1943 it was experienced enough to lead the Eighth Air Force as it sought to establish air superiority over Europe. But the 91st did not have adequate fighter support until 1944. It had the greatest casualty rate of any of the heavy bomb squadrons.
Beau was one of the casualties. On August 12, 1943, just a week before his sister turned 18, while he was on a mission, enemy flak cut his oxygen line and he died before the plane could make it back to base. He was buried in Cambridge, England, at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, the military cemetery for Americans killed in action during WWII. He was twenty years old.
I grew up with Beau’s nephews and nieces, and we made decades of havoc and memories. But Beau's children weren't there, and neither he nor they are part of the memories.
Thinking about our untimely dead is hard enough, but I am haunted by the holes those deaths rip forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born.
I know of this man only what his sister told me: that he was a decent fellow who did what he could to support his mother and his sisters. Before he entered the service, he once spent a week’s paycheck on a dress for my friend’s mother so she could go to a dance.
And he gave up not only his life but also his future to protect American democracy against the spread of fascism.
I first wrote about Beau when his sister passed, for it felt to me like another kind of death that, with his sisters now all gone, along with almost all of their friends, soon there would be no one left who even remembered his name.
But something amazing happened after I wrote about him. People started visiting Beau’s grave in England, leaving flowers, and sending me pictures of the cross that bears his name.
So he, and perhaps all he stood for, will not be forgotten after all.
May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.
[Photo by Carole Green.]
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Beginning in 1943, the War Department published a series of pamphlets for U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II. Titled Army Talks, the series was designed "to help [the personnel] become better-informed men and women and therefore better soldiers."
On March 24, 1945, the topic for the week was “FASCISM!”
“You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer at a civilian job or at school and many of you are risking your very lives,” the pamphlet explained, “because of a thing called fascism.” But, the publication asked, what is fascism? “Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze,” it said, “nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it.”
Fascism, the U.S. government document explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”
“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.
Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”
Fascists understood that “the fundamental principle of democracy—faith in the common sense of the common people—was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite few,” it explained, “[s]o they fought democracy…. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled.”
Americans should not be fooled into thinking that fascism could not come to America, the pamphlet warned; after all, “[w]e once laughed Hitler off as a harmless little clown with a funny mustache.” And indeed, the U.S. had experienced “sorry instances of mob sadism, lynchings, vigilantism, terror, and suppression of civil liberties. We have had our hooded gangs, Black Legions, Silver Shirts, and racial and religious bigots. All of them, in the name of Americanism, have used undemocratic methods and doctrines which…can be properly identified as ‘fascist.’”
The War Department thought it was important for Americans to understand the tactics fascists would use to take power in the United States. They would try to gain power “under the guise of ‘super-patriotism’ and ‘super-Americanism.’” And they would use three techniques:
First, they would pit religious, racial, and economic groups against one another to break down national unity. Part of that effort to divide and conquer would be a “well-planned ‘hate campaign’ against minority races, religions, and other groups.”
Second, they would deny any need for international cooperation, because that would fly in the face of their insistence that their supporters were better than everyone else. “In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations.”
Third, fascists would insist that “the world has but two choices—either fascism or communism, and they label as ‘communists’ everyone who refuses to support them.”
It is “vitally important” to learn to spot native fascists, the government said, “even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.”
The only way to stop the rise of fascism in the United States, the document said, “is by making our democracy work and by actively cooperating to preserve world peace and security.” In the midst of the insecurity of the modern world, the hatred at the root of fascism “fulfills a triple mission.” By dividing people, it weakens democracy. “By getting men to hate rather than to think,” it prevents them “from seeking the real cause and a democratic solution to the problem.” By falsely promising prosperity, it lures people to embrace its security.
“Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance,” it warned. Freedom requires “being alert and on guard against the infringement not only of our own freedom but the freedom of every American. If we permit discrimination, prejudice, or hate to rob anyone of his democratic rights, our own freedom and all democracy is threatened.” And if “we want to make certain that fascism does not come to America, we must make certain that it does not thrive anywhere in the world.”
Seventy-eight years after the publication of “FASCISM!” with its program for recognizing that political system and stopping it from taking over the United States, President Joe Biden today at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, honored those who gave their lives fighting to preserve democracy. “On this day, we come together again to reflect, to remember, but above all, to recommit to the future our fallen heroes fought for, …a future grounded in freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, opportunity, and…justice.”
“[T]he truest memorial to their lives,” the president said, is to act “every day to ensure that our democracy endures, our Constitution endures, and the soul of our nation and our decency endures.”
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“[O]ne of the things that I hear some of you guys saying is, ‘Why doesn’t Biden say what a good deal it is?’” President Joe Biden said to reporters yesterday afternoon before leaving the White House on the Marine One helicopter. “Why would Biden say what a good deal it is before the vote? You think that’s going to help me get it passed? No. That’s why you guys don’t bargain very well.”
Biden’s unusually revealing comment about the budget negotiations was actually a statement about his presidency. Unlike his Republican opponents, he has refused to try to win points by playing the media and instead has worked behind the scenes to govern, sometimes staying out of negotiations, sometimes being central to them.
The result has been, as Daily Beast columnist David Rothkopf summarized today, historic. Biden has worked to replace 40 years of supply-side economics with policies to rebuild the nation’s economy and infrastructure by supporting ordinary Americans. The American Rescue Plan gave the United States a faster economic recovery from the COVID pandemic than any other major economy. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has already funded more than 32,000 projects in more than 4,500 communities in all 50 states, Washington D.C., and U.S. territories.
The Inflation Reduction Act made the biggest investment in addressing climate change in our history, and according to University of Washington transportation analyst Jack Conness, it and the CHIPS and Science Act have already attracted over $220 billion in private investment, much of it going to Republican-dominated states: Tennessee, Nevada, North Carolina, and Oklahoma have each attracted more than $4 billion; Ohio, more than $6 billion; Arizona, more than $7 billion; South Carolina, more than $9 billion; and Georgia, more than $13 billion.
Victoria Guida in Politico yesterday reported that the reordering of the economy under Biden and the Democrats has reversed the widening income gap between wage workers and upper-income professionals that has been growing for the past 40 years. The pay of those making an average of $12.50 an hour grew by almost 6% from 2020 to 2022, even after inflation.
Those gains are now at risk as pandemic measures end and the Fed raises interest rates to bring down inflation, although the wage increases are only a piece of the inflation puzzle: Talmon Joseph Smith and Joe Rennison of the New York Times today reported that companies raising their prices to “protect…profits” are “adding to inflation.” In other words, companies pushed prices beyond normal profit margins during the pandemic and the economic recovery, then maintained those higher profit margins with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and continue to maintain them now.
The fight over the debt ceiling is both an example of the different approaches to negotiation on the part of Biden and Republicans like House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and part of the larger question about the direction of the country.
On January 13, 2023, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned McCarthy that the Treasury was about to hit the borrowing limit established by Congress and that she would have to resort to extraordinary measures in order to meet obligations until Congress raised the debt ceiling.
On March 9, as part of the usual budget process, Biden produced a detailed budget, which was a wish list of programs that would continue to build the country from the bottom up. He told McCarthy he would meet with the speaker as soon as he produced his own budget, which McCarthy could not do because the far-right House Freedom Caucus (these days being abbreviated as HFC) wanted extreme cuts to which other Republicans would never agree.
On April 26 the House Republicans passed a bill that would require $4.8 trillion in cuts but was quite vague about how it would do so apart from getting rid of much of the legislation the Democrats had just passed. HFC members said they would not raise the debt ceiling until the Senate passed their bill. That is, they would drive the United States into default, crashing the U.S. and the global economy, until the president and the Democrats agreed to their policies. Even then, they would raise it only until next spring, with the expectation that it would then become a key factor in the 2024 election.
Biden insisted all along that he would not negotiate over the debt ceiling, which pays for money already appropriated under the normal process of Congress and which Congress raised three times under former president Trump even as he added $7.8 trillion to the national debt. Biden said he would happily negotiate over the budget. McCarthy, meanwhile, was out in front of the cameras and on social media insulting Biden and insisting that it was Biden’s fault that talks took so long to get started.
Late Saturday, the two sides announced an agreement “in principle” to raise the debt ceiling for two years—clearing the presidential election. As the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell noted, it protects current spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; keeps tax rates as they are; increases spending on defense and veterans’ programs; leaves most other domestic spending the same; cuts a little from the expanded funding of the Internal Revenue Service; and tweaks both the permitting process for energy projects and the existing work requirements in the food assistance program.
As Rampell points out, “this much-ballyhooed ‘deal’ doesn’t seem terribly different from whatever budget agreement would have materialized anyway later this year, during the usual annual appropriations process, under divided government. To President Biden’s credit, the most objectionable ransoms that Republicans had been demanding are all gone.”
Now the measure has to get through both parties, with congressmembers back in Washington today after the holiday weekend. Freedom Caucus members are howling at the deal. Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) is threatening to bottle the measure up in the House Rules Committee, which decides what bills make it to the floor. The Freedom Caucus forced McCarthy to stack that committee with far-right extremists as part of his deal for the speakership (it has nine Republicans but only four Democrats on it). But Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggests that McCarthy’s alliance with Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) might pay off here, since the two have thrown their weight behind the measure.
Even if the measure does pass before the June 5 deadline when the Treasury runs out of money, it has had an important effect. As Rampell noted, it has weakened the United States. It has enabled both China and Russia to portray the U.S. as unstable and an unreliable partner. As if to prove that criticism, Biden had to cancel a trip to Australia and Papua New Guinea, where he was strengthening the Indo-Pacific alliances designed to weaken Chinese dominance of the region. (And Russia continues to involve itself in U.S. politics: today Tara Reade, the woman who in 2020 accused Biden of sexually assaulting her, appeared on Russian television next to alleged spy Maria Butina to say she has fled to Russia out of fear for her life in the U.S.)
Writing in Foreign Policy, Howard W. French sees a more sweeping problem with the debt ceiling fight: it “highlights America’s warped priorities.” “[W]hen a rich and powerful country finds it easier to cut back on the way that it invests in its people, in education, in science, and in making sure that the weakest among them are not completely left behind than to curtail useless and profligate weapons spending,” he said, “there are reasons to worry about the foundations of its power.”
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Tonight the House passed a bill to suspend the debt ceiling for two years, enabling the Treasury to borrow money to prevent a default. More Democrats than Republicans rallied to the measure, with 165 Democrats and 149 Republicans voting in favor, for a final vote of 314 to 117. Seventy-one Republicans and 46 Democrats opposed the bill.
The votes revealed a bitter divide in the Republican Party, as the far-right House Freedom Caucus fervently opposed the measure; Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) for example, called it a “turd sandwich.” Florida governor Ron DeSantis also came out against it, saying it leaves the country “careening toward bankruptcy.”
The far right insists the measure does not provide the cuts they demand. Last night’s nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office scoring of the bill offered them ammunition when it said that the additional work requirement imposed on able-bodied people aged 18–54 without dependents to receive food benefits is outweighed by the expansion of those benefits to veterans, unhoused people, and children aging out of foster care. The CBO estimates that the measure will add 78,000 people a month to food assistance programs, adding $2.1 billion in spending over the next ten years.
Despite their fury, though, the far right in the House appears to be backing down from challenging Representative Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) speakership. Their angry news conferences seem mostly to be performances for their base, and to answer them, McCarthy today said on the Fox News Channel that he was creating a “commission” to “look at” cutting the budget that the president “walled off” from cuts, including the mandatory spending on Medicare and Social Security.
But, as Josh Marshall pointed out in Talking Points Memo today, the Republican base no longer seems to care much about fiscal issues. Instead, they are pushing the cultural issues at the heart of illiberal democracy: anti-LGBTQ laws, antiabortion laws, anti-immigration laws.
Former president Trump is making those themes central to his reelection campaign. Yesterday he released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. Our current policy that anyone born in the United States is a citizen, he claims, is “based on a historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.” He promises to make “clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic US citizenship.”
Trump is picking up an idea from his presidential term that immigrants are flocking to the U.S. as “birth tourists” so their children will have dual citizenship, but the estimate from the immigration-restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies that birth tourism accounts for 26,000 of the approximately 3.7 million births in the U.S. each year has been shown to be wildly high. Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is an attack on immigration itself, echoing people like Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who insists that immigration weakens a nation by diluting its native-born people with outsiders.
Trump’s attack on the idea of birthright citizenship as a “historical myth” is a perversion of our history. It matters. In the nineteenth century, the United States enshrined in its fundamental law the idea that there would not be different levels of citizenship in this country. Although not honored in practice, that idea, and its place in the law, gave those excluded from it the language and the tools to fight for equality. Over time, they have increasingly expanded those included in it.
The Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race—not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans faced discriminatory state laws. Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
In 1868, after the Civil War had ended the legal system of human enslavement, the American people added to the Constitution the Fourteenth Amendment, whose very first sentence reads: “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.” Congress wrote that sentence to overturn the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”
The Fourteenth Amendment legally made Black men citizens equal to white men.
But did it include the children of immigrants? In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, the Chinese Exclusion Act declared that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens. But what about their children who were born in the United States?
Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.
Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.
That decision has stood ever since, as a majority of Americans have recognized the principle behind the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as the one central to the United States: “that all men are created equal” and that a nation based on that idea draws strength from all of its people. Over time, we have expanded our definition of who is included in that equality.
Now the right wing is trying to contract equality again, excluding many of us from its rights and duties. The Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision makes women a separate and lesser class of citizen; anti-LGBTQ legislation denigrates sexual minorities. Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship makes that attack on equality explicit, calling equality a “myth” and attempting to enshrine inequality as the only real theme of our history.
The concept of equality means we all have equal rights. It also means we all owe an equal allegiance to the country and that we all should be equal before the law, a principle the former president has reason to dislike.
Today, Katelyn Polantz, Paula Reid, and Kaitlan Collins of CNN today broke the story that federal prosecutors have an audio recording of the former president admitting he kept a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran. The material on the tape, which was recorded at his Bedminster, New Jersey, property and appears to indicate that the document was in his hands, shows that Trump understood he had taken a classified document and that he understood that there were limits to his ability to declassify records.
The recording also appears to suggest that at least one of the documents Trump took when he left office had enormous monetary value. As former Senior Foreign Service member Luis Moreno tweeted: “You can bet that if the TS/SCI dox involved military action against Iran, there would be a couple of countries willing to pay a king’s ransom for it.”
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Late tonight the Senate passed H.R. 3746, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, suspending the debt ceiling and cutting certain federal spending. President Joe Biden has promised to sign it tomorrow, preventing a government default. Forty-four Democrats and two Independents—Angus King (I-ME) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ)—voted yes, along with 17 Republicans. Four Democrats and Independent Bernie Sanders (I-VT) voted no, along with 31 Republicans. The final tally to pass the measure was 63 to 36.
“Democrats are feeling very good tonight,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said. “We’ve saved the country from the scourge of default.”
Republicans brought the nation to the brink of default with their insistence that they opposed runaway government spending, but their demands did not square with that argument. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said that the $21 billion cut in funding to the Internal Revenue Service, for example, will result in $40 billion in lost revenue, increasing the deficit by $19 billion.
In other economic news, the Biden administration today announced actions designed to address racial bias in the valuation of homes.
This sounds sort of in the weeds for administration action, I know, but it is actually an important move for addressing the nation’s wealth inequality. In 2019 a study from the Federal Reserve showed that white American families had a median net worth of $188,100, Hispanic or Latino families had a net worth of $36,200, and Black American families had a median net worth of $24,100.
Homeownership is the most important factor in creating generational wealth—that is, wealth that passes from one generation to the next—both because homeownership essentially forces savings as people pay mortgages, and because homes tend to appreciate in value.
But a 2021 study by the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, more popularly known as Freddie Mac, showed that real estate appraisers are twice as likely to undervalue minority-owned property relative to contract price for which the home sells, than they are to undervalue homes owned by white Americans.
The story of lower valuation came to popular attention after a Black couple living near San Francisco applied for a loan and received an initial valuation far too low for them to qualify for that loan. Shocked, since the same house had been appraised at almost a half a million dollars higher the year before, the couple removed all traces of their ownership of the house and asked a white friend to stand in as the owner before a new appraiser evaluated the worth of the property. That new appraisal came back a half a million dollars higher than the lowball one.
(The couple sued, and the case was settled in February 2022).
Two years ago, the Biden administration announced a sweeping effort to “root out racial and ethnic bias in home evaluations.” Today it bolstered those efforts to “ensure that every American who buys a home has the same opportunities to build generational wealth through homeownership.” They call for fixing algorithms to ensure that home values are accurately assessed, creating pathways for consumers to challenge low assessments, and increasing the numbers of trained appraisers.
There is a reason that the administration has centered its housing policies on June 1. This is the anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, when in 1921 white gangs destroyed the prosperous Greenwood district of that city, which was home to more than 10,000 Black Americans. It wiped out 35 blocks with more than 1,200 homes and businesses and took hundreds of Black lives, robbing Black families of generational wealth and the opportunities that come with it.
In 1921, Greenwood, known as “Black Wall Street,” was estimated to be the richest Black community in the United States. The destruction of May 31 to June 1, 1921, changed all that. Residents of Greenwood filed $1.8 million in damage claims—more than $27 million in today’s dollars—against the city, but all but one of the claims were denied when the city was found not liable for damages caused by mobs. (A white pawnshop owner was compensated for the guns stolen from his store.) Insurance didn’t help, either: insurance companies claimed that damage caused by “riots” was not covered by their policies.
In a 2018 article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Chris M. Messer, Thomas E. Shriver, and Alison E. Adams estimated that the destruction in Tulsa might well have amounted to more than $200 million in today’s dollars.
Greenwood’s Black residents nonetheless pooled their resources and rebuilt the district, despite the system of “redlining” by mortgage companies that deemed parts of Greenwood to be credit risks and made it impossible for residents to get mortgages. “Urban renewal” then destroyed the area again in the 1960s through the 1980s as white city planners rezoned the district, built highways through it, and took property through eminent domain.
Vice President Kamala Harris acknowledged the destruction of Greenwood today in a call with reporters. Noting that “[h]omeownership is one of the single most powerful engines of wealth-building available to American families,” she explained that ‘[m]illions rely on the equity in their homes to put their children through college, to fund a startup, to retire with dignity, to create intergenerational prosperity and wealth.” But “for generations, many people of color have been prevented from taking full advantage of the benefits of homeownership.”
The inequalities of the past have persisted in the home appraisal system, Harris said. “[B]ecause their homes are undervalued, Black and Latino people often pay more for their mortgage, receive less when they sell, and are less able to get access to home equity lines of credit—all of which widens the racial wealth gap and deepens longstanding financial inequities.”
“Today,” her Twitter account said, “our Administration is announcing new actions to root out racial bias in home valuations to ensure that all hardworking families can realize the true value of their investment and have a fair shot at the American dream.”
Jonathan Lemire, Adam Cancryn, and Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico reported today that White House officials urged allies to downplay their substantial victory on the debt ceiling crisis and the related budget negotiations, afraid of sparking Republican opposition and eager to be seen as the adults in the room.
But they needn’t have worried. Today, President Biden tripped over a sandbag left in his path as he was jogging away from the center stage of the U.S. Air Force Academy graduation in Colorado after giving the commencement address. He appeared fine after the fall, but it is dominating right-wing social media, the debt ceiling crisis already forgotten.
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Three years ago today, on June 2, 2020, days after then–Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes, Martha Raddatz of ABC snapped the famous and chilling photograph of law enforcement officers in camouflage, their names and units hidden, standing in rows on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Mr. Floyd’s murder sparked protests across the country, and Trump used those protests as a pretext to crack down on his opponents. Just the day before, after a call with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump told state governors on a phone call: “You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time.... You’ve got to arrest people, you have to track people, you have to put them in jail for 10 years and you’ll never see this stuff again.” Then he used a massive police presence wielding tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash-bang explosives to clear peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters from Lafayette Square across from the White House.
Tonight, President Joe Biden addressed the nation from the Oval Office to emphasize that democracy depends on bipartisanship.” [W]hen I ran for President,” he began, “I was told the days of bipartisanship were over and that Democrats and Republicans could no longer work together. But I refused to believe that, because America can never give in to that way of thinking…. [T]he only way American democracy can function is through compromise and consensus, and that’s what I worked to do as your President…to forge a bipartisan agreement where it’s possible and where it’s needed.”
While he noted that he has signed more than 350 bipartisan laws in his time in office, his major focus today was on the bipartisan budget agreement passed by the House and Senate after months of wrangling to get House Republicans to agree to lift the debt ceiling. Biden will sign it tomorrow, averting the nation’s first-ever default.
Biden characterized those threatening to force the U.S. into default as “extreme voices,” who were willing to cause a catastrophe. The economy, which continues to add jobs at a cracking pace—another 339,000 in May, according to the numbers released today by the U.S. Bureau of Labor—would have been thrown into recession. As many as 8 million Americans would have lost their jobs, retirement savings would have been decimated, borrowing for everything from mortgages to government funding would have become much more expensive, and “America’s standing as the most trusted, reliable financial partner in the world would have been shattered.”
“It would have taken years to climb out of that hole,” he said.
But the extremists were sidelined, and the House Republicans and the White House reached an agreement. Biden went out of his way to praise House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and his team, saying that the two negotiating teams “were able to get along and get things done. We were straightforward with one another, completely honest with one another, and respectful with one another. Both sides operated in good faith. Both sides kept their word.”
This was not entirely true—McCarthy constantly attacked Biden in the media—but Biden was hammering on the image of bipartisanship. Yesterday, Jonathan Lemire, Adam Cancryn, and Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico reported that Biden and his team plan to make the case for reelection on their ability to negotiate deals that get things done for the American people, acting as the “adults in the room” in contrast to Republican extremists. The budget deal that led to the suspension of the debt ceiling is a major illustration of that position.
Biden also praised House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), claiming that “[t]hey acted responsibly and put the good of the country ahead of politics.”
The solution to the debt ceiling crisis is a major victory for Biden’s team not only because it happened, but also because it leaves Biden’s key priorities intact, not least because they are popular and Republicans did not want to go into 2024 having demanded unpopular cuts.
Biden noted that the measure will cut spending as Republicans wanted (although not necessarily through the measures they insisted on adding), but reiterated that it is the Republican Party that has been on a spending spree. “We’re all on a much more fiscally responsible course than the one I inherited when I took office,” Biden said. “When I came to office, the deficit had increased every year the previous four years. And nearly $8 trillion was added to the national debt in the last administration,” while the deficit fell by $1.7 trillion in his first two years in office.
Biden laid out that the deal protects his reworking of the U.S. economy to support ordinary Americans. It protects Social Security and Medicare, as well as healthcare and veterans’ services. It protects the investments in the economy that have enabled the country to add more than 13 million new jobs, including 800,000 jobs in manufacturing. It protects investments in addressing climate change.
Finally, Biden vowed to make the wealthy—those who earn more than $400,000 a year—pay their fair share in taxes.
“I know bipartisanship is hard and unity is hard,” he concluded, “but we can never stop trying, because in moments like this one—the ones we just faced, where the American economy and the world economy is at risk of collapsing—there is no other way.
“No matter how tough our politics gets, we need to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans. Treat each other with dignity and respect. To join forces as Americans to stop shouting, lower the temperature, and work together to pursue progress, secure prosperity, and keep the promise of America for everybody.”
What a difference three years can make.
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Spring has sprung here, and everything is a bright young green.
Going to leave you with a photo from this year's first trip out on the water, late one afternoon this week, while I see about catching up on some sleep.
I'll see you tomorrow.
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Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, a staunch supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his invasion of Ukraine, last week awarded the First Degree of the Order of Glory and Honor from the Russian Orthodox Church to Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.
Orbán has dismantled Hungary’s liberal democratic government in favor of what he calls “illiberal” or “Christian” democracy that rejects LGBTQ and women’s rights, claiming that the equality valued by liberal democracies undermines traditional virtue. Kirill called out for praise Orbán’s “great attention to the preservation of Christian values in society and the strengthening of the institution of family and marriage.”
This award makes explicit the link between the Putin regime, which has been committing war crimes against Ukraine’s people, and Orbán, who is such a hero to America’s right wing that the Conservative Political Action Conference has twice gathered in Hungary, most recently just last month. Orbán has called for Trump’s reelection.
The common thread among these groups is a rejection of democracy, with its emphasis on equality before the law, and the embrace of a hierarchical world in which some people are better than others and have the right to rule.
In Poland today, an estimated half a million people marched in the streets to protest the loss of rights for women and LGBTQ people amid an attack on democracy by the nationalist Law and Justice party (PiS), which condemned the protest as a “march of hate.” Leaders for PiS claim they are only trying to protect traditional Christian values from Western ideas.
Today is the 34th anniversary of the first democratic elections in Poland in 1989 as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. Former Polish prime minister and president of the European Council Donald Tusk, who called for the march, told the crowd: "Democracy dies in silence but you've raised your voice for democracy today, silence is over, we will shout.”
Today is also the 34th anniversary of the Chinese government’s crackdown on demonstrations for democracy in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, with troops firing on their own citizens.
For 22 weeks now, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been protesting in the streets against the plans of right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to overhaul the judiciary, weakening the country’s system of checks and balances by shifting power to Netanyahu, and threatening the rights of minorities and marginalized groups.
In Sudan today, the war between two military generals who seized power from a democratic government continues. Tens of thousands of Sudan’s people have fled the country since the fighting broke out in April.
The political career of Florida governor Ron DeSantis is the epitome of Orbán’s “Christian democracy” come to the United States. DeSantis has imitated Orbán’s politics, striking at the principles of liberal democracy with attacks on LGBTQ Americans, abortion rights, academic freedom, and the ability of businesses to react to market forces rather than religious imperatives. Last week he told an audience that “the woke mind virus represents a war on the truth so we will wage a war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education, we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of congress. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. We will make woke ideology leave it to the dustbin of history; it’s gone.”
But DeSantis’s speech was a perversion of the real speech on which he based it.
On June 4, 1940, nine months into the Second World War, British prime minister Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons. British, Canadian, and French destroyers along with dozens of merchant ships and a flotilla of small boats had just managed to evacuate more than 338,000 Allied soldiers from Dunkirk, in northern France, as German troops advanced.
Britain was fighting fascism, and Churchill warned his people that the war would be neither easy nor quick. But, he promised, “we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender....”
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This morning, CBS News cameras captured on video the sight of former president Trump’s lawyers entering the Department of Justice.
Shortly after their two-hour meeting ended, a message appeared on the Trump-affiliated social media site Truth Social, in all caps: “HOW CAN DOJ POSSIBLY CHARGE ME, WHO DID NOTHING WRONG, WHEN NO OTHER PRESIDENT’S [sic] WERE CHARGED, WHEN JOE BIDEN WON’T BE CHARGED FOR ANYTHING, INCLUDING THE FACT THAT HE HAS 1,850 BOXES, MUCH OF IT CLASSIFIED, AND SOME DATING BACK TO HIS SENATE DAY WHEN EVEN DEMOCRAT SENATORS ARE SHOCKED. ALSO, PRESIDENT CLINTON HAD DOCUMENTS, AND WON IN COURT. CROOKED HILLARY DELETED 33,000 EMAILS, MANY CLASSIFIED, AND WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO BEING CHARGED! ONLY TRUMP - THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME!”
It appears there is reason to suspect Trump’s lawyers delivered to the former president bad news about Trump’s refusal to return to the government—that is, to the American people—the classified documents he stole when he left the White House.
The Twitter account of the Republican National Committee promptly tweeted footage of House Oversight Committee chair Representative James Comer (R-KY) suggesting that the “Biden family” has engaged in “a pattern of bribery, where payments would be made through shell accounts and multiple banks,” in a system of “money laundering.” There is no evidence of these accusations, and their framing of Biden as part of a “family corruption scandal” is pretty transparently designed to make the Bidens look like the Trumps, although there is no Biden family business as there is a Trump Organization.
Republican leaders have tiptoed around former president Trump even if they were hoping to move him offstage, but that caution broke today when the governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu, who in February said he would vote for Trump if he is the 2024 nominee, warned in a Washington Post op-ed that the Republican Party must break free of Trump and the culture wars or face “electoral irrelevance.”
Sununu announced that he would not seek the party’s presidential nomination himself, keeping his powder dry to try to correct the Republican Party’s course. In a clear shot at the many Republicans jumping into the race, he warned that “candidates should not get into this race to further a vanity campaign, to sell books or to audition to serve as Donald Trump’s vice president.” He promised to work for whichever candidate he thought best positioned to win in 2024.
Sununu called for returning the party to “classic conservative principles of individual liberty, low taxes and local control,” saying that Republicans need to “expand beyond the culture wars that alienate independents, young voters and suburban moms” and appeal to new voters on substantive issues. He also took on the issue of abortion, which has created a groundswell of opposition to Republicans, saying that “Republicans should recognize that every time they open their mouths to talk about banning abortion, an independent voter joins the Democrats.”
Indeed, as Kate Riga of Talking Points Memo wrote today, the abortion issue is suddenly toxic for Republicans. After years of calling for the end of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, Republicans got their wish almost a year ago with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. Republican-dominated states promptly began to pass antiabortion laws at the state level. But a majority of voters actually support abortion access, even in Republican-dominated states. They are eager to restore abortion rights, while the evangelical base of the Republican Party wants a federal abortion ban.
Republicans running for president are now trying to avoid the issue, since they need to support a federal ban on abortion to win base voters but will repel a majority of general voters if they do. Putting Republicans into power will likely mean a federal ban that will run badly against the popular will. It is not clear how Republican candidates will square this circle, but it is unlikely to go away simply because Republicans try not to talk about it.
While many eyes in the United States are focused on domestic political events, today’s news also included reports that the Ukrainian military may have begun its counteroffensive to push Russian invaders out of Ukraine (although Ukrainian officials denied it, saying that no single action would indicate that a counteroffensive had begun).
The U.K. Ministry of Defence reported that there has been a “substantial increase in fighting along numerous sectors of the front, including those which have been relatively quiet for several months.” It also said that the feud between the mercenary Wagner Group and the Russian Ministry of Defence has “reached an unprecedented level.” It is not clear they will continue to cooperate.
Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, and Kylie Atwood of CNN reported today that Ukraine has encouraged sympathizers and agents in Russia to sabotage targets there, diverting Russian attention from Ukraine and bringing the threat of war home to Russians.
Tonight, part of the Nova Kakhovka Dam was breached, sending a flood down the Dnipro River. The breach will create flooding downstream. It will also affect drinking water, and the electricity for more than 3 million people. It threatens the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, whose reactors are cooled with water from the reservoir above the dam, but tonight the Ukrainian state nuclear energy company Energoatom said the situation is under control.
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Far-right Republican representatives from the House Freedom Caucus today launched a battle against House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), accusing him of violating the agreement he made with them in order to get their backing for the speakership. Angry at the passage of the deal to suspend the debt ceiling and keep the United States from defaulting, they blocked two bills today and apparently have decided to oppose all legislation that comes before the House unless McCarthy puts in writing what they understand to be the deal they made.
Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) said: “The end game is freedom, less government, less spending.”
If the far right is trying to dismantle the federal government, the White House is working to advertise the effects of its use of the federal government for the American people.
Today the administration unveiled a new website called “Investing in America.” The site tracks both the public infrastructure and the private investments sparked by the laws like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, breaking those investments down by category.
While the Republicans since 1980 have claimed that tax cuts and deregulation would spur private investment in the economy, it appears that Biden’s policy of public investment to encourage private investment has, in fact, worked. So far, during his term, private companies have announced $479 billion in investments under the new system, while the government has directed more than $220 billion towards roads, bridges, airports, public transportation, addressing climate change, and providing clean water. The website locates and identifies the more than 32,000 new projects underway.
The site also highlights the high rates of employment in the U.S. and the addition of new manufacturing jobs, as well as lower costs for prescription drugs and health insurance.
Separately, the administration noted that its plan for migration across the border is “working as intended.” The pandemic-era Title 42, put in place by Trump in early 2020 to stop the spread of COVID, went out of operation at midnight on May 12, and while Republicans insisted the reversion to the normal laws governing immigration would create a crisis, in fact unlawful crossings have dropped more than 70%. Still, the administration emphasized yet again today that Congress must address “our broken immigration and asylum system.”
While President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are returning to the traditional idea—embraced by members of both parties before 1980—that investing in the country benefits everyone, much of the Freedom Caucus has thrown in its lot with former president Donald Trump, who calls the Democrats’ ideology “communism.” So convinced were Trump’s supporters that Democrats should not be allowed to govern that they tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
One of the key figures in that attempt was Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, who as a representative from North Carolina was a founder of the House Freedom Caucus (along with Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Ron DeSantis of Florida, among others). As Trump’s chief of staff, Meadows was close to the center of the attempt to keep former president Trump in the White House. His aide Cassidy Hutchinson provided some of the most compelling—and damning—testimony before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Meadows refused to cooperate with that committee and was found in contempt of Congress, but the Department of Justice declined to prosecute. When he seemed largely to drop out of public view, there was speculation about his role in the investigations into Trump’s role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
This afternoon, Jonathan Swan, Michael S. Schmidt, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times reported that Meadows has testified before a federal grand jury in the investigations led by Special Counsel Jack Smith. It is not clear if Meadows testified in the matter of the election sabotage or in the matter of documents taken from the White House when Trump left office, or both. One of his lawyers refused to comment but told the New York Times reporters that “Mr. Meadows has maintained a commitment to tell the truth where he has a legal obligation to do so.”
I cannot help but contrast that statement with one from another American leader seventy-nine years ago.
On June 5, 1944, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was preparing to send Allied troops across the English Channel to France, where he hoped they would push the German troops back across Europe. More than 5,000 ships waited to transport more than 150,000 soldiers to France before daybreak the following morning. The fighting to take Normandy would not be easy. The beaches the men would assault were tangled in barbed wire, booby trapped, and defended by German soldiers in concrete bunkers.
On the afternoon of June 5, as the Allied soldiers, their faces darkened with soot and cocoa, milled around waiting to board the ships, Eisenhower went to see the men he was almost certainly sending to their deaths. He joked with the troops, as apparently upbeat as his orders to them had been when he told them Operation Overlord had launched. “The tide has turned!” his letter had read. “The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!”
But after cheering his men on, he went back to his headquarters and wrote another letter. Designed to blame himself alone if Operation Overlord failed, it read:
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
The letter was never delivered. Operation Overlord was a success, launching the final assault in which western democracy, defended by ordinary men and women, would destroy European fascism.
A year later, General Eisenhower was welcomed home as the hero who had won World War Two. But for all those noisy accolades, it was the letter of June 5, that he wrote in secret, alone and unsure whether the future would find him right or wrong but willing to take both the risk and the blame if he failed, that proved his heroism.
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Three more candidates have entered the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination this week. Former vice president Mike Pence, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and current North Dakota governor Doug Burgum join former South Carolina governor and Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, South Carolina senator Tim Scott, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, as well as a few others and former president Donald Trump in their hope of winning the nomination.
Taken together, the different candidates offer a window into the current Republican Party. Haley and DeSantis are embracing the cultural issues to which the Trump base is wedded. At a CNN town hall on Sunday, Haley singled out transgender girls as one of her key issues, linking (without any evidence) their presence on girls’ sports teams to an April study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that showed a rise in the number of teenaged girls contemplating self-harm between 2019 and 2021, years that covered the height of the pandemic. (In fact, LGBTQ teenagers have a higher rate of thoughts of self-harm than their straight, gender-conforming peers.)
DeSantis has reached for the Trump base by focusing on immigration. That focus has backfired as unlawful border crossings have dropped more than 70% since President Biden’s ending of the pandemic-related Title 42, and as a new Florida law designed to “scare people from coming to Florida” has resulted in immigrants, whose labor is vital to the state, leaving it.
Apparently trying to reclaim the narrative, in the last week, DeSantis has sent two charter flights taking migrants who have legally applied for asylum in the U.S. from the Texas border to Sacramento, California. While the DeSantis administration claims the migrants went “voluntarily,” they say they were tricked into thinking they would get work in California. One set of the migrants were dropped off outside the Catholic Archdiocese of Sacramento, which had not been alerted they were coming and was closed.
Pence, Hutchinson, and Christie are directly attacking Trump, Pence by saying the events of January 6, 2021, make Trump unfit to be president, Hutchinson by saying Trump should withdraw because of the criminal charges he’s facing, and Christie by attacking Trump and his family as grifters. At Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire yesterday, Christie reminded the audience: “Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis…. You think it’s because he’s some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it’s because he was sitting next to the President of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis?... That’s your money he stole and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic.”
Scott and Burgum seem to be trying to offer exhausted Republican voters a rest. Scott is trying to offer an optimistic vision of the United States amidst the apocalyptic narratives of his rivals, denying that systematic racism is a societal problem, for example, while Burgum’s chief attribute seems to be an embrace of pre-2016 Republicanism and a low-key presentation.
That scrum of Republican hopefuls—none of whom is polling well—is the backdrop to this evening’s story from Andrew Feinberg of the Independent that prosecutors from the Department of Justice are ready to ask a grand jury in Washington, D.C., to indict former president Trump on charges that he has violated the Espionage Act and obstructed justice.
Aside from anything else, the Espionage Act includes language that anyone who “willfully retains…any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation… and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it” can be punished by as many as ten years in prison.
The story says the jury could vote as early as tomorrow, but it could also be delayed until next week, or beyond. It is worth remembering that this Department of Justice has not been known to leak, and that the sooner Trump is indicted—which certainly looks likely, at least in the case of the missing documents—the sooner his supporters can jump to another candidate, which might suggest a rival camp pushing the story that an indictment will come soon. That same calculation might have been part of what was behind Trump’s insistence to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that he has “NOT been told he’s getting indicted.” And, he added on Truth Social, “I shouldn't be because I’ve done NOTHING wrong.”
Troubles in the Republican Party are not limited to the 2024 hopefuls. House Republicans continue to fight against House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), angry over the budget deal under which he pushed through a measure to suspend the debt ceiling. McCarthy tried to head off their protests with a promise to establish a commission to cut Social Security and Medicare, but it was not enough. Yesterday, members of the House Freedom Caucus said they would not permit votes on anything until he put in writing what they believed was the deal he made to get their votes for the speakership; that revolt continued today.
Tonight, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported that McCarthy appears to have agreed to let appropriators write bills that come in below the agreed-upon spending levels. Sherman’s colleague John Bresnahan noted: “The Fiscal Responsibility Act isn’t even a week old & Republicans in the House and Senate are already trying to redo it.”
In other news, CNN has parted ways with Chris Licht, its chief executive officer and chair, who had sought to move the network to what he considered the center of American politics. He had done so by highlighting “both sides” of today’s political arguments, firing leading journalists he thought too far on the left and centering Trump in a town hall that became the former president’s triumphant reentry to the political stage as he lied and bullied the interviewer. Some pundits have taken Licht’s fall as a sign that there is no longer a powerful center in American politics, but my own guess is the opposite: that most of us want news based in reality rather than media giving platforms to people who are openly lying.
Yale scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder today applied this idea to coverage of the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine, which has rained down humanitarian, ecological, and economic disaster on Ukrainians as they appear to be launching a counteroffensive to the Russian invasion of their country.
Snyder warned journalists not to “bothsides” the story by offering equal time to both sides. “What Russian spokespersons have said has almost always been untrue, whereas what Ukrainian spokespersons have said has largely been reliable. The juxtaposition suggests a false equality,” he wrote. “The story doesn't start at the moment the dam explodes. For the last fifteen months Russia has been killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, whereas Ukraine has been trying to protect its people and the structures that keep them alive.” “Objectivity does not mean treating an event as a coin flip between two public statements,” he said. “It demands thinking about the objects and the settings that readers require for understanding amidst uncertainty.”
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This morning the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Allen v. Milligan, a case that challenged the Alabama legislature’s redistricting of the state after the 2020 census on the grounds that the new districts had been configured to pack the state’s growing numbers of Black voters into a single district and thus dilute their vote. Such discrimination based on race, plaintiffs charged, violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA).
District courts agreed with the plaintiffs and told the state it couldn’t use the new map, but in February 2022 the Supreme Court issued a stay of the injunction prohibiting that map. The Supreme Court ruling left the Alabama map intact for the 2022 election. Legal scholar Stephen Vladeck noted that the decision was part of the court’s recent use of the “shadow docket,” unsigned, unexplained orders issued without a hearing.
Today’s 5–4 decision upheld the verdicts of the lower courts, agreeing that the new Alabama map was, after all, illegal, because it violates Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits the denial of the right to vote on account of race. This leaves intact the ability of plaintiffs to sue when states appear to discriminate against minority voters. Similar lawsuits are pending in ten different states.
But, as Vladeck notes, the Supreme Court’s February 2022 decision leaving the discriminatory map in Alabama, as well as similar maps in other states, in place for the November election, is likely responsible for the Republicans’ current majority in the House of Representatives. The Cook Political Report, which follows elections, immediately changed their ratings for the leanings of five House districts after news of the Supreme Court decision.
That House majority is currently at an impasse that makes it impossible to conduct business. The extremist House Freedom Caucus (HFC) has revolted against House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) because of the budget deal he cut with President Biden before he would agree to raise the debt ceiling. Members of the HFC are demanding deeper cuts than McCarthy agreed to. The revolt of the far right puts into danger crucial spending bills, raising fears of a government shutdown in the fall.
To placate the extremists, McCarthy has apparently agreed to take up two bills: one to kill a Biden-backed gun regulation and another to push even more strongly against abortion rights. This move, which flies in the face of popular opinion, has angered Republicans in battleground districts, who are revolting against measures that will hurt them at home. It also runs the risk of alienating Democrats McCarthy will need to pass spending measures if the far right refuses to vote for them.
The extremism of today’s Republican Party grew in large part from the work of televangelist Pat Robertson, who died today at age 93. The son of a segregationist southern Democratic senator, Baptist minister Robertson urged evangelical Christians to vote and made them a core constituency of the Republican Party. Paving the way for those today calling for an end to liberal democracy, Robertson blamed LGBTQ Americans and women for secularizing the United States, which he saw as a tragedy and frequently blamed for natural disasters.
That political ideology depended on creating a false picture of what was really going on in the country. The Republican Party has become so wedded to lying about reality that today we saw Florida governor and Republican candidate for president Ron DeSantis circulating fake images of rival candidate Donald Trump embracing right-wing nemesis Dr. Anthony Fauci as a way to discredit Trump.
Trump’s team cried foul at the fake images, but the former president himself relies on manipulating reality to garner political support. CNN national correspondent Kristen Holmes reported today that Trump’s people reached out this week to congressional allies to encourage them to flood the airwaves with a defense of Trump and attacks on special counsel Jack Smith before a possible indictment of the former president.
To that end, Trump’s supporters spent the week trying to gin up outrage over a document they claimed shows that President Biden had taken a bribe as vice president. The document in question appears to be an unverified report that came to the Department of Justice through Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, one that the Trump Department of Justice dropped after it determined that the allegation was not supported by facts. But the practice of influencing politics through sham investigations is one of the Republicans’ key tools, and Trump allies have flooded social media this week insisting that this document is a smoking gun.
They were, of course, trying to set up a defense for the former president’s possible indictment on charges related to his refusal to hand over national security documents he had taken when he left the White House.
This evening, news broke that Trump has, indeed, been indicted by a grand jury in South Florida in connection with the documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago. The indictment is sealed, but there are reports that it includes seven counts of lawbreaking, including at least one related to the Espionage Act. These charges are serious indeed.
Trump is now the first former U.S. president in history to face federal criminal charges (his first indictment, on March 30, was at the state level). As The Guardian’s David Smith puts it, “he really might be going to jail.” Smith—who is a keen observer of American politics—notes that it is hard to figure out what is important and what is not in the general drama around the former president, but this indictment is “genuinely monumental.”
According to Trump’s outraged posts on social media, he has been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami next Tuesday.
Trump’s team asked his allies to jump to his defense, and they did. Trump loyalists implied that the “sham indictment” was destined to distract from the blockbuster story they had invented about Biden. House speaker McCarthy implied that Biden, who has had nothing to do with the Department of Justice investigation, special counsel in charge of the investigation Jack Smith, or the grand jury deliberations, was responsible for launching a political attack on a rival. The third Republican in House leadership, New York representative Elise Stefanik, also defended Trump…in a fundraising email that assured donors their money would go to the “OFFICIAL TRUMP DEFENSE FUND” though, in fact, most of it would be diverted to Stefanik’s operations. Trump, too, lost no time in fundraising off the indictment.
Significantly, though, all Republicans who do not identify with the far right have remained steadfastly silent in the face of the day’s news. The exception has been long-shot presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson, who has called for Trump to end his campaign.
New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who communicates with the Trump camp, says he holed up tonight not with his legal team but with political advisors. CBS News correspondent Robert Costa reports tonight that the camps of Republican rivals think that this news will actually help Trump in the short term, as his base rallies to him, but that the news of what is at stake in the theft of national security documents might well lose him support over time. If another indictment comes from Georgia concerning his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election there, rival camps say he might “bleed out.”
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At 3:00 today, Washington D.C., time, Special Counsel Jack Smith delivered a statement about the recently unsealed indictment charging former president Donald J. Trump on 37 counts of violating national security laws as well as participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Although MAGA Republicans have tried to paint the indictment as a political move by the Biden administration over a piddling error, Smith immediately reminded people that “[t]his indictment was voted by a grand jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida, and I invite everyone to read it in full to understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged.”
The indictment is, indeed, jaw dropping.
It alleges that during his time in the White House, Trump stored in cardboard boxes “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.” The indictment notes that “[t]he unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”
Nonetheless, when Trump ceased to be president after noon on January 20, 2021, he took those boxes, “many of which contained classified documents,” to Mar-a-Lago, where he was living. He “was not authorized to possess or retain those classified documents.” The indictment makes it clear that this was no oversight: Trump was personally involved in packing the boxes and, later, in going through them and in overseeing how they were handled. The employees who worked for him exchanged text messages referring to his personal instructions about them.
Mar-a-Lago was not an authorized location for such documents, but he stored them there anyway, “including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room.” They were stacked in public places, where anyone—including the many foreign nationals who visited Mar-a-Lago—could see them. On December 7, 2021, Trump’s personal aide Waltine Nauta took two pictures of several of the boxes fallen on the floor, with their contents, including a secret document available only to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, spilled onto the floor.
The indictment alleges that Trump showed classified documents to others without security clearances on two occasions, both of which are well documented. One of those occasions was recorded. Trump told the people there that the plan he was showing them was “highly confidential” and “secret.” He added, “See, as president I could have declassified it….Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
This recording undermines his insistence that he believed he could automatically declassify documents; it proves he understood he could not. In addition, the indictment lists Trump’s many statements from 2016 about the importance of protecting classified information, all delivered as attacks on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, whom he accused of mishandling such information. “In my administration,” he said on August 18, 2016, “I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”
The indictment goes on: When the FBI tried to recover the documents, Trump started what Washington Post journalist Jennifer Rubin called a “giant shell game”: he tried to get his lawyer to lie to the FBI and the grand jury, saying Trump did not have more documents; worked with Nauta to move some of the boxes to hide them from Trump’s lawyer, the FBI and the grand jury; tried to get his lawyer to hide or destroy documents; and got another lawyer to certify that all the documents had been produced when he knew they hadn’t.
Nauta lied to the grand jury about his knowledge of what Trump did with the boxes. Both he and Trump have been indicted on multiple counts of obstruction and of engaging in a conspiracy to hide the documents.
Eventually, Trump had many of the boxes moved to his property at Bedminster, New Jersey, where on two occasions he showed documents to people without security clearances. He showed a classified map of a country that is part of an ongoing military operation to a representative of his political action committee.
Trump has been indicted on 31 counts of having “unauthorized possession of, access to, and control over documents relating to the national defense,” for keeping them, and for refusing “to deliver them to the officer and employee of the United States entitled to receive them”: language straight out of the Espionage Act. Twenty-one of the documents were marked top secret, nine were marked secret, and one was unmarked.
These documents are not all those recovered—some likely are too sensitive to risk making public—but they nonetheless hold some of the nation’s deepest secrets: “military capabilities of a foreign country and the United States,” “military activities and planning of foreign countries,” “nuclear capabilities of a foreign country,” “military attacks by a foreign country,” “military contingency planning of the United States,” “military options of a foreign country and potential effects on United States interest,” “foreign country support of terrorist acts against United States interests,” “nuclear weaponry of the United States,” “military activity in a foreign country.”
Smith put it starkly in his statement, “The men and women of the United States intelligence community and our armed forces dedicate their lives to protecting our nation and its people. Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”
On Twitter, Bill Kristol said it more clearly: “These were highly classified documents dealing with military intelligence and plans. What did Trump do with them? Who now has copies of them?” Retired FBI assistant director Frank Figliuzzi noted that there is a substantial risk that “foreign intelligence services might have sought or gained access to the documents.”
There is also substantial risk that other countries will be reluctant to share intelligence with the United States in the future. At the very least, it is an unfortunate coincidence that the Central Intelligence Agency in October 2021 reported an unusually high rate of capture or death for foreign informants recruited to spy for the United States.
Since Trump supporters have taken the position that Trump’s indictment over the stolen documents is the attempt of the Biden administration to undermine Trump’s presidential candidacy, it is worth remembering that Trump’s early announcement of his campaign was widely suspected to be an attempt to enable him to avoid legal accountability. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith precisely to put arms length between the administration and the investigations into Trump.
Smith noted today, “Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice. And our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone. Applying those laws. Collecting facts. That’s what determines the outcome of an investigation. Nothing more. Nothing less.
“The prosecutors in my office are among the most talented and experienced in the Department of Justice. They have investigated this case hewing to the highest ethical standards. And they will continue to do so as this case proceeds.”
Smith added: “It’s very important for me to note that the defendants in this case must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. To that end, my office will seek a speedy trial in this matter. Consistent with the public interest and the rights of the accused. We very much look forward to presenting our case to a jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida.”
Likely responding to MAGA attacks on the FBI and the rule of law, Smith thanked the “dedicated public servants of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with whom my office is conducting this investigation and who worked tirelessly every day upholding the rule of law in our country,” before closing his brief statement.
The indictment revealed just how much detailed information Smith’s team has uncovered, presenting a shockingly thorough case to prove the allegations. Trump’s lawyers will have their work cut out for them…although the team has shifted since this morning: two of Trump’s lawyers quit today. The thoroughness of the indictment also suggests that Trump and his allies might have reason to be nervous about Smith’s other investigation: the one into the attempt to overturn results of the 2020 election.
Some of Trump’s supporters are calling for violence. After Louisiana representative Clay Higgins appeared to be egging on militias to oppose Trump’s Tuesday arraignment, Democratic senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) issued a joint statement calling for “supporters and critics alike to let the case proceed peacefully in court.” Legal scholar Joyce White Vance noted that it was “extremely sad for our country that this isn’t a bipartisan statement being made by leaders from both parties.”
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Taking the evening off, as I spent the entire day with my family (which was a really nice antidote to the firehose of this week’s events). But there is some personal news to share….
People have noted that I have been posting the letters earlier than usual lately, and have wondered if everything is okay. First of all, thank you for your concern, and second, yes, it is.
When I first started writing these letters in September 2019, they concerned only Trump’s first impeachment. I wrote them after teaching and posted them usually no later than 10:00. I vividly remember the first time I stayed in the office until midnight, thinking that was really too much and it couldn’t happen again.
But then, as the letters began to involve more aspects of the news, they got later and later. Stories from the Trump White House often dropped after Hannity’s show went off the air at 10:00, and then, once Biden took office and news dumps went back to normal hours, I started writing a book. That meant the letter writing stayed late. And got later.
And that is my personal news. The reason the letters are posting earlier again is that the book is done.
It is called Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, and in 30 short chapters in three sections for a total of 250 pages of text, it tries to explain how we got to this political moment…and how we get out. There is a lot of material in it you all will recognize—on the Trump years, for example, and how we got to them and how we got through them—but there is a lot that is new, too, reflecting how the last several years have made me reconceive the way I think about the meaning of history. In the end, this book makes an argument for a new understanding of U.S. history as an explicitly democratic history, kept alive primarily by marginalized Americans who have worked to expand our rights and bring the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life.
Writing the book was a very odd experience. Because I was writing so much else, I could never focus on the book exclusively as I have done for previous books. I would write in the mornings, but every afternoon I would have to pack up whatever was in front of me and start working on the nightly letter. When one chapter was done, I would throw it aside and ignore it while working on the next. It was almost as if I was seeing the project only in my peripheral vision while looking intently at what was in front of me.
I took a break from the manuscript before picking it up for the second draft, and when I did turn back to it, I discovered something curious: it was almost as if the chapters had been chatting together while I ignored them, and they demanded an entire reworking. In the end, I rewrote close to 80% of the manuscript and developed a much different thesis than I had set out to write two years ago. It was rather as if I had seen things more clearly out of the corner of my eye than if I had been looking directly at them.
The manuscript turned into a voyage of discovery for me, and it ended up feeling very much like I didn’t have a lot of control over it: I was just bringing a definitive shape to the questions, comments, concerns, and hopes of so many people who have been part of the crazy journey of the past three and a half years.
It will come out in mid-September and I think it is…not bad, which is about as far as any writer will—or should—go on a new book.
I am extraordinarily relieved to have this project off my desk, and hope to write earlier going forward, although always with an eye to the idea that each letter tries to encapsulate a full 24-hour period in the nation’s historical record.
There are new projects in the works, but for now a heartfelt thank you to all of you who have cheered me, the letters, and this new book on, all in the midst of trying to protect our democracy. It’s been quite a journey already, and I am eager to see what comes next.
Oh, and here’s the cover. It’s not an accident that it’s a sunrise.
I’ll be back at the national news tomorrow.
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All weekend, Trump supporters have flooded media channels with accusations that President Joe Biden has weaponized the Department of Justice to use as a political cudgel against former president Trump, whom they characterize as the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
On Thursday the Department of Justice indicted Trump on 37 counts of hanging onto classified national security documents, deliberately hiding those documents from his lawyers and the government after a subpoena, lying about them, and showing them to people without security clearances and without any need to know about them.
Trump and his loyalists insist the indictment makes the United States a “banana republic,” by which they appear to mean a country with a corrupt ruling elite that uses the machinery of government against political opponents (though the historical meaning of that term actually is much more complicated). Sometimes in the same breath they call for arresting members of the Biden administration in retaliation; on the Fox News Channel on Friday, personality Greg Gutfield added First Lady Jill Biden as a potential target after Jesse Watters called for arresting “all of them, [former House speaker Nancy] Pelosi, too.”
There are a number of problems with their characterization of what is going on.
First of all, Biden’s Department of Justice has operated as it is supposed to: independently. While Trump apparently tried to use the department for his own political ends—we learned just last month, for example, that the Department of Justice kept an investigation of the Clinton Foundation open for almost Trump’s entire term, although prosecutors thought the rumors about the foundation were bogus from the start—Biden has gone out of his way to emphasize that he will not interfere with the Justice Department.
To underline that independence, after Trump announced his candidacy for president last November—an early announcement many thought was an attempt to avoid criminal prosecution—Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee the two federal investigations that touched on the former president, thus deliberately moving those investigations outside the department. The special counsel is Jack Smith, and those investigations are the one into the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the documents case currently in the news.
Still, the indictment came not from Smith, but from a federal grand jury of ordinary American citizens in Florida who reviewed evidence and determined that there was probable cause to believe that Trump committed crimes and should be tried for them. Trump’s defenders are trying to blur this reality by saying it was Biden who charged Trump, when it was really the members of a grand jury.
Trump supporters’ evidence for Biden’s corruption is that the Justice Department has indicted neither President Biden nor former secretary of state Hillary Clinton for what they claim are similar offenses. (It hasn’t charged Republican former vice president Mike Pence, either, but they are not talking about that.) The crucial difference in all three of those cases is that Biden, Clinton, and Pence did not try to hide the documents found in their possession and they cooperated fully with the Department of Justice to return them. (In addition, in Clinton’s case, most of the 110 emails that contained classified information did not bear classified markings.)
As Devlin Barrett of the Washington Post notes, Trump was not charged for illegally keeping any of the 197 documents he returned. He was charged only for ones he kept, lied about, showed to other people, and hid.
Republicans who are trying to pick up Trump’s voters, including Florida governor Ron DeSantis, are not defending Trump but are instead trying to argue that the Democrats are discriminating against Trump. "Is there a different standard for a Democrat secretary of state versus a former Republican president?" DeSantis asked.
That line of reasoning is swaying Republican primary voters, 88% of whom, according to a CBS News poll, say the indictment was politically motivated, although 24% of them agree that the loose handling of the documents was a national security risk. Trump and key supporters are playing to that base, using thinly veiled calls for violence. Meanwhile, Republicans who are likely hoping this will sink Trump are either dodging questions about the issue or, like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, remaining steadfastly silent.
But for all the focus on the politics of this moment and the apparent attempt to rally the Republican base to violence, this is a legal case. Trump is accused of serious crimes that endangered—and likely continue to endanger—our national security, which means the safety of every American.
His alleged criminal activity endangers the operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (in charge of imagery, maps, and intelligence concerning them), the National Reconnaissance Office (in charge of space-based surveillance and reconnaissance), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
It is notable that the two Republican presidential candidates who have served as U.S. attorneys—Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson—have both spoken out against Trump over it. So has Trump’s former attorney general William Barr, who told Shannon Bream of the Fox News Channel today: “I think the counts under the Espionage Act, that he willfully retained those documents, are solid counts… I do think we have to wait and see what the defense says, and what proves to be true, but I do think that…if even half of it is true, then he’s toast. I mean, it’s a very detailed indictment, and it’s very, very damning.”
Trump is reportedly having trouble finding lawyers to represent him in this matter, with Marc Caputo of The Messenger reporting today that one federal criminal defense lawyer he contacted in the Southern District of Florida said: “The problem is none of us want to work for the guy…. He’s a nightmare client.”
While committed Republican partisans seem to believe Trump is a victim, according to the CBS News poll, 38% of likely Republican primary voters do, in fact, believe Trump endangered our security—and national security, after all, is the primary job of the president.
Smith said on Friday that the department would seek a “speedy trial,” and if that indeed happens, the American people will hear Trump’s own lawyers and aides—for all the witnesses are his own hand-picked team members—testify under oath about Trump’s behavior. Under similar conditions, the testimony of Trump’s people before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol effectively countered Trump’s propaganda. That Republican leaders see Trump as vulnerable is evidenced by how many candidates are already in the presidential race.
The question is how much damage the fight for control will do to the Republican Party, especially in light of the fact that Smith’s other investigation, the one into the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, has not yet been concluded. There is reason to suspect those congress members involved in that effort might have been spooked by just how thorough the investigation of the documents case turned out to be.
Guided by President Biden, the Democrats are refusing to comment on the indictment, likely in part to undermine the argument that it is about politics and also because they recognize that many Americans are just tired of drama.
Overall, though, they seem determined to redirect people’s attention to the reality that the Biden administration and the Democrats are actually governing according to the principles of a democracy. Frustrating as this tactic is to partisans, scholars who study how to restore democratic norms in a faltering democracy suggest that emphasizing those norms is crucial.
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On Friday, while the political world was focused on the federal indictment of a former president, the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee released their new tax plan.
Not two weeks after threatening to refuse to raise the debt ceiling because of their stated concerns over the nation’s mounting debt, Republicans are calling for tax cuts. The nonprofit public policy organization the Committee for a Responsible Budget estimates that over a decade those cuts will cost $80 billion as written and more than $1.1 trillion if made permanent. The frontloading in the measure, they estimate, will make it cost $320 billion by the end of 2025.
Meanwhile, the House Freedom Caucus is also demanding steeper cuts in spending than House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to in the budget deal he cut with President Joe Biden before agreeing to suspend the debt ceiling. The extremist Republicans have shut down House business for a week to protest what they considered a betrayal. But they cannot admit they want to cut Social Security and Medicare (although McCarthy has promised a commission to study such cuts).
Neither one of their measures will make it through the Senate. Even Republicans there are unhappy with the extremists’ attack on defense spending.
It feels like the end of an era. The idea that tax cuts and spending cuts will automatically expand the economy—the argument that Ronald Reagan rode to the White House in 1981—is no longer believable.
In the last week, two of the key architects of President Ronald Reagan’s administration have died. One was religious broadcaster and minister Pat Robertson, who ushered evangelicals into the Republican Party and blamed feminism, abortion, homosexuality, and “liberal” college professors for what he considered the decline of America.
The other was evangelical James G. Watt, Reagan’s first secretary of the interior. Watt embraced the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement to privatize federal lands in the West or, barring that, to hand them to states to lease as they saw fit. Watt took the theme of privatization to Washington, D.C., where he reversed the government’s policy of protecting the environment and embraced the commercial exploitation of resources, opening nearly all of the nation’s coastal waters to drilling, for example, and easing regulations on strip mining.
Like Robertson, Watt believed he was a warrior in a crusade to save the United States from those who believed that the government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. “I never use the words Democrats and Republicans,” he often said, “It’s liberals and Americans.” He called environmentalists “a left wing cult which seeks to bring down the type of government I believe in.” “Compromise,” he added, “is not in my vocabulary.”
People like Robertson and Watt believed they were at war with those Americans of both parties who approved of the democratic system that had ushered the nation through the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War and had promoted greater economic, racial, and gender equality than the country had ever known before.
That battle to divide the American people along cultural lines in order to dismantle the federal government has, after forty years, led to a Republican Party that has embraced Christian nationalism, abandoning not only the policies of democracy but also democracy itself.
The conclusion of that movement is playing out now over the defense of former president Trump from charges that he committed crimes that threaten our national security. He and some of his most fervent supporters have urged his base toward violence—in words not unlike the ones Trump used before the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, actually—and there is concern that there might be trouble tomorrow in Miami, Florida, where Trump is scheduled to be arraigned.
Miami mayor Francis Suarez, a Republican who reportedly is himself considering a run for the White House, spoke to the press today to make it clear law enforcement officers and emergency personnel are working closely with federal and state partners and are prepared for whatever might happen.
But the Trump base is not what it was in 2016, when Trump commanded the federal government. Right-wing personality Tucker Carlson is off the air and the Fox News Channel is apparently considering legal action against him to keep him from competing with his old employer. The leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who organized the Capitol attack, are scattered or in prison, and hundreds of those who were at the Capitol that day have discovered the weight of the law.
The number of candidates challenging him suggests Trump is no longer the undisputed leader of the Republican Party. Republican leaders are beholden to his base, though, and they either came out swinging over the weekend to defend Trump or kept silent.
But they, too, appear to have been thinking a bit about the weight of the law as information comes out that key evidence against Trump has come from his former lawyer M. Evan Corcoran, who apparently took notes of Trump’s requests that Corcoran break the law. While Republican presidential candidates former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and South Carolina senator Tim Scott are still defending Trump, Haley today said that “Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security,” and Scott said the case is “serious.”
They, and politicians like them, are likely making a political calculation. Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination but is unlikely to win a general election—a network tied to billionaire Charles Koch has begun to target him as unelectable—and they need to appeal to those who dislike Trump as well as those who like him.
But there is something else going on, too. As Trump and his loyalists sound more and more unhinged, both in his defense and in their attacks on everyone who isn’t in their club, people seem to be sick of them. As Charles C. W. Cooke asked in the conservative National Review, “Aren’t you all tired of this crap?”
In contrast, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have steadfastly refused to engage with the Trump drama and have quietly worked to rebuild the government that forty years of austerity and ideological attacks have undermined. Their determination to rebuild the middle class has led to strong economic growth, high employment, and now inflation at its lowest level since May 2021. Government investment in new technologies and in returning supply chains to the U.S. has led to private investment of more than $220 billion in the economy and the creation of more than 77,000 new jobs, largely in Republican-dominated states. Manufacturing construction has more than doubled in the past year.
As the architects of Reagan’s revolution exit stage right, Republican calls for more tax cuts are barely making the news, while the traditional idea of government investment in the American people appears to be showing its strength.
“The wind is shifting,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin tweeted today after listening to Haley and Scott backtrack. “Remember: change happens slowly and then all at once.”
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“DONALD TRUMP UNDER ARREST, IN FEDERAL CUSTODY.”
It was quite a chyron from CNN, marking the first time in the history of the United States that a former president has been charged with federal crimes. And in this case, what crimes they are: the willful retention, sharing, and hiding of classified documents that compromise our national security. Trump’s own national security advisor John Bolton said, “This is material that in the hands of America's adversaries would do incalculable damage to the United States. This is a very serious case and it's not financial fraud, it's not hush money to porn stars, this is the national security of the United States at stake. I think we've got to take the politics out of this business when national security is at stake.”
Cameras were barred in the courtroom as Trump pleaded not guilty to the 37 charges in Miami today. Presiding magistrate judge Jonathan Goodman ordered Trump not to communicate with witnesses about the case, including co-defendant Waltine Nauta, then released him on his own recognizance, that is, without needing to post bail. Special prosecutor Jack Smith was in the courtroom; ABC’s senior congressional correspondent Rachel Scott reported that Trump did not look at Smith.
Then Trump went back to his residence in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he gave a speech that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who is close to the Trump camp, described as low energy, focusing on his insistence that he had a right to keep the classified documents (which experts agree is nonsense and amounts to a confession) and that the indictment was "the most evil and heinous abuse of power." Right-wing Newsmax and the Fox News Channel (FNC) carried the speech; CNN and MSNBC did not.
FNC has been hemorrhaging viewers since it fired Tucker Carlson, a threat to its bottom line that might have been behind its chyron tonight attacking Biden by claiming “WANNABE DICTATOR SPEAKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER HAVING HIS POLITICAL RIVAL ARRESTED.”
In statements similar to the one from FNC, right-wing pundits spent the day flooding Twitter and other social media with furious insistence that Trump is being unfairly prosecuted, followed by attacks on former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and with allegations that there are tapes of President Biden accepting bribes—allegations that Biden openly laughed at this evening.
But that performative outrage among leaders did not translate into support on the ground in Miami. Law enforcement had been prepared for as many as 50,000 protesters, but only a few hundred to a thousand turned out (one wearing a shirt made of an American flag and carrying the head of a pig on a pole).
The lack of supporters on the ground was significant. Since the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, much of Trump’s power has rested on his ability to call out his base to silence opponents by threatening violence. That power was in full force on January 6, 2021, when his loyalists set out to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president, believing they were operating under the orders of then-president Trump.
Since then, though, more than 1,000 people who participated in the events of January 6 have been charged with crimes, and many have been sentenced to prison, while Trump, who many defendants say called them to arms, has skated. That discrepancy is likely dampening the enthusiasm of Trump’s supporters for protest.
Today Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo pointed out that the audacity of Nevada’s militia-related Bundy family simply grew as family members launched successive stands against the federal government without significant legal repercussions. Republican politicians cheered on their attacks on federal officials for political gain, while Democratic politicians didn’t push to go after them out of concern that a show of federal power would alienate Nevada voters.
Trump’s threats and determination to stir up his base seem to reflect a similar consideration: if he can just rally enough support, he might imagine, the federal government will back off.
Federal officials permitting politics to trump the rule of law in our past have brought us to this moment.
After the Civil War, officials charged Confederate president Jefferson Davis and 38 other leading secessionists with treason but decided not to prosecute when the cases finally came to trial in 1869. They wanted to avoid the anger a trial would provoke because they hoped to reconcile the North and South. They also worried they would not get convictions in the southern states where the trials were assigned.
In the end, between President Andrew Johnson’s pardons and Congress’s granting of amnesty to Confederates, no one was convicted for their participation in the attempt to destroy the country. This generosity did not create the good feeling men like General Ulysses S. Grant hoped it would. Instead, as Civil War scholar Elizabeth Varon established in her book on the surrender at Appomattox, it helped to create the myth that the southern cause had been so noble that even the conquering northern armies had been forced to recognize it. The ideology of the Confederacy never became odious, and it has lived on.
The same quest for reconciliation drove President Gerald R. Ford to grant a pardon to former president Richard M. Nixon for possible “offenses against the United States” in his quest to win the 1972 election by bugging the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Washington, D.C., Watergate Hotel.
Ford explained that the “tranquility” the nation had found after Nixon’s resignation “could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former President of the United States.” The threat of a trial would “cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest elective office of the United States.”
In an echo of 100 years before, Ford’s generosity did not bring Nixon or his supporters back into the fold. Instead, they doubled down on the idea that Nixon had done nothing wrong and had been hounded from office by his “liberal” enemies. Nixon himself never admitted wrongdoing, telling the American people he was resigning because he no longer had enough support in Congress to advance the national interest. Although his support had collapsed because even members of his own party believed he was guilty of obstructing justice, violated constitutional rights of citizens, and abused his power, Nixon blamed the press, whose members had destroyed him with “leaks and accusations and innuendo.”
The willingness of government officials to ignore the rule of law in order to buy peace gave us enduring reverence for the principles of the Confederacy, along with countless dead Unionists, mostly Black people, killed as former Confederates reclaimed supremacy in the South. It also gave us the idea that presidents cannot be held accountable for crimes, a belief that likely made some of the presidents who followed Nixon less careful about following the law than they might have been if they had seen Nixon indicted.
Holding a former president accountable for an alleged profound attack on the United States is indeed unprecedented, as his supporters insist. But far from being a bad thing to stand firm on the rule of law at the upper levels of government, it seems to fall into the category of “high time.”
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On Monday, the World Day Against Child Labor, Democrats led by Representatives Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Raul Ruiz (D-CA) introduced into Congress the Children's Act for Responsible Employment and Farm Safety, or CARE Act. It seeks to raise the minimum age for farm work from 12 to 14, repairing a carveout from the era of the Jim Crow 1930s that permitted children to work on farms at two years younger than in other sectors.
Democrats have introduced similar bills since 2005, but the measures have failed because opponents say such rules would hurt family farms. Kristi Boswell, a lobbyist for the agricultural industry and former member of the agricultural bureau under Trump, said at a hearing that her “niece and nephews would not have been able to detassel corn at ages 12 and 13, despite their parents knowing they were mature enough to handle the job.”
This bill, Ruiz notes, has exemptions for family farms. It is intended not to stop the passing of farming knowledge from parents to kids, but to protect Latinx children “who are working in the fields because they’re living in extreme poverty.”
Pressure for federal legislation to protect children is mounting, in part because of the recent effort of Republican-dominated state legislatures to weaken child labor laws. As recently as 2017 a historical review of the history of child labor from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said that “child labor like that…in the decades leading up to the passage of the [Fair Labor Standards Act] no longer exists.” But, now, thanks to a red-hot labor market that is driving up wages, immigration bans, and an influx of unaccompanied minor children who have been released to sponsors after arriving in the U.S., child labor is on the rise.
In February 2023 the Department of Labor reported that it had seen a 69% increase—note that these were only cases that were caught—in “children being employed illegally by companies.” In the same month it announced a $1.5 million settlement with Packers Sanitation Services, Inc., one of the nation’s largest food safety sanitation services providers, after officials found the company employed at least 102 children aged 13–17 during overnight shifts at thirteen meat-processing facilities in eight states, where they used hazardous chemicals and cleaned dangerous meat processing equipment. At least three got hurt.
The federal government has vowed to crack down on violations of child labor laws, but the Economic Policy Institute, which examines the economic impact of government policies, reports that in the last two years, at least fourteen states have either passed or introduced measures to weaken the laws protecting children from dangerous working conditions. They permit longer work hours and more dangerous work, lower the ages for work around alcohol, or introduce new subminimum wages for children.
Those calling for rollbacks of child labor protections say they are protecting parents’ rights from an intrusive state. They portray child labor as family oriented and good work experience. But the measures are backed—and sometimes written—by the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), a right-wing Florida think tank founded in 2011 whose goal is to cut the social safety net and antipoverty programs. Far-right donors who want to dismantle the federal government provide the financial support for the FGA.
David Campbell, professor of American democracy at the University of Notre Dame, told Jacob Bogage and María Luisa Paúl of the Washington Post, “When you say that a bill will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions, it sounds wildly unpopular…. You have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights, a very carefully chosen term that’s really hard to disagree with.”
A January 2022 FGA white paper provides talking points for weakened child labor laws, including the ideas that “teenagers are a critical source of labor for businesses struggling to find help” and that “with a national labor crisis and teenagers opting to join the workforce at record-high rates, cutting bureaucratic red tape can help stabilize the economy.” “THE BOTTOM LINE: States should restore decision-making to parents by eliminating youth work permits.”
This language echoes that of the early 1900s, when factories and mines employed children because they earned lower wages than adults and their small bodies could fit more easily into tight spaces, and when parents pushed their children to work because, in an era when most men made below-subsistence wages and there was no social safety net, families needed the money children earned to survive. In 1900 a quarter of the workers in the South’s textile factories were children under 16; by 1904, that number had climbed to a half, with 20,000 of them under age 12.
Factory fires and mine collapses, as well as the frequent injuries that cost children fingers or legs, brought popular attention to the dangers of child labor, but children could not vote and had no power to change legislation. Mill and mine owners lobbied legislators against regulating child labor, insisting that child labor laws would ruin their businesses by strengthening the power of unions as adult workers no longer had to worry about being undercut by cheaper child workers. And laws put children firmly under the control of their parents, who had the right to their children’s wages and who needed that income to make ends meet.
What would eventually throw a monkey wrench into this economic system was the recognition by Republican progressive reformers that children growing up in factories without education would never have the opportunity to become good citizens, whose education was crucial to a democracy. They would never learn to read or write, leaving them at the mercy of employers, and immigrant children caught in this system would never fully integrate into society.
Reformers worried that the nation would develop a permanent underclass that threatened the continued survival of democracy. In 1904 they organized as the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) to work against child labor in factories. In 1906, progressive senator Albert Beveridge (R-IN) introduced a federal child labor law, using the Constitution’s Commerce Clause to ban the transport of any products mined or manufactured by children under 14.
“We cannot permit any man or corporation to stunt the bodies, minds, and souls of American children,” Beveridge said. “We cannot thus wreck the future of the American Republic.”
When Beveridge’s bill failed, the NCLC hired photographer Lewis Hine to take the now-iconic pictures of the nation’s children in the streets, mines, and factories. In 1908, Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, who shared Beveridge’s concerns that the stunted children from the factories and mines would not grow up to become the foundation for a strong democracy, told Congress: “Child labor should be prohibited throughout the Nation.”
By 1916, Congress was ready to pass the Keating-Owen Act, a law prohibiting the shipment of goods produced by children across state lines. The Supreme Court struck it down in 1918, saying such federal legislation was unconstitutional. Congress then tried to stop child labor by levying a ten percent tax on businesses that hired children; the Supreme Court struck that down, too.
Finally, in 1938, as part of the New Deal effort to level the playing field between workers and employers, Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). It established a federal minimum wage, a 44-hour work week, and an end to work for those under 16. During his quest for the legislation, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told Congress, "A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling worker's wages or stretching workers' hours."
By the time the FLSA passed, laws requiring children to attend school had joined with the high unemployment of the Depression years to shift the idea that children should work to the idea that they should stay in school, and worker protections and Social Security, passed in the same era, meant that parents no longer needed their children’s wages to survive.
In the years after World War II, when people in the United States were determined to stand strong against both fascism and communism, the nation embraced the idea that children should be in school rather than in factories. An education would permit them to be upwardly mobile economically, thus lessening the likelihood that they would be tempted by authoritarian leaders who promised to improve their standard of living, and it would guarantee that they would be informed citizens who would work to advance democracy.
Until recently, that idea seemed permanent.
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Yesterday, the Republican Study Committee, a 175-member group of far-right House members, released their 2024 “Blueprint to Save America” budget plan. It calls for slashing the federal budget by raising the age at which retirees can start claiming Social Security benefits from 67 to 69, privatizing Medicare, and enacting dramatic tax cuts that will starve the federal government.
I’m actually not going to rehash the 122-page plan. Let’s take a look at the larger picture.
This budget dismisses the plans of “President Joe Biden and the left” as a “march toward socialism.” It says that “[t]he left’s calls to increase taxes to close the deficit would be…catastrophic for our nation.” Asserting that “the path to prosperity does not come from the Democrats’ approach of expanding government,” it claims that “[o]ver the past year and a half, the American people have seen that experiment fail firsthand.”
Instead, it says, “the key to growth, innovation, and flourishing communities” is “[i]ndividuals, free from the burdens of a burdensome government.”
It is?
Our history actually tells us how these two contrasting visions of the government play out.
Grover Norquist, one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.”
Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross national product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States.
The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity.
When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people.
The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in painters and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism.
That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic, a high from which it is still coming down), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point.
So why is there a growing debt?
Because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic. The United States is nowhere close to the average tax burden of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations.
Republicans who backed those tax cuts now insist that the only way to deal with the growing debt is to get rid of the government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and eventually promoted civil rights, all elements that stabilized the nation after the older system gave us the Depression. Indeed, the Republican Study Committee calls for making the Trump tax cuts, scheduled to expire in 2025, permanent.
“There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his acceptance speech. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small businessman.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.”
When the Republican Study Committee calls Biden’s policies—which have led to record employment, a booming economy, and a narrowing gap between rich and poor— “leftist,” they have lost the thread of our history. The system that restored the nation after 1933 and held the nation stable until 1981 is not socialism or radicalism; it is one of the strongest parts of our American tradition.
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In one of the quirky coincidences that history deals out, Daniel Ellsberg died today at age 92 on the eve of the fifty-first anniversary of the break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C.
Ellsberg was a military analyst in the 1960s, disturbed by the gulf between what the government was telling the public about the war in Vietnam and what he was seeing behind the scenes.
After serving as a Marine, Ellsberg earned his doctorate at Harvard and joined the RAND Corporation, where he learned to apply game theory to warfare. By 1964 he was an advisor to Robert McNamara, who served as defense secretary under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In 1967, Ellsberg was part of the team tapped by McNamara to compile a history of the conflict in Vietnam to evaluate the success of different programs.
Ellsberg was concerned by investigators’ conclusions. The 7,000-page secret government study detailed U.S. involvement in Vietnam from Harry Truman’s presidency to Lyndon Johnson’s. It outlined how successive presidents had lied to the American people, expanding the war with promises of victory even as the costs of the war mounted and the chances of victory moved farther and farther away.
Ellsberg copied the secret study and shared it with congressmen, who buried it. Finally, Ellsberg shared the report with a New York Times correspondent on the condition the reporter would only take notes and would not copy the pages. But the correspondent broke the agreement, believing the documents were “the property of the people” who had paid for them with “the blood of their sons.”
On June 13, 1971, the New York Times began to publish what became known as the Pentagon Papers, showing how presidents had lied to the American people about the nation’s involvement in Vietnam. President Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, warned the New York Times that the publication was jeopardizing national security and warned that the government would prosecute. The editors decided to continue publication—the Supreme Court later agreed that the newspaper had the right to publish the information—while Ellsberg leaked the report to other newspapers.
The study ended before the Nixon administration, but the president was deeply concerned about it. The report showed that presidents had lied to the American people for years, and Nixon worried that the story would hurt his administration by souring the public on his approach to the Vietnam War. Worse, if anyone looked at his own administration, they might well find evidence of his own secret actions in the Vietnam arena: the Chennault affair, in which a Nixon ally undermined peace talks before the 1968 presidential election in order to undercut Johnson’s reelection campaign, and what was then the undisclosed bombing of Cambodia.
News of either could, at the very least, destroy Nixon’s reelection campaign.
Nixon became obsessed with the idea that the Pentagon Papers proved that opponents were trying to sink his campaign for reelection.
Frustrated when the FBI did not seem to be taking an investigation into Ellsberg seriously enough, in July 1971, Nixon put together in the White House a special investigations unit to stop leaks. And who stops leaks?
Plumbers.
Officially known as the White House Special Investigations Unit, Nixon’s “plumbers” burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist on September 9, 1971, hoping to find damaging information about him that would discredit the Pentagon Papers. (Their burglary, showing gross governmental misconduct, was later key to the dismissal of charges against Ellsberg for leaking the report.)
Some of the plumbers began to work with the Committee to Reelect the President (aptly called “CREEP” as its methods came to light) to sabotage Nixon’s Democratic opponents by “ratf*cking” them, as they called it, planting fake letters in newspapers, hiring vendors for Democratic rallies and then running out on the unpaid bills, and planting spies in Democrats’ campaigns.
Finally, CREEP turned back to the plumbers.
Early in the morning on June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard at the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C., noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.
The White House denied all knowledge of what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and most of the press took the denial at face value. But two young reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, followed the sloppy money trail behind the burglars directly to the White House.
The fallout from the burglary gained no traction before the election, which Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7 percent of the vote. But the scandal erupted in March 1973, when one of the burglars, James W. McCord, Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing, saying that he had lied at his trial, under pressure to protect government officials. McCord had been the head of security for CREEP, and Sirica, known by reporters as “Maximum John,” later said, “I had no intention of sitting on the bench like a nincompoop and watching the parade go by.”
Sirica made the letter public, White House counsel John Dean promptly began cooperating with prosecutors, and the Watergate scandal was in full swing. On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in American history to resign.
Ellsberg decided to release the Pentagon Papers to alert the American people to the fact that their government was lying to them about the Vietnam War. But he helped set in motion a series of events that determined the shape of the political world we live in today.
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
It's not officially summer yet, but it sure feels like the seasons are changing. And it doesn't matter how long these late spring days are, they are never, never, never long enough.
Going to hit bed early and be back at it tomorrow.
[Photo by Buddy Poland.]
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
Tomorrow is the federal holiday honoring Juneteenth, the celebration of the announcement in Texas on June 19th, 1865, that enslaved Americans were free.
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army, but it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.
Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived to take charge of the soldiers stationed there. On June 19, he issued General Order Number 3. It read:
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
The order went on: “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
While the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing enslavement except as punishment for a crime had passed through Congress on January 31, 1865, and Lincoln had signed it on February 1, the states were still in the process of ratifying it.
So Granger’s order referred not to the Thirteenth Amendment, but to the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, which declared that Americans enslaved in states that were in rebellion against the United States “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons.” Granger was informing the people of Galveston that, Texas having been in rebellion on January 1, 1863, their world had changed. The federal government would see to it that, going forward, white people and Black people would be equal.
Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emancipation was not a gift from white Americans. Black Americans had fought for the United States and worked in the fields to grow cotton the government could sell. Those unable to leave their homes had hidden U.S. soldiers, while those who could leave indicated their support for the Confederacy and enslavement with their feet. They had demonstrated their equality and their importance to the United States.
The next year, after the Thirteenth Amendment had been added to the Constitution, Texas freedpeople gathered on June 19, 1866, to celebrate with prayers, speeches, food, and socializing the coming of their freedom. By the following year, the federal government encouraged “Juneteenth” celebrations, eager to explain to Black citizens the voting rights that had been put in place by the Military Reconstruction Act in early March 1867, and the tradition of Juneteenth began to spread to Black communities across the nation.
But white former Confederates in Texas were demoralized and angered by the changes in their circumstances. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled.
In summer 1865, as white legislators in the states of the former Confederacy grudgingly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, they also passed laws to keep freedpeople subservient to their white neighbors. These laws, known as the Black Codes, varied by state, but they generally bound Black Americans to yearlong contracts working in the fields owned by white men; prohibited Black people from meeting in groups, owning guns or property, or testifying in court; outlawed interracial marriage; and permitted white men to buy out the jail terms of Black people convicted of a wide swath of petty crimes, and then to force those former prisoners into labor to pay off their debt.
In 1865, Congress refused to readmit the Southern states under the Black Codes, and in 1866, congressmen wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Its first section established that “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.” It went on: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
That was the whole ball game. The federal government had declared that a state could not discriminate against any of its citizens or arbitrarily take away any of a citizen’s rights. Then, like the Thirteenth Amendment before it, the Fourteenth declared that “Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article,” strengthening the federal government.
The addition of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868 remade the United States, but those determined to preserve a world that discriminated between Americans according to race, gender, ability, and so on, continued to find workarounds.
On Friday the Department of Justice—created in 1870 to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment—released the report of its investigation into the Minneapolis Police Department and the City of Minneapolis in the wake of the April 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer. The 19-page document found systemic “conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law,” discriminating against Black and Native American people, people with behavioral health disabilities, and protesters. Those systemic problems in the MPD’s institutional culture enabled Floyd’s killing.
Minneapolis police performed 22% more searches, 27% more vehicle searches, and 24% more uses of force on Black people than on white residents behaving in similar ways. They conducted 23% more searches and used force 20% more on Indigenous Americans.
The Justice Department’s press release specified that the city and the police department “cooperated fully.” The two parties have “agreed in principle” to fix the problem with sweeping reforms based on community input, with an independent monitor rather than litigation.
While the Senate unanimously approved the measure creating the Juneteenth holiday last year, fourteen far-right Republicans voted against it, many of them complaining that such a holiday would be divisive.
How we remember our history matters.
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
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in China, where he has met in the past two days for a total of more than ten hours with China’s top foreign policy official, Wang Yi, and with Foreign Minister Qin Gang. Today, he met for 35 minutes with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Blinken called the talks “candid, substantive, and constructive.“
The backdrop to the talks is that under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the United States has taken steps to bring supply chains back to the United States and has also limited the export to China of technology that can be used for the development of military weapons. Those actions have led Chinese leaders to accuse the U.S. of seeking to “decouple” from China and to contain China’s economic development. China’s economy is reeling after shutting down for the pandemic, raising concerns about a global economic slowdown.
In the past two and a half years, the U.S. has also worked hard to create and deepen alliances around the world. Those alliances, especially in the Indo-Pacific region and in Africa, have shifted the balance of global power at the same time that China’s support for Russia has tied China to an epic mess. As David Ignatius put it this week in the Washington Post, Biden is trying to create a more stable strategic balance between China, India, and Japan. “Rather than walking a bipolar tightrope between Washington and Beijing,” Ignatius notes, “the administration is trying to build a matrix of relationships, with the United States as a key interlocutor in each node.”
Those relationships include the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—an international organization that includes Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam—and an alliance with the Pacific Islands Forum, an 18-member organization, with which the U.S. held its first summit ever in September 2022. They also include AUKUS, a trilateral security pact between the U.S., Australia, and the United Kingdom, designed to “promote a free and open Indo-Pacific that is secure and stable.”
For the U.S. these alliances have meant stronger military cooperation with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, as well as with India, whose prime minister, Narendra Modi, will make a state visit to Washington, D.C., this week in a demonstration of India’s deepening ties to the U.S. just as both India and China have revoked the credentials of each other’s journalists. China has been building up its military presence on India’s border, pushing India toward the U.S.
While Blinken was in China, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was in Japan for a trilateral meeting with Japan and the Republic of Korea, and other meetings with the U.S., Japan, the ROK, and the Philippines.
Of his meetings in China, Blinken told reporters that he emphasized to his Chinese counterparts that the U.S. is interested in reducing the risk of economic cooperation, not in “decoupling.” The U.S. and China engaged in almost $700 billion in trade last year, he said, and that trade benefits both countries. But the U.S. is “investing in our own capacities and in secure, resilient supply chains; pushing for level playing fields for our workers and our companies; defending against harmful trade practice; and protecting our critical technologies so that they aren’t used against us.” Blinken also emphasized that the U.S. does “not support Taiwan independence” and opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo there, noting that if China provokes a crisis there, it could produce an economic crisis that affects the entire world. With 70% of the world’s semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan and 50% of commercial container traffic going through the Taiwan Strait, there is no room for a conflict there.
The U.S. is pushing China to stop violating human rights and to release the U.S. citizens it holds. It is also calling for China to cooperate on stopping its exportation of the precursor chemicals that enable drug lords to manufacture synthetic opioids and street fentanyl, which is the number one killer of Americans from ages 18 to 49.
Blinken told reporters that he had emphasized “direct engagement and sustained communication at senior levels,” to avoid conflict, but China has, so far, refused to reinstate communication between military leaders. Blinken also noted that China is in a unique position to play a constructive role in working toward a just peace in Ukraine, and in pressing North Korea to stop its nuclear program and to start engaging responsibly with the rest of the world.
When a reporter asked why the U.S. should continue to engage in talks when China won’t agree to military-to-military channels of communication, Blinken answered: “Because, as we’ve seen, we’re not going to have success on every issue between us on any given day, but in a whole variety of areas—on the terms that we set for this trip, we have made progress and we are moving forward…. At the end of the day, the best way that we can advance our interests, stand up for our values, and make sure that we are very clear about our intent—the best way to do that is through direct engagement, through diplomacy.”
The other big news today was an eye-popping interview of former president Trump by Bret Baier of the Fox News Channel, in which Trump seemed to agree that he had broken the law by retaining documents, saying he had not handed over to the National Archives the documents he kept because he wanted to take his personal material out of the boxes and was “very busy.” Legal commentator and former U.S. acting solicitor general Neal Katyal tweeted: “The breaking news is that the Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, has a new addition to his legal team tonight. An unpaid new deputy Special Counsel. His name is Donald J. Trump.”
In the interview, Trump also denied that he had the secret document he claimed to have on a recorded tape, saying he is up against “dishonest…thugs.”
Today, U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart ordered Trump’s lawyers not to disclose evidence to the public about the classified documents at the heart of the case involving Trump’s refusal to return those documents. He also limited Trump’s access to that material, saying he may review the materials only “under the direct supervision” of his lawyers and that he “shall not retain copies.”
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
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