Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat

  September 10, 2023 (Sunday)

Taking the night off. 🙂

mickeyrat

  September 11, 2023 (Monday)

Yesterday, President Joe Biden was in Hanoi, Vietnam, where he and General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong announced they were elevating U.S.-Vietnam relations from the comprehensive partnership agreement President Barack Obama signed in 2013 to a comprehensive strategic partnership, Vietnam’s highest tier of international partnership. The earlier measure called for cooperation in transnational crime and public health; the new measure will boost Vietnam's high-technology sector and security.

The visit to Vietnam was part of the administration’s continuing push to loosen China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific by strengthening other countries in the region. China has had a comprehensive strategic partnership with Vietnam since 1998; Russia has had one since 2012.

Biden’s visit to Vietnam came just after Vice President Kamala Harris’s attendance at the U.S.- Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Biden’s attendance at the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi, where he and the leaders of India, Brazil, and South Africa—all members of BRICS, the economic bloc that includes China—reaffirmed their “shared commitment to the G20 as the premier forum for international economic cooperation to deliver solutions for our shared world.”

Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy has been central to his presidency, and he has marked a number of firsts in U.S.-Indo-Pacific relationships. In September 2021, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. announced a trilateral security pact called AUKUS. In May 2022 the White House held the ASEAN summit in Washington, D.C., for the first time in the organization’s 45-year history; later that summer the U.S. opened a number of embassies in the Pacific Islands region and appointed the first-ever U.S. envoy to the Pacific Islands Forum. In June 2023, Biden hosted a state dinner for Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. In August, Biden held a historic trilateral meeting at Camp David with the leaders of Japan and the Republic of Korea.

At the same time, the administration has worked to improve communications with China. In June 2023, Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Beijing for two days and met with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Since then, the administration has tried to demonstrate that it is willing to work with China on economic issues, as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen traveled to China in July and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visited at the end of August.

Raimondo emphasized that the U.S. is not interested in “containing China’s economic development,” as Chinese leaders have charged, but needs to protect U.S. national security, preventing exports of U.S. technology that can be used by the Chinese military. Raimondo emphasized that the world needs the U.S. and China to manage their relationship “responsibly.” She said the Biden administration wants “to have a stable commercial relationship, and the core to that is regular communication.”

Chinese officials praised Raimondo, saying her visit rendered “rational, candid, pragmatic and constructive communications on China-U.S. relations and economic and trade cooperation.” But facing the twin problems of a faltering economy and negative population growth, Xi appears to be trying to shore up an economic bloc—BRICS—in which China can exercise a more powerful influence than it can in the G20. He chose not to attend the G20 summit in New Delhi, possibly to downplay India’s growing global power, and observers were concerned that Premier Li Qiang, who attended in his place, might throw a monkey wrench in the works of a G20 joint statement. Instead, Xi’s absence allowed India’s president Modi to take center stage, and the summit produced a joint statement on its first day.

After the summit, Biden traveled to Vietnam, which shares an 806-mile (~1,300 km) land border with China and has an ongoing dispute with China over Beijing’s asserting authority over parts of the South China Sea that are more than 1,000 miles (~1,600 km) from China’s coast. Last month, satellite images appeared to show that China is building an airstrip on an island Vietnam claims as its territory.

Amidst news that Vietnam is secretly engaged in talks to buy arms from Russia, Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer told the press that the U.S.-Vietnam partnership shows that the U.S. and aligned countries can offer an alternative to countries that have previously worked with Russia and are now finding that relationship “increasingly uncomfortable.” When asked if that partnership might eventually include military aid, Finer responded that the partnership is “comprehensive and strategic” and that “[i]t’s hard to imagine a relationship that is both comprehensive and strategic that doesn’t have a security dimension.”

While acknowledging in speeches the changing relationship between the U.S. and Vietnam over the past 50 years, Biden was careful not to appear to have forgotten the American experience in the Vietnam War. Before leaving for India and Vietnam, he awarded the Medal of Honor to 81-year-old Captain Larry Taylor, who as a 1st lieutenant during the war in Vietnam flew his Cobra attack helicopter into heavy enemy fire to rescue four members of a reconnaissance team who were surrounded by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops in a maneuver army officers said had never before been attempted.

In more than 2,000 combat missions, Taylor never lost a man. “You just do whatever is expedient and do whatever to save the lives of the people you’re trying to rescue,” he said. After his discharge from the Army in 1970, Taylor ran a roofing and sheet metal company in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In Hanoi, Biden visited a memorial for the late Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who was a prisoner of war in Hanoi for five and a half years from 1967, when he was shot down, to 1973. “I miss him,” Biden said. “He was a good friend.” Biden and McCain served in the Senate together for three decades. Biden’s tribute to McCain contrasted sharply with the 2019 request from then-president Trump’s White House team that a warship named for McCain, his father, and his grandfather, be hidden from Trump during a visit to Japan. McCain had clashed with Trump despite their shared political affiliation.

Like Biden, Vietnam’s leader Vo Van Thuong welcomed “an enduring, stable long-term framework that opens up a vast space for further development of the bond between us for decades to follow.” But he did note in his remarks at a state luncheon at the presidential palace that President Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam during the early years of the Vietnam War, had asked President Harry Truman for just such a relationship only months after Vietnam gained its independence from France in 1945. “As history would have it, this desire had to confront countless turmoil and challenges,” he said, “all of such we have overcome…. From former enemies to Comprehensive Strategic Partners, this is truly a model in the history of international relations as to how reconciliation and relationship-building should proceed after a war.”

In other international news today, the administration announced it has cleared the way for a deal with Iran to release five U.S. citizens detained in Iran. Last month, Iran moved four dual citizens from the infamous Evin Prison to house arrest, and now it is expected to release those four and one more who was already under house arrest in exchange for five Iranian prisoners and the release of $6 billion in Iranian oil revenue currently held in South Korea.

Several Republicans have opposed the deal. The senior Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, James E. Risch of Idaho, said that the “unfreezing” of funds “incentivizes hostage taking & provides a windfall for regime aggression,” and Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) called the money “ransom” and said it was a “craven act of appeasement.”

But in an op-ed on the national security website Defense One last month, Ryan Costello, the policy director for the National Iranian American Council, called the deal a win-win. The Iranian money will be released to Qatar, which will release it for purchases of food and medicine, which are not sanctioned. Medicine is desperately needed in Iran, and as Biden said in 2020: “Whatever our profound differences with the Iranian government, we should support the Iranian people.”

Today is the 50th anniversary of the military coup in Chile that overthrew the democratically elected government of leftist President Salvador Allende, a coup aided by the U.S. government’s Central Intelligence Agency under President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger. The State Department issued a statement calling the anniversary “an opportunity to reflect on this break in Chile’s democratic order and the suffering that it caused.”

While remaining silent on the U.S. role in that coup, the State Department noted that the Biden administration had sought to be transparent about that role by declassifying information. It said, “We pay our deepest respects to the victims of the repression that followed and honor the extraordinary bravery and sacrifices of countless Chileans who stood up for human rights and fought for an end to dictatorship and a peaceful return to democracy,” and it reaffirmed the U.S. “fullest commitment to supporting democracy and upholding human rights.”

This reassurance likely seems too easy to the human rights advocates who worry that stronger U.S. ties to India and Vietnam, both of which have troubling human rights records, will send a message that the U.S. is willing to tolerate human rights violations in strategically important countries. Biden says he pushes human rights in private talks with those countries’ leaders.

After commemorating the attacks of September 11, 2001, in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at Ground Zero in New York City, and at the Pentagon in 2021 and 2022, Biden today spoke at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, on his way home from Vietnam. He called for national unity to honor the nearly 3,000 people lost that day, urging people to remember “what we can do together. To remember what was destroyed, what can we repair, what was threatened, what we fortified, what was attacked—an indomitable American spirit prevailed over all of it.”

In his speech, Biden recalled Senator McCain as a man who always put country “above party, above politics, above his own person. This day reminds us we must never lose that sense of national unity. So, let that be the common cause of our time: let us honor September 11 by renewing our faith in one another.”

mickeyrat

  September 12, 2023 (Tuesday)

Members of the House of Representatives returned to work today after their summer break. They came back to a fierce fight over funding the government before the September 30 deadline, with only 12 days of legislative work on the calendar. That fight is also tangled up with Republican extremists’ demands to impeach President Joe Biden—although even members of their own caucus admit there are no grounds for such an impeachment—and threats to the continued position of Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as speaker of the House.

It’s an omnishambles, a word coined in 2009 by the writers of the BBC political satire The Thick of It, meaning “a situation, especially in politics, in which poor judgment results in disorder or chaos with potentially disastrous consequences.”

It fits.

In August, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed 12 spending bills covering discretionary funding—about 27% of the budget—by bipartisan votes, within limits set as part of the deal Speaker McCarthy made with President Biden to prevent the U.S. defaulting for the first time in history.

But the House left for summer break without being able to pass more than one of the 12 necessary bills. The extremists in the House Freedom Caucus oppose the spending levels Biden and McCarthy negotiated, insisting they amount to “socialism,” although with the exception of the Covid-19 blip, discretionary federal spending has stayed level at about 20% of the nation’s gross domestic product since 1954.

The Republican-dominated House Appropriations Committee has reneged on the deal McCarthy struck, producing bills that impose cuts far beyond those McCarthy agreed to. In particular, it cut Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding for programs to address climate change and the Internal Revenue Service, which has been badly underfunded since at least 2010, leaving wealthy tax cheats unaudited. The cuts are ideological: the bills have cut funding for food assistance programs for pregnant mothers and children, grants to school districts serving impoverished communities, the Environmental Protection Agency, agencies that protect workers’ rights, federal agencies’ civil rights offices, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the IRS (on top of clawing back funding in the IRA), and so on.

Although appropriations bills are generally kept clean, the extremists have loaded the must-pass bills with demands unrelated to the bill itself. They have put measures restricting abortion and gender-affirming care in at least 8 of the 12 bills. Even if such measures could make it through the Democrat-dominated Senate—and they can’t—President Biden has vowed to veto them.

Even fellow Republicans are balking at the attempt of the extremists to get their ideological wish list by holding the government hostage. Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters she doesn’t see how the Republicans are going to get the bills out of the committee, let alone pass them. “Overall, I think it's going to be very, very hard to get these bills forward,” she said.

Far from negotiating with McCarthy over the break, Freedom Caucus members appear to be increasing their demands as a shutdown looms. In August, the caucus announced it would not support even a short-term funding bill unless it also included their own demands for border policy, an end to what they call “woke” policies in the Department of Defense, and what they call the “unprecedented weaponization” of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They also oppose funding for Ukraine to enable it to fight off Russia’s invasion.

They have hinted they will use procedural votes to prevent any large spending bill from getting to the floor at all. One of the tools at their disposal is a challenge to McCarthy’s leadership, which thanks to the deal he struck to get the speakership in the first place, a single member can bring. Today, Florida representative Matt Gaetz threatened to “lead the resistance” if McCarthy worked with Democrats to fund the government.

They have offered McCarthy a way to avoid that showdown: impeach President Joe Biden, although there is no evidence the president has committed any “high crimes and misdemeanors” required for an impeachment.

Today, McCarthy availed himself of that escape clause. On the first day back from a 45-day August break, rather than tackling the budget crises, he endorsed an impeachment inquiry into President Biden.

This is a fascinating moment, as the Republicans have opened an impeachment inquiry into Biden with no evidence of wrongdoing. For all their breathless statements before the TV cameras, they have not managed to produce any evidence. Trump's own Department of Justice opened an investigation into Biden four years ago and found nothing to charge. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, Biden’s taxes are public, and a U.S. attorney has been scrutinizing Biden’s son Hunter for years; red flags should have been apparent long ago, if there were any.

Just yesterday, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tore apart the talking points far-right Republicans have been using to smear the president. He noted that none of the bank records Representative James Comer (R-KY) has referenced show any payments to President Biden, none of the suspicious activity reports the Oversight Committee has reviewed suggest any potential misconduct by Biden, none of the witness accounts to the Oversight Committee show any wrongdoing by Biden, Hunter Biden’s former business associates explicitly stated they had no reason to think President Biden was involved in his son’s business ventures, and so on.

This inquiry is not actually about wrongdoing; it is a reiteration of the same plan Trump tried to execute in 2019 when he asked Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Biden before the 2020 presidential election. By launching an inquiry, Republicans can count on their false accusations spreading through the media, tainting their opponents even without evidence of wrongdoing. See, for example, Clinton, Hillary: emails.

McCarthy insisted to reporters that an impeachment inquiry would simply give House committees leverage to subpoena officials from the White House, but during the Trump administration, the Department of Justice issued an opinion that the House must take a formal vote to validate an impeachment inquiry. It did so in reaction to then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s launch of an impeachment inquiry without such a vote, and the decision invalidated subpoenas issued as part of that inquiry. Pelosi went on to hold a vote and to launch an official inquiry.

It will not be so easy for McCarthy. He has not wanted to hold a vote because outside of the Freedom Caucus, even Republicans don’t want to launch an impeachment inquiry when there is no evidence for one. Senate Republicans today were quick to tell reporters they were skeptical that McCarthy could get enough votes in the House for an article of impeachment, and they were clear that a Senate trial was not an option. Representative Ken Buck (R-CO), himself a member of the Freedom Caucus, said: “The time for impeachment is the time when there’s evidence linking President Biden—if there’s evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor. That doesn’t exist right now.”

The attack on Biden is a transparent attempt to defend former president Trump from his own legal troubles by suggesting that Biden is just as bad. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin today also defended Trump, saying that his prosecutions show that the United States is fundamentally corrupt. His comment made former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) seem to wash her hands of the modern incarnation of her political party. “Putin has now officially endorsed the Putin-wing of the Republican Party,” she wrote. “Putin Republicans & their enablers will end up on the ash heap of history. Patriotic Americans in both parties who believe in the values of liberal democracy will make sure of it.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) summed up the day: “So let me get this straight: Republicans are threatening to remove their own Speaker, impeach the President, and shut down the government on September 30th—disrupting everyday people’s paychecks and general public operations. For what? I don’t think even they know.”

The center-right think tank American Action Forum’s vice president for economic policy, Gordon Gray, had an answer. Ever since the debt ceiling fight was resolved, he told Joan E. Greve of The Guardian, “there’s a big chunk of House Republicans who just want to break something. That’s just how some of these folks define governing. It’s how their constituents define success.”

Halifax2TheMax

mickeyrat said:

  September 12, 2023 (Tuesday)

Members of the House of Representatives returned to work today after their summer break. They came back to a fierce fight over funding the government before the September 30 deadline, with only 12 days of legislative work on the calendar. That fight is also tangled up with Republican extremists’ demands to impeach President Joe Biden—although even members of their own caucus admit there are no grounds for such an impeachment—and threats to the continued position of Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as speaker of the House.

It’s an omnishambles, a word coined in 2009 by the writers of the BBC political satire The Thick of It, meaning “a situation, especially in politics, in which poor judgment results in disorder or chaos with potentially disastrous consequences.”

It fits.

In August, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed 12 spending bills covering discretionary funding—about 27% of the budget—by bipartisan votes, within limits set as part of the deal Speaker McCarthy made with President Biden to prevent the U.S. defaulting for the first time in history.

But the House left for summer break without being able to pass more than one of the 12 necessary bills. The extremists in the House Freedom Caucus oppose the spending levels Biden and McCarthy negotiated, insisting they amount to “socialism,” although with the exception of the Covid-19 blip, discretionary federal spending has stayed level at about 20% of the nation’s gross domestic product since 1954.

The Republican-dominated House Appropriations Committee has reneged on the deal McCarthy struck, producing bills that impose cuts far beyond those McCarthy agreed to. In particular, it cut Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding for programs to address climate change and the Internal Revenue Service, which has been badly underfunded since at least 2010, leaving wealthy tax cheats unaudited. The cuts are ideological: the bills have cut funding for food assistance programs for pregnant mothers and children, grants to school districts serving impoverished communities, the Environmental Protection Agency, agencies that protect workers’ rights, federal agencies’ civil rights offices, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the IRS (on top of clawing back funding in the IRA), and so on.

Although appropriations bills are generally kept clean, the extremists have loaded the must-pass bills with demands unrelated to the bill itself. They have put measures restricting abortion and gender-affirming care in at least 8 of the 12 bills. Even if such measures could make it through the Democrat-dominated Senate—and they can’t—President Biden has vowed to veto them.

Even fellow Republicans are balking at the attempt of the extremists to get their ideological wish list by holding the government hostage. Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told reporters she doesn’t see how the Republicans are going to get the bills out of the committee, let alone pass them. “Overall, I think it's going to be very, very hard to get these bills forward,” she said.

Far from negotiating with McCarthy over the break, Freedom Caucus members appear to be increasing their demands as a shutdown looms. In August, the caucus announced it would not support even a short-term funding bill unless it also included their own demands for border policy, an end to what they call “woke” policies in the Department of Defense, and what they call the “unprecedented weaponization” of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They also oppose funding for Ukraine to enable it to fight off Russia’s invasion.

They have hinted they will use procedural votes to prevent any large spending bill from getting to the floor at all. One of the tools at their disposal is a challenge to McCarthy’s leadership, which thanks to the deal he struck to get the speakership in the first place, a single member can bring. Today, Florida representative Matt Gaetz threatened to “lead the resistance” if McCarthy worked with Democrats to fund the government.

They have offered McCarthy a way to avoid that showdown: impeach President Joe Biden, although there is no evidence the president has committed any “high crimes and misdemeanors” required for an impeachment.

Today, McCarthy availed himself of that escape clause. On the first day back from a 45-day August break, rather than tackling the budget crises, he endorsed an impeachment inquiry into President Biden.

This is a fascinating moment, as the Republicans have opened an impeachment inquiry into Biden with no evidence of wrongdoing. For all their breathless statements before the TV cameras, they have not managed to produce any evidence. Trump's own Department of Justice opened an investigation into Biden four years ago and found nothing to charge. As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, Biden’s taxes are public, and a U.S. attorney has been scrutinizing Biden’s son Hunter for years; red flags should have been apparent long ago, if there were any.

Just yesterday, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tore apart the talking points far-right Republicans have been using to smear the president. He noted that none of the bank records Representative James Comer (R-KY) has referenced show any payments to President Biden, none of the suspicious activity reports the Oversight Committee has reviewed suggest any potential misconduct by Biden, none of the witness accounts to the Oversight Committee show any wrongdoing by Biden, Hunter Biden’s former business associates explicitly stated they had no reason to think President Biden was involved in his son’s business ventures, and so on.

This inquiry is not actually about wrongdoing; it is a reiteration of the same plan Trump tried to execute in 2019 when he asked Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Biden before the 2020 presidential election. By launching an inquiry, Republicans can count on their false accusations spreading through the media, tainting their opponents even without evidence of wrongdoing. See, for example, Clinton, Hillary: emails.

McCarthy insisted to reporters that an impeachment inquiry would simply give House committees leverage to subpoena officials from the White House, but during the Trump administration, the Department of Justice issued an opinion that the House must take a formal vote to validate an impeachment inquiry. It did so in reaction to then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s launch of an impeachment inquiry without such a vote, and the decision invalidated subpoenas issued as part of that inquiry. Pelosi went on to hold a vote and to launch an official inquiry.

It will not be so easy for McCarthy. He has not wanted to hold a vote because outside of the Freedom Caucus, even Republicans don’t want to launch an impeachment inquiry when there is no evidence for one. Senate Republicans today were quick to tell reporters they were skeptical that McCarthy could get enough votes in the House for an article of impeachment, and they were clear that a Senate trial was not an option. Representative Ken Buck (R-CO), himself a member of the Freedom Caucus, said: “The time for impeachment is the time when there’s evidence linking President Biden—if there’s evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor. That doesn’t exist right now.”

The attack on Biden is a transparent attempt to defend former president Trump from his own legal troubles by suggesting that Biden is just as bad. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin today also defended Trump, saying that his prosecutions show that the United States is fundamentally corrupt. His comment made former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) seem to wash her hands of the modern incarnation of her political party. “Putin has now officially endorsed the Putin-wing of the Republican Party,” she wrote. “Putin Republicans & their enablers will end up on the ash heap of history. Patriotic Americans in both parties who believe in the values of liberal democracy will make sure of it.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) summed up the day: “So let me get this straight: Republicans are threatening to remove their own Speaker, impeach the President, and shut down the government on September 30th—disrupting everyday people’s paychecks and general public operations. For what? I don’t think even they know.”

The center-right think tank American Action Forum’s vice president for economic policy, Gordon Gray, had an answer. Ever since the debt ceiling fight was resolved, he told Joan E. Greve of The Guardian, “there’s a big chunk of House Republicans who just want to break something. That’s just how some of these folks define governing. It’s how their constituents define success.”

‘Murica.

mickeyrat

  September 13, 2023 (Wednesday)

Russian president Vladimir Putin met with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un today in Russia’s far east. His need to turn to North Korea’s isolated leader is a dramatic fall for Putin, who just four years ago was hobnobbing with then-president Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan. Now, thanks to his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin, too, is isolated, charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, and under an arrest warrant.

It is no wonder that shortly before he met with Kim, Putin said of Trump’s 2024 presidential run: “We surely hear that Mr. Trump says he will resolve all burning issues within several days, including the Ukrainian crisis. We cannot help but feel happy about it.” Trump has said he will end the war in a day if he’s reelected, and has called for withholding funds to Ukraine until the Department of Justice and the FBI investigate President Joe Biden.

At the meeting, Putin and Kim vowed to strengthen the ties between the two countries, and Kim expressed total support for Putin as Russia’s isolation grows, calling their stance a “fight against imperialism” and saying at a state dinner that he is “certain that the Russian people and its military will emerge victorious in the fight to punish the evil forces that ambitiously pursues hegemony and expansion.”

And yet it is Russia that is attacking other nations, including the U.S.: on September 7 the U.S. Department of Justice indicted 11 Russian men for their participation in cyberattacks against governments, businesses, and major hospital chains around the world. The U.S. Treasury Department and the United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency say the hackers are associated with Russian intelligence services.

Russia is looking for artillery munitions from North Korea to continue its war against Ukraine; North Korea wants ballistic missile technology from Russia to develop its space and satellite program. Kim cannot get that technology elsewhere because of sanctions intended to keep him from developing nuclear weapons. Sergey Radchenko, a senior professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who studies Russian and Chinese national security, concluded that we might be seeing an alliance between North Korea and Russia that, among other things, is likely to increase North Korea’s assertiveness.

That Putin feels the need to cozy up to Kim indicates the war is not going as he would like. Indeed, last night Ukraine hit the main base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, in occupied Crimea, destroying two vessels and the port infrastructure. The Ukrainian military claimed responsibility for the strike, underlining its growing strength in Russian-occupied areas..

In a major speech today at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Secretary of State Antony Blinken explained the place at which the United States finds itself in both foreign and domestic affairs. He told the audience that the end of the Cold War, a period of competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, along with their respective allies, ushered in “the promise of an inexorable march toward greater peace and stability, international cooperation, economic interdependence, political liberalization, human rights.” That postwar period did, indeed, lift more than a billion people from poverty, eliminate deadly diseases, and usher in a period of historically low conflicts between nations, despite challenges such as the 2008 global financial crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, and regional conflicts like those in Rwanda and Iraq.

“But,” Blinken said, “what we’re experiencing now is more than a test of the post–Cold War order. It’s the end of it.”

The relative geopolitical stability of the post–World War II years has given way to the rise of authoritarian powers, he said. Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine is the most immediate threat to “the international order enshrined in the UN charter and its core principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence for nations, and universal indivisible human rights for individuals.” But the People’s Republic of China “poses the most significant long-term challenge,” he said, “because it not only aspires to reshape the international order, it increasingly has the economic, the diplomatic, the military, the technological power to do just that.”

As partners, “Beijing and Moscow are working together to make the world safe for autocracy,” Blinken warned.

As the competition between the two systems ramps up, many countries are hedging their bets, while the influence of nonstate actors—international corporations, public service nongovernmental organizations, international terrorists, transnational criminal organizations—is growing. At the same time, the sheer scale of global problems like climate change and mass migration is making cooperation across borders more difficult.

The international economic order of the past several decades is flawed in ways that have caused people to lose faith in it, Blinken explained. Technology and globalization have hollowed out entire industries and weakened workers, while laws protected property. Inequality grew dramatically between 1980 and 2020, with the richest 0.1% accumulating the same wealth as the poorest 50%. “The longer these disparities persist,” Blinken pointed out, “the more distrust and disillusionment they fuel in people who feel the system is not giving them a fair shake. And the more they exacerbate other drivers of political polarization, amplified by algorithms that reinforce our biases rather than allowing the best ideas to rise to the top.”

Democracies are under threat, Blinken said. “Challenged from the inside by elected leaders who exploit resentments and stoke fears; erode independent judiciaries and the media; enrich cronies; crack down on civil society and political opposition. And challenged from the outside, by autocrats who spread disinformation, who weaponize corruption, who meddle in elections.”

The post–Cold War order is over, Blinken said. “One era is ending, a new one is beginning, and the decisions that we make now will shape the future for decades to come.”

The U.S. is in a position of strength from which it seeks to reinforce a rules-based international order in which “goods, ideas, and individuals can flow freely and lawfully across land, sea, sky, and cyberspace, where technology is used to empower people—not to divide, surveil, and repress them,” where the global economy is defined by fair competition and widespread prosperity, and where “international law and the core principles of the UN Charter are upheld, and where universal human rights are respected.” Such a world would serve humanity’s interests, as well as our own, Blinken said; its principles are universal.  

“[O]ur competitors have a fundamentally different vision,” he said. “They see a world defined by a single imperative: regime preservation and enrichment. A world where authoritarians are free to control, coerce, and crush their people, their neighbors, and anyone else standing in the way of this all-consuming goal.”

They claim that the norms and values that anchor the rules-based international order are imposed by Western nations, that human rights are up to nations themselves, and that big countries should be allowed to dictate to their smaller neighbors.

“The contrast between these two visions could not be clearer. And the stakes of the competition we face could not be higher—for the world, and for the American people.”

Blinken explained that the Biden administration has deliberately integrated domestic and foreign policy, crafting industrial strategy to rebuild the U.S. and to address the wealth disparities that create deep political resentment, while aligning that domestic strength to foreign policy. That foreign policy has depended on strengthening alliances and partnerships, building regional integration so that regions address their own interests as communities, closing the infrastructure gap between nations, and strengthening international institutions—rejoining the Paris Climate Accords and the World Health Organization, working to expand the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and so on.

Blinken said that such investments will lead nations to stand up to “the Beijings and Moscows of the world” when they claim this system serves the West and try to tear it down, and answer back: “No, the system you are trying to change is our system; it serves our interests.” At the same time, such investments will offer new markets for American workers and businesses, more affordable goods for American consumers, more reliable food and energy supplies, more robust health systems to stop deadly disease, more allies to address global challenges.

Looking back from the future, Blinken said, “the right decisions tend to look obvious, the end results almost inevitable. They never are. In real time, it’s a fog.”

“We must put our hand on the rudder of history and chart a path forward, guided by the things that are certain even in uncertain times—our principles, our partners, our vision for where we want to go,” Blinken said, “so that, when the fog lifts, the world that emerges tilts toward freedom, toward peace, toward an international community capable of rising to the challenges of its time.”

mickeyrat

  September 14, 2023 (Thursday)

Yesterday, Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) announced he would not run for reelection. That announcement came just as The Atlantic published an excerpt from a forthcoming biography of Romney by McKay Coppins in which Romney expressed disgust with his Republican colleagues for feeding Trump’s lies to their voters in exchange for power and acknowledged that “[a] very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

Coppins had access to Romney’s private journals, correspondence, and interviews. He describes Romney as isolated from other Republicans in Washington, unwelcome first because he was disgusted by Trump and vowed to be independent of him and then because, in the first impeachment trial, Romney voted to convict on one of two charges.

Romney said that “[a]lmost without exception” his Republican colleagues “shared my view of the president,” but they refused to speak up out of fear that their voters would turn against them. Coppins recounts a weekly caucus lunch at which Republicans gave Trump a standing ovation, listened as he boasted and rambled through remarks, and then burst into laughter as soon as Trump left.  

That loyalty appears to have been behind leaders’ refusal to address rumors of violence on January 6, 2021. According to Coppins, on January 2, 2021, Senator Angus King (I-ME) warned Romney that a high-ranking Pentagon official had told King that right-wing extremists online appeared to be planning to attack the government on January 6 to stop what Trump had told them was the stealing of the 2020 presidential election. They talked of guns and arson and bombs, and they talked of targeting the traitors in Congress, among whom they counted Romney for his vote to convict Trump on one count in his first impeachment trial. King was concerned for Romney’s safety.

Romney promptly texted then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to recount the conversation. “There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol,” Romney wrote. “I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require.” McConnell never answered.

When even after the events of January 6, fellow senators continued to execute their plan of objecting to the counting of electoral votes for certain states, Romney called them out on the floor of the Senate for “being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy.”

Romney recalled that some senators refused to convict Trump in the second impeachment trial out of concerns for their safety and that of their families. Romney himself had hired a security detail for his family since the attack on the U.S. Capitol, but at $5,000 a day such security was out of reach for most of his colleagues.

Just eleven years ago, Romney was the 2012 Republican nominee for president. Almost 61 million Americans voted for him. Now he is leaving public service with voters calling him a traitor and threatening his life.

In the House of Representatives today, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had to pull back one of the eleven spending bills that Congress needs to pass before the end of the fiscal year on September 30 to fund the government. Extremists say they will not bring any of those bills to the floor without deeper cuts than McCarthy agreed to in a deal with President Biden earlier this year.

In a conference meeting today, McCarthy allegedly exploded at the extremists stopping the budget process, who hold over him their power to challenge his speakership. “If you want to file a motion to vacate,” he said, “then file a f*cking motion.” Rather than backing down, an extremist leader, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), continued to needle McCarthy on social media.  

The House went home for the weekend. While it made no progress on the budget this week, Speaker McCarthy did manage to initiate an impeachment inquiry into President Biden in an unsuccessful attempt to appease the extremists. According to Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Alyce McFadden of the New York Times, those extremists have been conferring with Trump.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who has led calls to impeach Biden, told the reporters that she told Trump she wanted the impeachment inquiry to be “long and excruciatingly painful for Joe Biden.” Ultimately, she says, she wants a “long list of names” of those she claims are involved in crimes with the Bidens, and when Trump wins the presidency in 2024, she wants “to go after every single one of them and use the Department of Justice to prosecute them.”

Today the independent counsel appointed by then-president Trump to investigate Biden’s son Hunter charged Hunter with three felonies related to the fact that he falsely claimed he was not using illegal drugs when he applied to buy a handgun that he owned for about 11 days in 2018. Los Angeles Times legal affairs columnist Harry Litman noted that in June, after five years of investigation, the Justice Department negotiated a plea agreement with Hunter Biden’s lawyers in which Biden would plead guilty to two tax offenses and receive probation, and a gun charge would be dropped after two years if he continued to stay drug-free.

Although Biden had taken the unusual step of retaining Trump’s appointee, then–U.S. attorney David Weiss, to continue to investigate Hunter even after Trump’s term ended, to avoid any appearance of interference, Republicans protested what they saw as preferential treatment for the president’s son, harassing Weiss’s team and FBI agents and their families. Then the deal fell apart for reasons unrelated to Hunter.

And now Weiss has brought more charges. Litman notes that “the charges Weiss brought are rarely pursued for their own sake. The department does bring such charges against defendants who use improperly obtained firearms to commit other crimes. And in one or two instances, prosecutors appear to have used such charges against defendants whom they knew to be particularly dangerous. But this indictment over an isolated lie by a relatively harmless firearm applicant seems to be without precedent.”

But, Litman notes, the Republicans now have something with which “to muddy the waters with respect to Trump’s multiple criminal indictments.” As if on cue, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) claimed that “[m]ountains of evidence reveals that Hunter Biden likely committed several felonies and Americans expect the Justice Department to apply the law equally. Today’s charges are a very small start, but unless U.S. Attorney Weiss investigates everyone involved in the fraud schemes and influence peddling, it will be clear President Biden’s DOJ is protecting Hunter Biden and the big guy.”

Yesterday, President Biden spoke at a campaign reception. “Everybody always asks about impeachment,” he said, but he didn’t think much about it. He noted that Greene had vowed to impeach him the first day she was elected, and said: “I get up every day…not focused on impeachment. I’ve got a job to do. I’ve got to deal with the issues that affect the American people every single solitary day.”

That focus today demonstrated the vision Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have for the U.S. After yesterday’s meeting between Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan today held a trilateral call with his counterparts in Japan and South Korea, honoring the agreement forged at the historic trilateral summit of the three countries at Camp David in August. Together, they noted that North Korean arms exports to Russia would directly violate multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions, including ones for which Russia itself voted.

And in Largo, Maryland, today, after listing the economic accomplishments of his administration, Biden called out the Republicans for their lack of policy plans. For all the time they spend attacking Bidenomics, he said, “here’s what they never do: They never talk about what they want to do.... They tell you what they’re against. What are they for? It’s like they want to keep it a secret.”

Biden pointed out that just months ago, Republicans threatened to default on the U.S. debt, and now they are breaking the commitment they made to resolve that standoff. Working from a budget produced in June by the Republican Study Committee, which has 156 out of 222 of the Republican members in the House, Biden explained that Congressional Republicans now are doubling down on the old trickle-down economics that “hollowed out…the middle class…blew up the deficit…produced an anemic economic growth…and…stripped the dignity and pride and hope out of a community, one after another.”

“[Y]ou hear from our friends on the other side, the MAGA Republicans, what’s wrong with America. Everything’s wrong with America. They keep telling us America is failing,” Biden said. “Well, they’re wrong. They’re failing. America is not failing. America is winning. And there’s one reason for it: you. All you people get up every single morning and go out to try to do the right thing. You, the American people—you’re the one with grit and determination. Not me or your elected officials. You.”

“We’re the only nation based on an idea—an idea. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Look,” Biden said, “we’ve never fully lived up to it,’’ but “[w]e’ve never walked away from it.”

“These other guys are trying to walk away from it.”

mickeyrat

  September 15, 2023 (Friday)

At 10:22 this morning, a Jewish temple in Birmingham, Alabama, blew the shofar, and churches rang their bells four times.  

It was at that moment, sixty years ago, that a bomb ripped through the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. It was Youth Day in the historic brick church on Sunday, September 15, 1963, and five young girls dressed in their Sunday best were in the ladies’ lounge getting ready for their part in the Sunday service that was about to start. As Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins were chatting and adjusting their dresses, a charge of dynamite stashed under the steps that led to the church sanctuary blasted into the ladies lounge, killing the four girls instantly. Standing at the sink in the back of the room, Addie’s sister Sarah survived with serious injuries.  

Just five days before, Black children had entered formerly all-white schools after an August court order required an end to segregation in Birmingham’s public schools. This decision capped a fight over integration that had begun just after the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision in which the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional.

In that same year, in the wake of the successful 381-day Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott to protest that city’s segregated bus system, Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, along with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and strategist and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, started the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to challenge segregation through nonviolent protest, rather than trusting the work to the courts alone.

On September 9, 1957, Shuttlesworth and his wife Ruby, along with other Black parents, tried to enroll their children in the city’s all-white flagship John Herbert Phillips High School. A mob of white Ku Klux Klansmen met them at the school, attacking them with chains and bats; someone stabbed Ruby Shuttlesworth in the hip with a pocketknife, and an amateur videographer captured a man named Bobby Frank Cherry on video reaching for brass knuckles before diving back into the attack on Shuttlesworth.

Cherry had no children at the school.

Over the next several years, the Ku Klux Klan lost the political struggle over civil rights, and its members increasingly turned to public violence. There were so many bombings of civil rights leaders’ homes and churches that the city became known as “Bombingham.” When the Freedom Riders, civil rights workers who rode interstate buses in mixed-race groups to challenge segregation, came through Birmingham, police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor looked the other way as KKK members beat the riders with baseball bats, chains, rocks, and lead pipes.

Connor was a perfect foil for civil rights organizers, who began a campaign of nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation in Birmingham. One of the organizers’ tactics was to attract national attention by provoking Connor, and participants in the movement began sit-ins at libraries, kneel-ins at white churches, and voter registration drives. Shuttlesworth invited King to Birmingham to help.

In April 1963, Connor got an injunction barring the protests, and promised to fill the jails. He did. King’s famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail was a product of Connor’s vow, smuggled out of jail on bits of paper given to him by a sympathetic inmate. In the letter, King responded to those who opposed the civil rights protests and, claiming to support civil rights, said that the courts were the proper venue to address social injustice. King agreed that the protests created tension, but he explained that such tension was constructive: it would force the city’s leaders to negotiate. “‘Wait,’” he reminded them, “has almost always meant ‘never.’”

But Connor’s tactics had the chilling effect he intended, as demonstrators shied away from being arrested out of fear of losing their jobs and being unable to provide for their families. So organizers decided to invite children to join a march to the downtown area. When the children agreed, the SCLC held workshops on the techniques of nonviolence and warned them of the danger they would be facing.  

On May 2, 1963, they gathered at the 16th Street Baptist Church, just blocks away from Birmingham’s City Hall. As students moved toward City Hall in waves, singing “We Shall Overcome,” police officers arrested more than 600 of them and blocked the streets with fire trucks. The national news covered the story.

The next day, Bull Connor tried another tactic to keep the young protesters out of the downtown: fire hoses set to the highest pressure. When observers started to throw rocks and bottles at the police with the fire hoses, Connor told police officers to use German shepherd dogs to stop them. Images from the day made the national news and began to galvanize support for the protesters.

By May 6, Connor had turned the state fairgrounds into a makeshift jail to hold the overflow of protesters he was arresting, and national media figures, musicians, and civil rights activists were arriving in Birmingham. By May 7 the downtown was shut down while Connor arrested more people and used fire hoses again. The events in Birmingham were headline news.

By May 10, local politicians under pressure from businessmen had agreed to release the people who had been arrested; to desegregate lunch counters, drinking fountains, and bathrooms; and to hire Black people in a few staff jobs.

After Connor’s insistence that he would never permit desegregation, white supremacists in Birmingham felt betrayed by the new deal, basic though it was. Violence escalated over the summer, even as King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail was widely published and praised and as civil rights activists, fresh from the Birmingham campaign, on August 28 held the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C., where King delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech.

For white supremacists in Birmingham, the children and the 16th Street Baptist Church where they had organized were the symbols of the movement that had beaten them.

Their fury escalated in summer 1963 when a lawsuit the Reverend Shuttlesworth had filed to challenge segregation in public schools ended in August with a judge ordering Birmingham public schools to desegregate.

Five days after the first Black children entered a white school as students, four members of the Cahaba River Group, which had splintered off from another Ku Klux Klan group because they didn’t think it was aggressive enough, took action. Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, and Bobby Frank Cherry—the same man who in 1957 had beaten the Reverend Shuttlesworth with brass knuckles for trying to enroll his children in school—bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church. "Just wait until Sunday morning and they'll beg us to let them segregate,” Chambliss had told his niece.  

The death of innocent children—on a Sunday morning, in a house of God—at the hands of white supremacists drew national attention. It woke up white people who had previously been leery of civil rights protests, making them confront the horror of racial violence in the South. Support for civil rights legislation grew, and in 1964 that support helped legislators to pass the Civil Rights Act.

Still, it seemed as if the individual bombers would get away with their crimes. In 1968, the FBI investigation ended without indictments.

But it turned out the story wasn’t over. Bill Baxley, a young law student at the University of Alabama in 1963, was so profoundly outraged by the bombing that he vowed someday he would do something about it. In 1970, voters elected Baxley to be Alabama’s attorney general. He reopened the case, famously responding to a Ku Klux Klan threat by responding on official state letterhead: “kiss my *ss.”

The reluctance of the FBI to share its evidence meant that Baxley charged and convicted only Robert Chambliss—whose nickname in 1963 was “Dynamite Bob”—for the murder of Denise McNair.

But still the story wasn’t over. Another young lawyer named Doug Jones was in the courtroom during that trial, and in 1997, President Bill Clinton appointed Jones as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. Jones pursued the case, uncovering old evidence and finding new witnesses. Herman Cash had died, but in 2001 and 2002, representing the state of Alabama, Jones successfully prosecuted Thomas Edwin Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry for first-degree murder.

Chambliss, Cherry, and Blanton all died in prison: Chambliss in 1985, Cherry in 2004. Blanton died in 2020.

mickeyrat

  September 16, 2023 (Saturday)

The storm has left us safe and sound, and this is how it said goodbye.

We are still without power and operating on a generator, so I'm going to leave it at that tonight, turn everything off, and sleep for a very long time.

I'll see you tomorrow (assuming we get power back).

mickeyrat

  September 17, 2023 (Sunday)

Friday, September 15, was the fourth anniversary of these Letters from an American, although they did not then have a title. When I posted a roundup of what I thought was going on in the government on Facebook that day, I had no idea it was going to be anything other than a marker for the future.

I wrote a review of Trump’s mental decline amidst his faltering presidency, stonewalling of investigations of potential criminal activity by him or his associates, packing of the courts, and attempting to use the power of the government to help his 2020 reelection. And I added: “None of  this would fly in America if the Senate, controlled by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, were not aiding and abetting him.”

“This is the story of a dictator on the rise,” I wrote, “taking control of formerly independent branches of government, and using the power of his office to amass power.”

Just four days later, the story that there was an intelligence community whistleblower had broken wide open. When I wrote on September 19, it was about how, on September 13, House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) wrote to then–acting director of national intelligence (DNI) Joseph Maguire accusing him of illegally withholding from the committee a whistleblower complaint made by someone in the intelligence community. The inspector general of the intelligence community, Trump appointee Michael Atkinson, had determined the complaint was credible and urgent. Under the law, that determination meant that Congress must see it.

But Maguire refused to turn it over.

Maguire had been in the job only a month. Trump’s previous director of national intelligence, the well-regarded former senator Dan Coats (R-IN), had earned Trump’s wrath in 2018 when he confirmed—a day after Trump had denied it—that the United States intelligence community had concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election.

Trump fired Coats just three days after the phone call that had sparked the whistleblower complaint: the phone call in which Trump had asked Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to “do us a favor” before the administration would release the money Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine fight the ongoing Russian presence after its 2014 invasion.  

Coats’s natural replacement was the deputy director of national intelligence, career intelligence professional Sue Gordon, but Trump forced her out. Instead, he tried to replace her with loyalist Representative John Ratcliffe (R-TX), but the Senate balked then at confirming a man without the national security credentials required by law (it would agree to Ratcliffe in May 2020). Then he turned to Maguire, slotting him in as an “acting” officer so he could avoid Senate confirmation.   

“A Director of National Intelligence has never prevented a properly submitted whistleblower complaint that the [inspector general] determined to be credible and urgent from being provided to the congressional intelligence committees. Never,” Schiff said in a statement. “This raises serious concerns about whether White House, Department of Justice or other executive branch officials are trying to prevent a legitimate whistleblower complaint from reaching its intended recipient, the Congress, in order to cover up serious misconduct.”

As I had noted just four days earlier, there was already plenty of reason to worry about what was going on in the administration—not least over the DNI position—but the whistleblower threw things into a new realm. A member of the legislative branch—Congress—had directly accused a member of the executive branch—possibly even the president— of violating a specific law.

And so we were off to the races.

The question at the heart of the four years since then has been whether the rule of law on which the United States of America was founded will survive.

Within months the fight over the whistleblower complaint had become an impeachment. The evidence against the president was so overwhelming that Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said: “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one.”

And yet, Republican senators stood behind Trump. “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues. “It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”

His acquittal made Trump determined to take revenge and to cement his power. As the Covid-19 pandemic shattered the country in summer 2020, he claimed he had “absolute authority” to force states to reopen. “When somebody is President of the United States, the authority is total,” Trump stated, adding that “[t]he federal government has absolute power” and that he had the “absolute right” to use that power if he wanted to.

Trump’s determination to hold onto power metastasized into his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election…and still, Republican senators refused to hold him to account.

That poison has continued to spread. On May 27, 2023, the Republican-led Texas House of Representatives voted to impeach Texas attorney general Ken Paxton on 20 counts of corruption and bribery. Paxton is supported by hard-right wealthy donors and has used his position to advance Trump’s fortunes rather than to defend Texas laws. According to Axios’s Mike Allen, Trump allies Steve Bannon and Charlie Kirk fired up their supporters to flood senators’ phones to demand acquittal, while party leaders warned senators that they would face well-funded primary opponents if they voted to convict.

On Saturday the Texas Senate acquitted Paxton of all charges, with only two Republicans voting to convict. Trump promptly congratulated Paxton on his “Texas sized VICTORY” and attacked the Republicans who had voted to impeach him.

The Dallas News warned: “We have come to a place of great danger, where the plain evidence of corruption can no longer overcome the majority party’s determination to protect its self-interest and its agents.”

But this is not the only story of the past four years. At the same time Republican Party leaders have abandoned the rule of law, the rest of us have realized how imperative it is to demand its restoration.

The other thing that happened on September 15, 2023, was that copies of the new book arrived. It is called Democracy Awakening for a reason. From the Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration—the largest single-day demonstration in world history—to Alexander Vindman’s declaration in the first impeachment hearings that “Here, right matters,” to the lawyers protecting immigrant rights and election laws, the Black Lives Matter movement, the refusal of Republican officials to help Trump overturn the election, the work of election officials to ensure a fair vote count, the determination of law enforcement officers like Michael Fanone to defend the U.S. Capitol, the testimony of those like Cassidy Hutchinson, and the determination of the majority to make its voice heard, from where I sit it looks like the American people are waking up to the defense of our democracy.  

The past four years have been quite a ride. For me, what began as a Facebook post has grown into a community I am ever so proud to be a part of.

I’m eager to see what comes next.

mickeyrat

  September 18, 2023 (Monday)

Headlines this morning said that “Congress” is in crisis. But that construction obscures the true story: the Republicans are in crisis, and they are taking the country down with them.

The most immediate issue is that funding for the government ends on September 30. The Senate, controlled by Democrats, is moving forward on a strongly bipartisan basis with 12 appropriations bills that reflect the deal President Biden hammered out with Speaker Kevin McCarthy in May to get House Republicans to agree not to default on the United States debt. That deal, the Washington Post editorial board pointed out today, was a comprehensive compromise that should have been a blueprint for the budget.

But extremist House Republicans reject it, and there is no sign that House Republicans can even agree among themselves on a replacement, let alone on one that can make it through the Senate and past the president’s desk. Extremists in the Freedom Caucus insist they will not agree to any budget that accepts the deal McCarthy cut with Biden. In addition, although appropriations bills are traditionally kept clean of volatile issues, the extremists have loaded up this year’s appropriations bills with so-called poison pills: rules that advance their attempt to impose their ideology on the country but are unacceptable to Democrats. McCarthy had to pull back the Pentagon spending bill on Thursday before the House went home for the weekend, leaving without any plan in place for funding the government.

Over the weekend, six Republicans from five different party factions offered a plan for a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government and avoid a shutdown. Designed to appeal to the extremists, the plan goes back on the deal McCarthy struck with Biden. It proposes a 1% cut to the federal budget, but that 1% is not applied evenly: the defense budget and the budget for the Department of Veterans Affairs would not take any cuts—Republicans have learned how voters react to hurting veterans—requiring an 8% cut to everything else. It includes the border measures the extremists want, and provides no money either for Ukraine or for disaster assistance.

It’s not clear that Republican House members will vote for the bill, and if they do, the bill is unlikely, encumbered as it is, to make it through the Senate.

What the House Republicans have managed to do recently is to try to appease the extremists by launching an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, claiming that he enriched himself through his son Hunter’s business dealings when he was vice president. McCarthy had to open the inquiry himself, without a House vote, because lacking any evidence, he didn’t have the votes to set such an inquiry in motion. On the Fox News Channel on Sunday, Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX) said McCarthy has given him the role of assisting in the inquiry, but admitted: “We don't have the evidence now, but we may find it later."

To try to get at the president, the Republicans have hammered at his son Hunter, who has begun to push back, today filing a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service for failing to keep his tax information private as the law requires. He is referring to the two men who testified before House committees trying to find dirt on Hunter Biden and who made the rounds of reporters with their allegations that the IRS did not adequately pursue charges against him.

Meanwhile, video has emerged of the conditions under which extremist Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) was kicked out of a kid-friendly Beetlejuice concert last weekend. Boebert has repeatedly accused those protecting LGBTQ civil rights of “grooming” children for sexual activity. Not only was she vaping, she and her date were groping each other quite intensely. Boebert is in the process of getting a divorce, and her date, it turns out, is co-owner of a gay-friendly bar that has hosted drag shows.

Things are not all ducky with Republicans in the Senate, either. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) refuses to lift his hold on more than 300 military promotions until the Pentagon changes its policy of allowing service members leave time and travel expenses to obtain abortion care. While he insists he is doing no damage to the military, actual military officers, as well as members of his own party, disagree. They say the holds are hollowing out our military leadership and that the damage will take years to repair, since the promotion holds also stop junior officers from moving up. Those holds mean lower pay and retirement, tempting junior officers to move out of the military to higher-paying private sector jobs.

The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) today wrote a public letter to Tuberville asking him to remove his hold and warning that “harming American service members as leverage in Washington political battles” set a “very dangerous precedent.” They also noted that in a survey of VFW members, including those in Alabama, “VFW members strongly conveyed that politicians should not be able to harm the troops over political disputes and that political decisions that harm the troops would affect the way they would vote in upcoming elections.”

And now Trump, who leads the extremists, has suddenly changed course on abortion, the leading issue for most of his base, in order to weaken his rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Florida governor Ron DeSantis. After packing the Supreme Court with three extremists who helped to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision by which the Supreme Court recognized the constitutional right to an abortion, Trump yesterday said the six-week abortion ban DeSantis signed, which would ban abortion before most women know they’re pregnant, was “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake,” although he also appeared to endorse abortion bans in general. Trump’s vice president Mike Pence, in contrast, is calling for a federal ban on abortion.  

Republicans have finally recognized that about 63% of Americans think abortion should be legal in “all or most circumstances,” according to a new poll by 19th News jand SurveyMonkey. But only 9% believe it should be illegal in all cases, although 14 states have enacted such extensive bans. The survey also found that support for abortion rights has increased since the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Trump has suddenly also become more problematic for the Republicans. On Sunday night,  Trump doubled down on his past antisemitism by sharing a Rosh Hashanah message that celebrated the Jewish New Year by accusing “liberal Jews” of voting to “destroy” America and Israel.

Then, ​​today, Katherine Faulders, Mike Levine, and Alexander Mallin of ABC News reported that long-time Trump assistant Molly Michael told agents investigating Trump’s mishandling of classified documents that he wrote to-do lists for her on the back of documents with classified markings.

Meanwhile, the administration continues to go about the daily work of governance.

On Sunday, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan met in Malta with China’s top diplomat to keep communications between the two countries open. Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Vice President Han Zheng of China on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. "The world expects us to responsibly manage our
relationship," Blinken said. "The United States is committed to doing just that.”

Also on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly today, 32 coastal Atlantic countries from Africa, Europe, North America, South America, and the Caribbean launched the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation. This new multilateral forum echoes regional organizations the administration has backed elsewhere and seeks to establish a mechanism for implementing “a set of shared principles for the Atlantic region, such as a commitment to an open Atlantic free from interference, coercion, or aggressive action,” as well as coordinated plans for addressing issues including climate change.

Finally, five Americans who have been imprisoned in Iran are home tonight, along with two of their spouses. In exchange, the U.S. freed five Iranian citizens who were imprisoned or were about to stand trial, although three of them declined to return to Iran (two have chosen to stay in the U.S., and another went to a third country). The Republic of Korea has released $6 billion of Iran’s money to Qatar for use for humanitarian aid to Iranian citizens suffering under the sanctions that prevent medicines and food from coming into the country.

Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, told the Washington Post’s Jason Rezaian that the funds had not previously been frozen; they were held up in South Korea because of that country’s own regulations. Under Trump, Iran spent heavily from similar accounts in China, Turkey, and India. Now that they are released, the funds will have more legal restrictions than they did when they were in South Korea.

The Biden administration has prioritized bringing home wrongfully detained Americans. Today’s events bring the number of those the administration has brought home to 35.

mickeyrat

  September 19, 2023 (Tuesday)

House Republicans appear to be barreling toward a government shutdown, unable to agree even to debate a bill to fund the military. That rejection made Republican leadership pull from the floor a continuing resolution to fund the government into October. Extremist members simply refuse to agree to any bill that doesn’t cave to their demands. And, as NBC News reporters note, “The House [Republican] chaos is worse than it may appear.” The bills over which they are currently fighting cannot possibly pass the Senate. Government funding ends on September 30.

And so a small minority of extremists are threatening to shut down our government. Such a shutdown would have global as well as domestic repercussions: the Pentagon warned that a government shutdown would disrupt U.S. military aid to Ukraine, including training for military forces. Hamstringing our ability to help Ukraine stand against Russia, refusing to fund the Pentagon, and Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville’s hold on military promotions that has left more than 300 top military positions vacant all undermine our national security. This is an astonishing position for Republicans, who used to pride themselves on their support for the military.

That such a small number of extremists can shut down our country speaks to the power of voting. Four days ago, Vice President Kamala Harris kicked off a month-long tour of college campuses to mobilize younger voters to “fight for our freedoms.” Today is National Voter Registration Day, and in Reading, Pennsylvania, she noted that young people have spent their whole lives in the climate crisis, have seen the Supreme Court stop recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, and have spent their earlier years practicing active shooter drills. They are now stepping up to lead the country toward solutions.

Harris told a cheering, overflow audience at the Reading Area Community College that voting “determines whether the person who is holding elected office is going to fight for your freedoms and rights or not. Whether that be the freedom that you should have to just be free from attack, free from hate, free from gun violence, free from bias, free to love who you love and be open about it, free to have access to the ballot box without people obstructing your ability to exercise your civic right to vote, in terms of who will be the people holding elected office and leading your country.”

The political power of young voters will be important in determining the outcome of the 2024 elections. In Pennsylvania today, Democratic governor Josh Shapiro announced automatic voter registration when people are getting or renewing a driver’s license. The governor tweeted: “We got traffic moving on I-95 in just 12 days. We delivered universal free breakfast for 1.7 million students. And today, we implemented automatic voter registration. There’s more to do, but we’re getting stuff done in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

In Congress today, the Democrats, led by Representative Terri Sewell (D-AL) reintroduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed the House in 2021 but was stopped by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

This measure would restore and modernize the 1965 Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision gutted it. Until that decision, Congress had regularly reauthorized the Voting Rights Act on a bipartisan basis, but as soon as the decision was handed down, Republican-dominated state legislatures passed voter suppression laws, gerrymandered their states, and closed polling sites, measures that made it more difficult for Black Americans, many of whom backed Democrats, to vote. In the decade since the decision, Sewell noted, at least 29 states have passed a total of almost 100 laws restricting voting.

Sewell represents Selma, Alabama, where civil rights activist and, later, Georgia representative John R. Lewis was beaten by law enforcement officers when he crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge with other civil rights activists marching for the right to vote. She noted, “Generations of Americans—many in my hometown of Selma, Alabama—marched, fought, and even died for the equal right of all Americans to vote. But today, their legacy and our very democracy are under attack as MAGA extremists target voters with new laws to restrict voting access. Ten years after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the fight for voting rights has never been more urgent.”

The reason for voter suppression was made clear again today when, in a pattern that has continued since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, no longer recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, Democrats won two elections. In New Hampshire, Democrat Hal Rafter flipped a state House seat formerly held by a Republican. And in Pennsylvania, Democrat Lindsay Powell won a special election in Pittsburgh, enabling Democrats to hold control of the Pennsylvania House.

mickeyrat

Last couple of paragraphs feel like Garland is throwing the gauntlet down.....

  September 20, 2023 (Wednesday)

The fight over how we conceive of our federal government was on full display today.

The Biden administration announced the creation of the American Climate Corps. This will be a group of more than 20,000 young Americans who will learn to work in clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience while also earning good wages and addressing climate change.

This ACC looks a great deal like the Civilian Conservation Corps established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1933, during the New Deal. The CCC was designed to provide jobs for unemployed young men (prompting critics to ask, “Where’s the She, She, She?”) while they worked to build fire towers, bridges, and foot trails, plant trees to stop soil erosion, stock fish, dig ditches, build dams, and so on.

While the CCC was segregated, the ACC will prioritize hiring within communities traditionally left behind, as well as addressing the needs of those communities that have borne the brunt of climate change. If the administration’s rules for it become finalized, the corps will also create a streamlined pathway into federal service for those who participated in the program.

In January, a poll showed that a climate corps is popular. Data for Progress found that voters supported such a corps by a margin of 39 points. Voters under 45 supported it by a margin of 51 points.

While the Biden administration is establishing a modern version of a popular New Deal program, extremists in the Republican Party are shutting down the government to try to stop it from precisely this sort of action. They want to roll the government back to the days before the New Deal, ending government regulation, provision of a basic social safety net, investment in infrastructure, and protection of civil rights.

Extremists in the House Republican conference are refusing to acknowledge the deal worked out for the budget last spring by President Biden and Republican speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Instead, in order to pass even a continuing resolution that would buy time for Congress to pass an actual budget, they are insisting on cuts of up to 8% on discretionary spending that Senate Democrats, as well as Biden himself, are certain to oppose.

The White House has noted that the cuts the Republicans demand would mean 800 fewer Customs and Border Protection agents and officers (which, in turn, would mean more drugs entering the United States); more than 2 million women and children waitlisted for the WIC food assistance program; more than 4,000 fewer rail inspection days; up to 40,000 fewer teachers, aides, and key education staff, affecting 26 million students; and so on.

House speaker McCarthy cannot corral the extremists to agree to anything unless they get such cuts, which even other Republicans recognize are nonstarters (those cuts are so unpopular that Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported today that Republicans are somewhat bizarrely considering changing their messaging about their refusal to fund the government from concerns about spending to concerns about border security).

Meanwhile, the extremists are threatening to throw McCarthy out of the speakership. There are rumors that Republican moderates are considering working with Democrats to save McCarthy’s job, but Democrats are not keen on helping him when he has just agreed to open a baseless impeachment inquiry into the president in order to appease the extremists.

“If you’d asked about two months ago I would have said absolutely,” Representative Dean Phillips (D-MN) told Manu Raju, Lauren Fox, and Melanie Zanona of CNN. “But I think sadly his behavior is unprincipled, it’s unhelpful to the country,” he said.

As a shutdown appears more and more likely, even Republicans acknowledge that the problem is on their side of the House. Until the 1980s, funding gaps did not lead to government shutdowns. Government agencies continued to work, with the understanding that Congress would eventually work out funding disputes. But in 1980 a fight over funding the 1,600-employee Federal Trade Commission led President Jimmy Carter to ask Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti if the agency could continue to operate when its funding ran out. Civiletti surprised participants by saying no.

Four years ago, Civiletti told Ian Shapira of the Washington Post that his decision was about a specific and limited issue, and that he never imagined that politicians would use shutdowns for long periods of time as a political weapon. And yet, shutdowns have become more frequent and longer since the 1990s, usually as Republicans demand that Congress adopt policies they cannot pass through regular procedures (like the 34-day shutdown in 2019 over funding for the border wall former president Trump wanted).

Many observers note that “governing by crisis,” as President Barack Obama put it, is terribly damaging and that Civiletti’s decision should be revisited. Next month’s possible shutdown has the potential to be particularly problematic because there is no obvious solution. After all, it’s hardly a surprise that this budget deadline was coming up and that the extremists were angry over the deal McCarthy cut with Biden back in May, and yet McCarthy has been unable in all those months to bring his conference to an agreement.

Republicans appear resigned that voters will blame them for the crisis, which, honestly, seems fair. “We always get the blame,” Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID), a senior appropriator, told Katherine Tully-McManus and Adam Cancryn of Politico. “Name one time that we’ve shut the government down and we haven’t got the blame.”

Meanwhile, the House extremists continue to push their vision for the nation by undermining the institutions of the government. The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), today held what normally would have been a routine oversight hearing focused on policy, law enforcement, and so on. Instead of that business, though, Jordan and the hard-right Republicans on the committee worked to construct a false reality in right-wing media by attacking Attorney General Merrick Garland over his role in the investigation of President Biden’s son Hunter, begun five years ago under Trump.

Glenn Thrush of the New York Times noted drily that “[m]any of the claims and insinuations they leveled against Mr. Garland—that he is part of a coordinated Democratic effort to shield the Bidens and persecute Mr. Trump—were not supported by fact. And much of the specific evidence presented, particularly the testimony of an investigator who questioned key decisions in the Hunter Biden investigation, was given without context or acknowledgment of contradictory information.”

Instead, Jordan and his extremist colleagues shouted at Garland and over his answers, producing sound bites for right-wing media. Those included the statement from Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN) that the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were actually “good Americans” who brought “strollers and the kids.” Even as both Biden and Garland have prioritized restoring faith in the Justice Department after Trump’s use of it for his own ends, the extremist Republicans are working to undermine that faith by constructing the false image that the Department of Justice is persecuting Trump and his allies.  

Their position was not unchallenged on the committee, even within their own party. Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) defended Garland from their attacks, while Democrats on the committee went after the Republicans themselves. Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) accused Jordan of making the Judiciary Committee into a “criminal defense firm for the former president.”

Garland, who is usually soft-spoken, pushed back too. "Our job is not to take orders from the president, from Congress, or from anyone else, about who or what to criminally investigate,” he told the committee. "I am not the president’s lawyer. I will add I am not Congress’s prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people."

“We will not be intimidated,” he added. “We will do our jobs free from outside influence. And we will not back down from defending our democracy.”

mickeyrat

  September 21, 2023 (Thursday)

The Senate has confirmed three top defense leaders. Last night it confirmed Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr. to replace Army General Mark A. Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he retires at the end of the month. Today, it confirmed General Randy A. George as Army chief of staff and General Eric M. Smith as Marine Corps commandant.

The Senate filled the positions at the top of our military by working around the hold extremist senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has put on more than 300 military promotions, allegedly because he objects to the government’s policy of providing leave and travel allowance for service members who have to travel to obtain abortions.

Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post focused on the House Republicans today, though, when she wrote: “The GOP completely gone off its rocker—incapable of passing House spending, ranting and raving at AG, cooking up ludicrous and baseless impeachment, unable to greet Zelensky with joint session. This is not normal. This is egregious. You'd think the reporting would reflect it.”

Indeed, the House Republicans remain unable even to agree to talk about funding the government, let alone actually passing the appropriations bills Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to four months ago. Today, right-wing extremists in the House blocked a procedural vote over a Pentagon funding bill, keeping what is normally an easily passed bipartisan bill from even reaching the floor for debate. McCarthy acknowledged to reporters that he is frustrated. “This is a whole new concept of individuals who just want to burn the whole place down. It doesn’t work.”

The extremists do indeed appear unconcerned about the effects of their refusal to fund the government, and since they have the five or six votes they need to sink the measures McCarthy wants to pass with only Republican votes, this handful of representatives are the ones deciding whether the government will shut down.

McCarthy could pass clean funding bills through the House whenever he wishes, but he refuses. To do so would mean working with Democrats, and that would spark a vote to throw him out of the speakership. And so, rather than keep the members in Washington, D.C., to work on the appropriations bills over the weekend, McCarthy recognized he did not have the votes he needs and sent them home.

The extremists are bolstered by former president Donald Trump, who posted on his social media platform today that the Republicans in Congress “can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government…. This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots. They failed on the debt limit, but they must not fail now. Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!”

Experts say shutting down the government would not, in fact, end the former president’s legal troubles, but he is actually doing more than that here: he is trying to assert dominance over the country. As Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said: “Let’s be clear about what the former president is saying here. House Republicans should shut down the government unless the prosecutions against him are shut down. He would deny paychecks to millions of working families & devastate the US economy, all in the service of himself.”

Extremist leader Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) responded to Trump’s statement with his own: “Trump Opposes the Continuing Resolution” to fund the government,” he wrote. “Hold the line.” Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch noted: “House Republicans refuse to fund the government to protect Donald Trump.”

Trump’s accusation that President Biden is weaponizing the Justice Department against him and others who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election is the opposite of what has really happened. Not only has Biden stayed scrupulously out of the Justice Department’s business—leaving in place the Trump-appointed leader of the investigation into Biden’s son Hunter, for example—but also we received more proof yesterday that it was Trump, not Biden, who weaponized the Justice Department against his enemies.

Nora Dennehy, who abruptly resigned from former special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, explained in her confirmation hearing to Connecticut’s state supreme court yesterday that she quit because Trump’s Department of Justice was tainted by politics. Before joining the probe, she said, “I had been taught and spent my entire career at [the] Department of Justice conducting any investigation in an objective and apolitical manner.”

But Trump and his loyalists expected Durham’s investigation to prove that there was a “deep state” conspiracy against him, and then–attorney general William Barr seemed to be working to support that fantasy, even though there was no evidence of it (as shown by the fact the investigation ultimately fizzled). Barr was, she thought, violating DOJ guidelines in his public comments about the investigation and in his consideration of releasing an interim report before the 2020 election.

“I simply couldn’t be part of it,” Dannehy said. “So I resigned.”

The resistance of the extremists to McCarthy’s leadership is spilling over into foreign affairs as well. Today, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky was in Washington, D.C., where he met with President Biden at the White House and with leaders at the Pentagon, and spoke to a closed-door session for the Senate. But he did not speak to the House of Representatives. While McCarthy met with him privately, the speaker maintained that “we just didn’t have time” for him to address the House.

As part of their demands, House extremists want to cut funding for Ukraine’s defense. This would, of course, work to strengthen Russian president Vladimir Putin’s hand in his war against Ukraine. Earlier this month, former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan told MSNBC that it is “absolutely essential” to Putin that Trump win back the White House in 2024. “I think it is Putin's main lifeline in order to find some way to salvage what has been a debacle in Ukraine for him," Brennan said. "If Trump is able to return to the White House...Putin could have a like-minded individual that he can work with, detrimental to U.S. interests certainly and detrimental to Western interests overall.” The intelligence community assesses that Putin worked to help Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and is pushing pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine propaganda now.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III assured Zelensky that the U.S. will continue to support Ukraine and work with allies and partners to make sure it has the weapons it needs. Lara Seligman of Politico reported today that the Pentagon will continue to fund Ukraine operations even if there is a government shutdown. Military activities deemed crucial to national security can be exempted from being shuttered during a government shutdown.

And finally, 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch announced today that he will be stepping down as chair of his media empire, including both Fox Corporation, which includes the Fox News Channel (FNC), and News Corporation, which owns the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, among other newspapers. In 1996 the Australian-born mogul launched the Fox News Channel with media specialist Roger Ailes, who had packaged Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon in 1968 by presenting him to audiences in highly scripted television appearances.

The Fox News Channel initially presented news from a conservative viewpoint, but over time its opinion shows, delivered as if they were news, came to dominate the channel. Those shows presented a simple narrative in which Americans—overwhelmingly white and rural—wanted the government to leave them alone but “socialists” who wanted social welfare programs demanded their tax dollars. Isolated in the fantasy world of FNC, its viewers became such fanatic adherents to right-wing politics that FNC wholeheartedly trumpeted Trump’s Big Lie after he lost the 2020 presidential election because viewers turned away from FNC when some of its personalities acknowledged that Biden had won..

Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, said today that “Murdoch created a uniquely destructive force in American democracy and public life, one that ushered in an era of division where racist and post-truth politics thrive.”  Margaret Sullivan, formerly the Washington Post’s media critic, wrote in The Guardian that FNC was “a shameless propaganda outfit, reaping massive profits even as it attacked core democratic values such as tolerance, truth and fair elections.” Murdoch, she wrote, wreaked “untold havoc on American democracy.”

Murdoch sees it differently. In his resignation letter, he attacked “bureaucracies” who wanted to “silence those who would question their provenance and purpose” and “elites” who “have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class.” “Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth,” he wrote.

Forbes estimates that their media empire has enabled Murdoch and his family to amass a fortune of more than $17 billion.

mickeyrat

  September 22, 2023 (Friday)

Two major stories today seem to bring together both the past and the future of the country to chart a way forward.

The first involves a historic workers’ strike. A week ago, on Friday, September 15, after workers’ four-year contracts expired, the United Auto Workers union declared a limited and targeted work stoppage in which about 13,000 workers walked off the job at three Midwestern auto plants. For the first time in history, those walkouts included all three major automakers: workers left a General Motors plant in Missouri, a Stellantis (which includes Chrysler) plant in Ohio, and a Ford plant in Michigan.

Workers accepted major concessions in 2007, when it appeared that auto manufacturers would go under. They agreed to accept a two-tier pay system in which workers hired after 2007 would have lower pay and worse benefits than those hired before 2007. But then the industry recovered, and automakers’ profits skyrocketed: Ford, for example, made more than $10 billion in profits in 2022.

Automakers’ chief executive officers’ pay has soared—GM CEO Mary Barra made almost $29 million in 2022—but workers’ wages and benefits have not. Barra, for example, makes 362 times the median GM employee’s paycheck, while autoworkers’ pay has fallen behind inflation by 19%.

The new UAW president, Shawn Fain, ran on a promise to demand a rollback of the 2007 concessions in this summer’s contract negotiations. He wants a cap on temporary workers, pay increases of more than 40% to match the salary increases of the CEOs, a 32-hour workweek, cost of living adjustments, and an elimination of the tier system.

But his position is not just about autoworkers; it is about all U.S. workers. “Our fight is not just for ourselves but for every worker who is being undervalued, for every retiree who’s given their all and feels forgotten, and for every future worker who deserves a fair chance at a prosperous life,” Fain said. “[W]e are all fed up of living in a world that values profits over people. We’re all fed up with seeing the rich get richer while the rest of us continue to just scrape by. We’re all fed up with corporate greed. And together, we’re going to fight to change it.”

Fain has withheld an endorsement for President Biden out of concern that the transition to electric vehicles, which are easier to build than gas-powered vehicles, will hurt union jobs, and out of anger that the administration has offered incentives to non-union plants. That criticism created an opening for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to announce he would visit Detroit next week to show autoworkers that he has “always had their back,” in hopes of winning back the support of Rust Belt states.

But for all his talk of being pro-worker, Trump recently attacked Fain, saying “The autoworkers are being sold down the river by their leadership, and their leadership should endorse Trump.” Autoworkers note that Trump and the justices he put on the Supreme Court have been anti-union, and that he packed the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees labor laws and union elections, with officials who reduced the power of workers to organize. Before he left office, Trump tried to burrow ten anti-labor activists into the Federal Service Impasses Panel, the panel in charge of resolving disputes between unions and federal agencies when they cannot resolve issues in negotiations.

Fain recently said: “Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers.”

President Biden prides himself on his pro-union credentials, and as soon as he took office, he fired Trump’s burrowed employees, prompting the head of the union representing 700,000 federal employees to thank Biden for his attempt to “restore basic fairness for federal workers.” He said, “The outgoing panel, appointed by the previous administration and stacked with transparently biased union-busters, was notorious for ignoring the law to gut workplace rights and further an extreme political agenda.”

Today, in the absence of a deal, the UAW expanded the strike to dozens more plants, and in a Facebook live stream, Fain invited “everyone who supports our cause to join us on the picket line from our friends and families all the way up to the president of the United States.” Biden has generally expressed support for the UAW, saying that the automakers should share their record profits with their workers, but Fain rebuffed the president’s offer to send Labor Secretary Julie Su and White House senior advisor Gene Sperling to help with negotiations.

Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and John Fetterman (D-PA) have both visited Michigan to meet with UAW workers, but it was nonetheless a surprise when the White House announced that the president will travel on Tuesday to Michigan, where he will, as he posted on X, “ join the picket line and stand in solidarity with the men and women of UAW as they fight for a fair share of the value they helped create. It’s time for a win-win agreement that keeps American auto manufacturing thriving with well-paid UAW jobs."

If President Biden is showing his support for the strong unions of the past, Vice President Kamala Harris is in charge of the future. The White House today announced the establishment of a National Office of Gun Violence Prevention, to be overseen by the vice president.

Lately, Harris has been taking the lead in embracing change and appealing to younger voters. On September 9 she hosted a celebration honoring the 50th anniversary of hip hop, and she is currently in the midst of a tour of college campuses to urge young people to vote. She has been the administration’s leading voice on issues of reproductive rights and equality before the law, issues at the top of concerns of young Americans. Now adding gun safety to that list, she is picking up yet another issue crucially important to young people.

When 26-year-old Representative Maxwell Frost (D-FL) introduced the president today, he said that he got involved in politics because he "didn't want to get shot in school."

If the president and the vice president today seemed to represent the past and the future to carry the country forward, the present was also in the news today, and that story was about corruption and the parties’ different approaches to it.

ProPublica has published yet another piece about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s connections to wealthy donors. Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski reported that Thomas attended at least two donor summits hosted by the Koch family, acting as a fundraising draw for the Koch network, but did not disclose the flights he accepted, which should have been considered gifts, or the hospitality associated with the trips. His appearances were coordinated with the help of Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, who has been behind the court’s rightward swing.

The Koch family network funds a wide range of right-wing political causes. It has had interests in a number of cases before the Supreme Court during Thomas’s term, including an upcoming challenge to the government’s ability to regulate businesses—a principle the Koch enterprises oppose.

Republicans have been defending Thomas’s behavior since these stories began to surface.

Also in the corruption file today is Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who, along with his wife, has been indicted by a federal grand jury in New York on three counts of conspiracy to commit bribery, conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, and conspiracy to commit extortion in connection with using his influence to advance the interests of Egypt.

This is Menendez’s second legal go-round: in 2015 he was indicted on unrelated charges of bribery, trading political help for expensive plane flights and luxury vacations. Ten of the twelve members of the jury did not agree with the other two that he was guilty and after the hung jury meant a mistrial, the Department of Justice declined to retry the case.

That the DOJ has indicted Menendez again on new charges undercuts Republicans’ insistence that the department has been weaponized to operate against them alone. And while Menendez insists he will fight the charges, he has lost his position at the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under the rules of the Democratic Conference, and New Jersey Democratic leaders have already called on him to resign.

“So a Democratic Senator is indicted on serious charges, and no Democrats attacking the Justice Department, no Democrats attacking the prosecutors, no Democrats calling for an investigation of the prosecution, and no Democrats calling to defund the Justice Department,” wrote former Republican representative from Illinois and now anti-Trump activist Joe Walsh.

“Weird, huh?”

mickeyrat

  September 23, 2023 (Saturday)

Taking a deep breath and spending a quiet night with my family before the book tour starts next week, so no letter tonight.

My friend Peter Ralston took this image recently, and it feels perfect for this moment in a bunch of different ways. You will note that the building— and by extension, the flag painted on it— is under repair.

I'll see you tomorrow.
 
[Photo "State of the Union," by Peter Ralston.]

mickeyrat

 September 24, 2023 (Sunday)

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the nation’s highest-ranking military officer and the principal military advisor to the president, secretary of defense, and national security council. The current chairman, Army General Mark Milley, has served in the military for 44 years, deploying in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Panama, Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, Somalia, and the Republic of Korea. He holds a degree in political science from Princeton University, a master’s degree in international relations from Columbia University, and a master’s degree from the U.S. Naval War College in national security and strategic studies.

Former president Trump chose Milley for that position, but on Friday night, Trump posted an attack on Milley, calling him “a Woke train wreck” and accusing him of betraying the nation when, days before the 2020 election, he reassured his Chinese counterpart that the U.S. was not going to attack China in the last days of the Trump administration, as Chinese leaders feared.  

Trump was reacting to a September 21 piece by Jeffrey Goldberg about Milley in The Atlantic, which portrays Milley as an important check on an erratic, uninformed, and dangerous president while also warning that “[i]n the American system, it is the voters, the courts, and Congress that are meant to serve as checks on a president’s behavior, not the generals.”

Trump posted that Milley “was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States. This was an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH! A war between China and the United States could have been the result of this treasonous act. To be continued!!!”

In fact, the calls were hardly rogue incidents. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, another Trump appointee, endorsed Milley’s October call, and Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller, who replaced Esper when Trump fired him just after the election, gave permission for a similar call Milley made in January 2021. At least ten officials from the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department were on the calls.

Trump is suggesting that in acting within his role and through proper channels, our highest ranking military officer has committed treason and that such treason in the past would have warranted death, with the inherent suggestion that we should return to such a standard. It seems much of the country has become accustomed to Trump’s outbursts, but this threat should not pass without notice, not least because Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) echoed it today in his taxpayer-funded newsletter.

In the letter, Gosar refers to Milley as “the homosexual-promoting-BLM-activist Chairman of the military joint chiefs,” a “deviant” who “was coordinating with Nancy Pelosi to hurt President Trump, and treasonously working behind Trump’s back. In a better society,” he wrote, “quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung. He had one boss: President Trump, and instead he was secretly meeting with Pelosi and coordinating with her to hurt Trump.”

Trump chose Milley to chair the Joint Chiefs but turned on him when Milley insisted the military was loyal to the Constitution rather than to any man. Milley had been dragged into participating in Trump’s march across Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020, to threaten Black Lives Matter protesters, although Milley peeled off when he recognized what was happening and later said he thought they were going to review National Guard troops.

The day after the debacle, Milley wrote a message to the joint force reminding every member that they swore an oath to the Constitution. “This document is founded on the essential principle that all men and women are born free and equal, and should be treated with respect and dignity. It also gives Americans the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly…. As members of the Joint Force—comprised of all races, colors, and creeds—you embody the ideals of our Constitution.”

“We all committed our lives to the idea that is America,” he wrote by hand on the memo. “We will stay true to that oath and the American people.”

Milley’s appearance with Trump as they crossed Lafayette Square drew widespread condemnation from former military leaders, and in the days afterward, Milley spoke to them personally, as well as to congressional leaders, to apologize. Milley also apologized publicly. “I should not have been there,” he said to graduates at National Defense University’s commencement. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” Milley went on to defend the Black Lives Matter protesters Trump was targeting, and to say that the military must address the systematic racism that has kept people of color from the top ranks.

Milley’s defense of the U.S. military, 43% of whom are people of color, drew not just Trump’s fury, but also that of the right wing. Then–Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson made a special effort to undermine the man he said was “not just a pig, he’s stupid!” “The Pentagon is now the Yale faculty lounge, but with cruise missiles. That should concern you,” he told his audience. As Carlson berated the military for being “woke,” his followers began to turn against the military they had previously championed.

Trump has made it clear he intends to weaponize the government against those he perceives to be his enemies, removing those who refuse to do his bidding and replacing them with loyalists. Ominously, according to Goldberg, another area over which Trump and Milley clashed was the military’s tradition of refusing to participate in acts that are clearly immoral or illegal. Trump overrode MIlley’s advice not to intervene in the cases of three men charged with war crimes, later telling his supporters, “I stuck up for three great warriors against the deep state.”

Goldberg points out that in a second Trump administration packed with loyalists, there will be few guardrails, and he notes that Milley has told friends that if Trump is reelected, “[h]e’ll start throwing people in jail, and I’d be on the top of the list.”

But Milley told Goldberg he does not expect Trump to be reelected. “I have confidence in the American people,” he said. “The United States of America is an extraordinarily resilient country, agile and flexible, and the inherent goodness of the American people is there.” Last week, he told ABC’s Martha Raddatz that he is “confident that the United States and the democracy in this country will prevail and the rule of law will prevail…. These institutions are built to be strong, resilient and to adapt to the times, and I'm 100% confident we'll be fine."

Milley’s statement reflects the increasingly powerful reassertion of democratic values over the past several years. In general, the country seems to be moving beyond former president Trump, who remains locked in his ancient grievances and simmering with fear about his legal troubles—Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone recently reported he has been asking confidants about what sort of prison might be in his future—and what he has to say seems so formulaic at this point that it usually doesn’t seem worth repeating. Indeed, much of his frantic posting seems calculated to attract headlines with shock value.

But, for all that, Trump is the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. He has suggested that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s senior military advisor, has committed treason and that such a crime is associated with execution, and one of his loyalists in government has echoed him.

And yet, in the face of this attack on one of our key national security institutions, an attack that other nations will certainly notice, Republican leaders remain silent.

mickeyrat

  September 25, 2023 (Monday)

Pundits struggle to decide whether Trump’s rise represents something new in the United States or whether it is a continuation of the growing anti-democratic politics of the Republican Party. As a card-carrying Libra, I’m going to suggest it was both.

If yesterday’s letter was about how Trump’s turn to authoritarianism is unprecedented among major party political leaders, tonight’s is about how the Republican Party prepared the way for this moment in part by rigging the system through gerrymandering so that their politicians no longer need to appeal to voters. Those extreme gerrymanders threaten to skew the 2024 election and are contributing to the Republican Party’s inability to perform the most basic functions of government.

Gerrymandering is the process of drawing legislative districts to favor a political party. The practice was named for Elbridge Gerry, an early governor of Massachusetts who signed off on such a scheme (even though he didn’t like it). Political parties can gain an advantage in elections by either “packing” or “cracking” their opponents’ voters. Packing means stuffing the opposition party’s voters into districts so their votes are not distributed more widely; cracking means dividing opponents’ voters among multiple districts so there are too few of them in any district to have a chance of winning.

The Constitution requires the government to take a census every ten years to see where people have moved, enabling the government to draw districts that should allow us to elect politicians that represent us. Political operatives have always carved up maps to serve themselves when they could, but today’s computers allow them to draw maps with surgical precision.

That created a big change in 2010. Before that midterm election, hoping to hamstring President Barack Obama’s ability to accomplish anything by making sure he had a hostile Congress, Republican operatives raised money from corporate donors to swamp state elections with ads and campaign literature to elect Republicans to state legislatures. This Operation REDMAP, which stood for Redistricting Majority Project, was a plan to take control of state houses across the country so that Republicans would control the redistricting maps put in place after the 2010 census.

It worked. After the 2010 election, Republicans controlled the legislatures in the key states of Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as other, smaller states, and they redrew congressional maps using precise computer models. In the 2012 election, Democrats won the White House decisively, the Senate easily, and a majority of 1.4 million votes for House candidates. And yet Republicans came away with a thirty-three-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

The results of that effort are playing out today.

In Wisconsin the electoral districts are so gerrymandered that although the state’s population is nearly evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, Republicans control nearly two thirds of the seats in the legislature and it is virtually impossible for Democrats ever to win control of the state legislature. In April, voters elected Janet Protasiewicz to the state supreme court by an astonishing margin of 11 points, in part thanks to her promise to reject the extreme gerrymandered maps.

Protasiewicz’s election shifted the court majority away from the Republicans. Even before she was elected, one Republican senator suggested impeaching her, and now, because she has called the district maps “rigged” and said, “I don’t think you could sell to any reasonable person that the maps are fair,” Republicans are calling for her impeachment before she has even heard a case. (After saying the maps were rigged, she added: “I can't ever tell you what I’m going to do on a particular case, but I can tell you my values, and common sense tells you that it’s wrong.”)

Voters are also evenly split in North Carolina—illustrated by the fact that a statewide race elected Democrat Roy Cooper as governor—but there, too, gerrymandering has rigged the maps for the Republicans. After a Democrat switched sides to give the Republicans a veto-proof majority in both houses of the legislature, the House of Representatives last week passed laws taking away the governor’s power to make appointments to state and local election boards and removing the tiebreaker seat the governor appointed to the state board.

Instead, the legislature has taken over the right to make those appointments itself, meaning that election rules could become entirely partisan. At the same time, the legislature exempted its legislators from complying with the state open-records law that requires redistricting documents be public.

In Ohio, almost 75% of voters agreed to amend the state constitution in 2018 to prohibit political gerrymanders. Nonetheless, when the Republican-dominated legislature drew district maps in 2021, they gave a strong advantage to Republicans. The state supreme court struck the maps down as unconstitutional, but the U.S. Supreme Court permitted them to stay in place for the 2022 election. The court will now revisit the question, but it has moved further to the right since 2022.

In Alabama, in June, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision that the maps in place in 2022 were likely unconstitutional and must be redrawn to include a second majority-Black district. But when the state legislature drew a new map the next month, it defied the court. The court was shocked at the refusal to comply, and appointed a special master, who today offered three options. Any of them would offer the Democrats a chance to pick up another seat, and the state is challenging the new maps.

Tennessee shows what gerrymandering does at the state level. There, Republicans tend to get about 60% of the votes but control 76% of the seats in the House and 82% of the seats in the Senate. This supermajority means that the Republicans can legislate as they wish.

Gerrymandered seats mean that politicians do not have to answer to constituents; their purpose is to raise money and fire up true believers. Although more than 70% of Tennessee residents want gun safety legislation, for example, Republican legislators, who are certain to win in their gerrymandered districts, can safely ignore them.

Tennessee shows the effects of gerrymandering at the national level as well. Although Republican congressional candidates in Tennessee get about 65% of the vote, they control 89% of Tennessee’s congressional delegation. In the elections of 2022, Florida, Alabama, and Ohio all used maps that courts have thrown out for having rigged the system to favor Republicans. The use of those unfair maps highlights that the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives by only the slimmest of margins and explains why Republicans are determined to keep their gerrymanders.

Because their seats are safe, Republicans do not have to send particularly skilled politicians to Congress; they can send those whose roles are to raise money and push Republican ideology. That likely explains at least a part of why House Republicans are no closer to agreeing on a deal to fund the government than they have been for the past several months, even as the deadline is racing toward us, and why they are instead going to hold an impeachment hearing concerning President Joe Biden on Thursday.

Michigan was one of the Operation REDMAP states, redistricted after the 2010 election into an extreme gerrymander designed by Republicans who bragged about stuffing “Dem garbage” into four districts so that Republicans would, as one said, stay in power for years. In 2016 a Michigan woman, Katie Fahey, started a movement to get rid of the partisan maps. In 2018, despite a Republican lawsuit to stop them, they successfully placed an initiative to create an independent redistricting commission on the ballot. It passed overwhelmingly.

After the 2020 census the commission’s new maps still slightly favored Republicans because of the state’s demographic distribution—Democrats are concentrated in cities—but the parties were competitive. In 2022, Democrats took control of the state government, winning the House for the first time since 2008.

mickeyrat

  September 26, 2023 (Tuesday)

Today, on the anniversary of the creation of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in 1914, the FTC and 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon for using “a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to maintain its monopoly power.” The FTC and the suing states say “Amazon’s actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.”

The states suing are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.

While estimates of Amazon’s control of the online commerce market vary, they center around about 40%, and Amazon charges third-party merchants for using the company’s services to store and ship items. Last quarter, Amazon reported more than $32 billion in revenues from these services. The suit claims that Amazon illegally overcharges third-party sellers and inflates prices.

This lawsuit is about more than Amazon: it marks a return to traditional forms of government antitrust action that were abandoned in the 1980s. Traditionally, officials interpreted antitrust laws to mean the government should prevent large entities from swallowing up markets and consolidating their power in order to raise prices and undercut workers’ rights. They wanted to protect economic competition, believing that such competition would promote innovation, protect workers, and keep consumer prices down.

In the 1980s, government officials replaced that understanding with an idea advanced by former solicitor general of the United States Robert Bork—the man whom the Senate later rejected for a seat on the Supreme Court because of his extremism—who claimed that traditional antimonopoly enforcement was economically inefficient because it restricted the ways businesses could operate. Instead, he said, consolidation of industries was fine so long as it promoted economic efficiencies that, at least in the short term, cut costs for consumers. While antitrust legislation remained on the books, the understanding of what it meant changed dramatically.

Reagan and his people advanced Bork’s position, abandoning the idea that capitalism fundamentally depends on competition. Industries consolidated, and by the time Biden took office, his people estimated the lack of competition was costing a median U.S. household as much as $5,000 a year.

On July 9, 2021, Biden called the turn toward Bork’s ideas “the wrong path” and vowed to restore competition in an increasingly consolidated marketplace. In an executive order, he established a White House Competition Council to direct a whole-of-government approach to promoting competition in the economy.

“[C]ompetition keeps the economy moving and keeps it growing,” Biden said. “Fair competition is why capitalism has been the world’s greatest force for prosperity and growth…. But what we’ve seen over the past few decades is less competition and more concentration that holds our economy back.”

In that speech, Biden deliberately positioned himself in our country’s long history of opposing economic consolidation. Calling out both Roosevelt presidents—Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who oversaw part of the Progressive Era, and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who oversaw the New Deal—Biden celebrated their attempt to rein in the power of big business, first by focusing on the abuses of those businesses, and then by championing competition.

While still a student at Yale Law School, FTC chair Lina Khan published an essay examining the anticompetitive nature of modern businesses like Amazon, arguing that focusing on consumer prices alone does not address the problems of consolidation and monopoly. With today’s action, the FTC is restoring the traditional vision of antitrust action.

President Biden demonstrated his support for ordinary Americans in another historic way today when he became the first sitting president to join a picket line of striking workers. In Wayne County, Michigan, he joined a UAW strike, telling the striking autoworkers, “Wall Street didn’t build the country, the middle class built the country. Unions built the middle class. That’s a fact. Let’s keep going, you deserve what you’ve earned. And you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now."

Even as Biden was standing on the picket line, House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) released a new budget plan that moves even farther to the right. Yesterday, former president Trump backed the far-right extremists threatening to shut down the government, insisting that holding the government hostage is the best way to get everything they want, including, he wrote, an end to the criminal cases against him.

“The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed,” Trump wrote on social media. “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN! Close the Border, stop the Weaponization of ‘Justice,’ and End Election Interference.”

McCarthy is reneging on the agreement he made with Biden in the spring as conditions for raising the debt ceiling, and instead is calling for dramatic cuts to the nation’s social safety net, as well as restarting construction of a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, as starting points for funding the government. Cuts of more than $150 billion in his new proposal would mean cutting housing subsidies for the poor by 33%, fuel subsidies for low-income families by more than 70%, and funding for low-income schools by nearly 80% and would force more than 1 million women and children off of nutritional assistance.

The “bottom line is we’re singularly focused right now on achieving our conservative objectives,” Representative Garret Graves (R-LA) told Jeff Stein, Marianna Sotomayor, and Moriah Balingit of the Washington Post. The Republicans plan to preserve the tax cuts of the Trump years, which primarily benefited the wealthy and corporations.

At any point, McCarthy could return to the deal he cut with Biden, pass the appropriations bills with Democratic support, and fund the government. But if he does that, he is almost certain to face a challenge to his speakership from the extremists who currently are holding the country hostage.

This evening, the Senate reached a bipartisan deal to fund the government through November 17 and to provide additional funding for Ukraine (although less than the White House wants), passing it by a vote of 77–19. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) urged the House Republicans to agree to the measure, warning them that shutdowns “don’t work as bargaining chips.” Nevertheless, McCarthy would not say he would take up the bill, and appears to feel the need to give in to the extremists’ demands. Moreover, he has suddenly said he thinks a meeting with Biden could avert the crisis, suggesting he is desperate for someone else to find a solution.

Former president Trump has his own problems this evening stemming from the civil case against him, his older sons, and other officers and parts of the Trump Organization in New York, where Attorney General Letitia James has charged him with committing fraud by inflating the value of his assets. Today New York judge Arthur Engoron ruled that Trump and his company deceived banks and insurers by massively overvaluing his real estate holdings in order to obtain loans and better terms for deals. The Palm Beach County assessor valued Mar-a-Lago, for example, at $18 million, while Trump valued it at between $426 million and $612 million, an overvaluation of 2,300% (not a typo).

Engoron canceled the organization’s New York business licenses, arranged for an independent receiver to dissolve those businesses, and placed a retired judge into the position of independent monitor to oversee the Trump Organization.

This decision will crush the heart of Trump’s businesses, and he issued a long statement attacking it, using all the usual words: “witch hunt,” “Communist,” “Political Lawfare” (ok, I don’t get that one), and “If they can do this to me, they can do this to YOU!” Law professor Jen Taub commented, “It reads better in the original ketchup.” Trump’s lawyers say they are considering an appeal. The rest of the case is due to go to trial early next month.

Finally, today, the Supreme Court rejected Alabama’s request to let it ignore the court’s order that it redraw its congressional district maps to create a second majority-Black district. Alabama will have to comply with the court’s order.

mickeyrat

  September 27, 2023 (Wednesday)

Exactly a week ago, Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported that Republican House leaders were talking about moving the government funding debate away from spending levels—their original complaint—to border security. “[T]he vast majority of House R[epublican]s,” Sherman wrote, “would rather fight on border policy than spending.”

True to form, party leaders today began to insist that we are barreling toward a shutdown because of President Joe Biden’s policies on the southern border. House speaker Kevin McCarthy says he wants to meet with Biden to “cut a deal.”

But, of course, McCarthy already cut a deal with Biden, back in May, that provided a clear roadmap for this year’s funding. McCarthy is refusing to honor that deal.

The Republicans’ willingness to invent a new reason for their threatened government shutdown suggests it was never about principle so much as about power. They are quite aware that the cuts the extremists are proposing before they will agree to fund the government are unpopular, so they have manufactured another reason for the shutdown that they hope will be more palatable to the country.

At any point, McCarthy could agree to work with the Democrats to pass the 12 appropriations bills that will fund the government. Last night, by a vote of 77–19, the Senate illustrated how that could be done by passing a bipartisan continuing resolution to fund the government through November 17 and to provide additional funding for Ukraine.

Today, McCarthy told Republican House members that he would not bring the Senate’s measure up for a vote. Instead, he will continue to court the extremists, who spent the day posturing. At the motion of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), for example, they voted to reduce Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s salary to $1 a year. They went on to pass a number of similarly extreme measures that will never make it through the Senate.

House minority leader Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) accused Republicans of using the threat of a shutdown “to jam your right-wing ideology down the throats of the American people.” The bills they were advancing, he said, had “zero chance of becoming law…. And they’re filled with extreme policy poison pills.”

For all that McCarthy is trying to pin the blame for a shutdown on the Democrats, it is the House Republicans who are refusing to perform the most basic of government procedures: fund the government for the next year. When Republicans have shut down the government in the past, the American people blamed them for it, and today Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) called out his House colleagues, clearly trying to isolate them, likely hoping to keep them from tainting the whole party in the eyes of voters before the 2024 election.

McConnell called out his colleagues on their new switch to complain about border security: “A vote against a standard short-term funding measure is a vote against paying over $1 billion in salary for Border Patrol and ICE agents working to track down lethal fentanyl and tame our open borders. Shutting down the government isn’t an effective way to make a point,” he said.
 
The 2024 election was also on former president Trump’s mind today. He was in Michigan tonight to try to draw attention away from the Republican primary debate that he refused to attend. But while President Biden yesterday visited the United Auto Workers picket line, Trump visited a non-union shop and talked about a future "fueled by American energy" and "built by highly skilled American hands and high-wage American labor.” As Craig Mauger of the Detroit News noted, however, “his address was short on specifics for how he would accomplish the goals.”

Trump told the crowd to get the UAW to support him, but the UAW doesn’t represent the workforce where he was speaking. Mauger noted that one woman holding a “union members for Trump” sign acknowledged she wasn’t a union member, while a man with a sign that said “auto workers for Trump” said he wasn’t an autoworker. The plant where Trump was speaking employs about 150 people, but 400–500 Trump supporters were there for his speech.

Yesterday, UAW president Shawn Fain said, “I find it odd he’s going to go to a non-union business to talk to union workers. I don’t think he gets it.”

mickeyrat

  September 28, 2023 (Thursday)

In Tempe, Arizona, today, President Joe Biden spoke at the dedication ceremony for a new library, named for the late Arizona senator John McCain, who died in 2018. Biden used the opportunity not only to honor his friend, but to emphasize the themes of democracy and to call out those who are threatening to overturn it. While Biden has made the defense of American democracy central to his presidency, he has never been clearer or more impassioned than he was today.

Biden recalled that when McCain was dying, he wrote a farewell letter to the nation that he had served in both war and peace. “We are citizens of the world’s greatest republic, a nation of ideals, not blood and soil,” McCain wrote. “Americans never quit…. We never hide from history. We make history.”

Biden reiterated the point he makes often: that the United States is the only nation founded on an idea, articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that we are all created equal and have the right to be treated equally before the law. While “[w]e’ve never fully lived up to that idea,” he said, “we’ve never walked away from it.” Now, though, our faith in that principle is in doubt.

“[H]istory has brought us to a new time of testing,” Biden said. “[A]ll of us are being asked right now: What will we do to maintain our democracy? Will we, as John wrote, never quit? Will we not hide from history, but make history? Will we put partisanship aside and put country first? I say we must and we will. We will. But it’s not easy.”

Biden laid out exactly what democracy means: “Democracy means rule of the people, not rule of monarchs, not rule of the monied, not rule of the mighty. Regardless of party, that means respecting free and fair elections; accepting the outcome, win or lose. It means you can’t love your country only when you win.”

“Democracy means rejecting and repudiating political violence,” he said. “Regardless of party, such violence is never, never, never acceptable in America. It’s undemocratic, and it must never be normalized to advance political power.”

“Today,” he warned, “democracy is…at risk.” Our political institutions, our Constitution, and “the very character of our nation” are threatened. “Democracy is maintained by adhering to the Constitution and the march to perfecting our union…by protecting and expanding rights with each successive generation.” “For centuries, the American Constitution has been a model for the world,” but in the past few years, he noted, the institutions of our democracy—the judiciary, the legislature, the executive” have been damaged in the eyes of the American people, and even the eyes of the world, by attacks from within.

“I’m here to tell you,” Biden said: “We lose these institutions of our government at our own peril…. Democracy is not a partisan issue. It’s an American issue.”

“[T]here is something dangerous happening in America now,” Biden said. “There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs in our democracy: the MAGA Movement.” After high praise for his Republican friend McCain, and recollections of working with Republicans to pass bipartisan legislation throughout his career, Biden made it clear that he does not believe “every Republican,” or even “a majority of Republicans” adheres to the MAGA extremist ideology. But, he said:

“[T]here is no question that today’s Republican Party is driven and intimidated by MAGA Republican extremists. Their extreme agenda, if carried out, would fundamentally alter the institutions of American democracy as we know it.”

The MAGA Republicans, Biden said, are openly “attacking the free press as the enemy of the people, attacking the rule of law as an impediment, fomenting voter suppression and election subversion.” They are “banning books and burying history.” “Extremists in Congress [are] more determined to shut down the government, to burn the place down than to let the people’s business be done.” They are attacking the military—the strongest military in the history of the world—as being “weak and ‘woke’.”

They are “pushing a notion the defeated former President expressed when he was in office and believes applies only to him: This president is above the law, with no limits on power. Trump says the Constitution gave him…’the right to do whatever he wants as President.’ I’ve never even heard a president say that in jest. Not guided by the Constitution or by common service and decency toward our fellow Americans but by vengeance and vindictiveness.”

Biden accurately recounted the plans Trump has announced for a second term: expand presidential power, put federal agencies under the president’s thumb, get rid of the nonpartisan civil service and fill positions with loyalists. Biden quoted MAGA Republicans: “I am your retribution,” “slitting throats” of civil servants, “We must destroy the FBI,” calling the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a “traitor” and suggesting he should be executed. These extremists, he said, are “the controlling element of the House Republican Party.”

“This is the United States of America,” Biden said. “Did you ever think you’d hear leaders of political parties in the United States of America speak like that? Seizing power, concentrating power, attempting to abuse power, purging and packing key institutions, spewing conspiracy theories, spreading lies for profit and power to divide America in every way, inciting violence against those who risk their lives to keep America safe, weaponizing against the very soul of who we are as Americans.”

“The MAGA extremists across the country have made it clear where they stand,” Biden said. “So, the challenge for the rest of America—for the majority of Americans—is to make clear where we stand. Do we still believe in the Constitution? Do we believe in…basic decency and respect? The whole country should honestly ask itself…what it wants and understand the threats to our democracy.”

Biden knew his own answers:

“I believe very strongly that the defining feature of our democracy is our Constitution.

“I believe in the separation of powers and checks and balances, that debate and disagreement do not lead to disunion.

“I believe in free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power.

“I believe there is no place in America…for political violence. We have to denounce hate, not embolden it.

“Across the aisle, across the country, I see fellow Americans, not mortal enemies. We’re a great nation because we’re a good people who believe in honor, decency, and respect.”

Pointing to the fact that the majority of the money appropriated for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has gone to Republican-dominated states, he added: “I believe every president should be a president for all Americans” and should “use the Office of the President to unite the nation.”

The job of a president, he said, is to “deliver light, not heat; to make sure democracy delivers for everyone; to know we’re a nation of unlimited possibilities, of wisdom and decency—a nation focused on the future.”

“We’ve faced some tough times in recent years, and I am proud of the progress we made as a country,” Biden said, “But the real credit doesn’t go to me and my administration…. The real heroes of the story are you, the American people.” Now, he said, “I’m asking you that regardless whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, or independent, put the preservation of our democracy before everything else. Put our country first…. We can’t take democracy for granted.”

“Democracies don’t have to die at the end of a rifle,” Biden said. “They can die when people are silent, when they fail to stand up or condemn the threats to democracy, when people are willing to give away that which is most precious to them because they feel frustrated, disillusioned, tired, alienated.”

“I get it,” Biden said. But “[f]or all its faults…, American democracy remains the best…[path] forward to prosperity, possibilities, progress, fair play, equality.” He urged people not to sit on the sidelines, but “to build coalitions and community, to remind ourselves there is a clear majority of us who believe in our democracy and are ready to protect it.”

“So,” he said, “let’s never quit. Let’s never hide from history. Let’s make history.” If we do that, he said, “[w]e’ll have proved, through all its imperfections, America is still a place of possibilities, a beacon for the world, a promise realized—where the power forever resides with ‘We the People.’”

“That’s our soul. That’s who we truly are. That’s who we must always be.”

mickeyrat

  September 29, 2023 (Friday)

"What a day we are having…. As a former director of emergency management, I know a disaster when I see one," Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) said yesterday in the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, overseen by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee chaired by James Comer (R-KY).

Moskowitz wasn’t wrong. After a hearing that lasted more than six hours, highlights of which Aaron Rupar of Public Notice reposted on social media, Neil Cavuto of the Fox News Channel was unimpressed. He said that although Comer had promised to present “a mountain of evidence” against President Biden, “none of the expert witnesses today presented…any proof for impeachment…. The way this was built up, ‘where there’s smoke there would be fire,’... but where’s there’s smoke today, we just got a lot more smoke.”   

The Republicans on the committee repeatedly talked about the volume of evidence they have uncovered, but they were never able to link their piles of evidence to the president. Under questioning, their own witnesses said there was not enough evidence to impeach President Biden.

It seemed as if Republicans have become so accustomed to being able to say anything they want to on right-wing media without being challenged they thought a congressional committee would operate the same way. When the Democrats pushed back, they seemed flummoxed.

Comer lost control of the hearing as Democrats on the committee, thoroughly prepared, came out swinging. Representative Shontel Brown (D-OH) noted that “[t]he DOJ and FBI under former President Trump spent 5 long years looking into these Republican conspiracy theories, and debunked them. Repeatedly.” Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said, “The majority sits completely empty handed with no evidence of any presidential wrongdoing, no smoking gun, no gun, no smoke.”

Representative Summer Lee (D-PA) called out the Republicans by name for holding a sham impeachment hearing instead of funding the government and working for their constituents. She noted that 217,583 people living in the districts of the Republicans on the committee would lose their paychecks because of the Republican shutdown.

Most notably, the Democrats called out the places where witnesses or committee members had deleted words in quotations that changed their meanings. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) emphasized that the four Republican witnesses said they had not presented any first-hand witness accounts of crimes committed by President Biden, while the committee was blocking the testimony of witnesses who could testify to actual facts. She also noted that members of Congress could say anything they wanted because they are covered by the Constitution’s Speech and Debate clause protecting them,

Democrats also called out the many ways in which the Republicans were trying to discredit President Biden with speculation during an impeachment hearing to distract from the very real legal troubles of former president Trump. Representatives Mike Garcia (D-CA) and Gerry Connolly (D-VA) called out the Republicans for focusing on allegations about Hunter Biden and ignoring the very real issues involving Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who could not get a security clearance until Trump demanded he be given one, worked on Middle East issues in the White House, and then received a $2 billion investment from the Saudis shortly after Trump left office.

Most dramatically, Representative Greg Cesar (D-TX) asked the members of the Oversight Committee to raise their hands if they believe that both Hunter and Trump should be held accountable if they are found guilty on any of their indictments. The Democrats all raised their hands. The Republicans did not.

One senior republican aide told CNN’s Melanie Zanona: “This is an unmitigated disaster.”

It did not get better after the hearing ended. A fact-check by CNN’s Daniel Dale, Marshall Cohen and Annie Grayer tore apart the committee’s “evidence.” Although Comer said in his opening remarks that the committee has uncovered how “the Bidens and their associates…raked in over $20 million between 2014 and 2019,” all but about $7 million went to Hunter Biden’s business associates, who according to the Washington Post had “legitimate business interests,” and there is no evidence that President Biden himself received any of this money.

Comer’s accusation that money was wired to Joe Biden’s Delaware address did not note that the money was a loan, and it went to Hunter Biden’s bank account. Hunter Biden’s lawyers say that he used the Bidens’ Delaware home as his address at the time.

Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) claimed that documents released Wednesday from 2020 showed that the Department of Justice was protecting President Biden. But in 2020 Trump, not Biden, was president, and the official who urged Biden senior’s name be kept off a search warrant did so because there was no legal basis to include him in a search warrant concerning a business involving his adult son.

And on it went.

Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark wrote: “The charitable view is that the first hearing was a dumpster fire inside a clown car wrapped in a fiasco. To put it mildly, the GOP did not bring their best.”

At the end of the day, it seemed as if Democrats had flipped the script that has worked so well for so long on right-wing media. Rather than being on the defensive themselves, they put Republicans on the defensive. And because their hits were based in reality, rather than a false narrative, they left the Republican committee members with few options today other than to take to social media, once again, to boast of all the evidence they have accumulated against President Trump.

The hearing was designed to give the extremists of the Freedom Caucus one of their demands, likely in the hope that they would agree to pass a stopgap funding bill that would at least make it look like the House Republicans were trying to fund the government. But today, when House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) brought to the floor an extreme bill that would have made 30% cuts to food assistance, housing, education, funding for border agents, and so on, and insisted on closing the border while funding the government for only another 30 days, 21 extremists voted with the Democrats to kill it by a vote of 198 to 232.

This was a harsh blow not only to McCarthy but to all the Republicans in swing districts. House leaders forced them all to vote for a measure chock full of enormously unpopular cuts and then snatched away the prize of funding the government. Such a political disaster speaks very poorly of McCarthy, who should have never put members of his conference in such a position. Losing 21 of his members in this vote is an embarrassment. The loss weakens the party for 2024: the Democratic ads will pretty much write themselves.

And the members refusing to fund the government simply don’t appear to care, either about their colleagues or their constituents.

At any point, McCarthy could bring up before the House the bipartisan measure already passed by the Senate. Democrats would then likely make up the votes he would lose in his own conference. But the extremists would then challenge his speakership, and that is apparently a challenge he is unwilling to brave.

mickeyrat

  September 30, 2023 (Saturday)

This afternoon, the House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution to fund the government for 45 days—until just before Thanksgiving—by a vote of 335 to 91.

The maneuver was a huge blow to the MAGA caucus that was demanding dramatic cuts to the government, the embrace of their border policies, and elimination of Ukraine aid in exchange for keeping the government open. The measure the House passed had almost none of that. It was a clean continuing resolution to fund the government at 2023 levels for another 45 days…with two important exceptions: it added disaster funding, and it stripped out additional funding for Ukraine’s war against Russia.  

House speaker Kevin McCarthy’s move was enough of a surprise that Democrats had to scramble even to read it, but it essentially means that McCarthy had to turn away from the MAGA Republicans to whom he has been catering and turn to the Democrats for the votes needed to fund the government.

All but one of the Democrats voted in favor; the lone “no” vote came from Representative Mike Quigley (D-IL), the co-chair of the Ukraine Caucus, whose district has a high percentage of Ukrainian Americans. The unity of the Democrats is notable and a sign of their strength going forward.

In contrast, the Republicans remain divided, but after months of catering to the extremists, today the rest of the conference asserted itself. One hundred and twenty-six Republicans voted in favor of the measure; 90 voted no. That 90 included all the usual suspects on the far right. The vote to pass the measure was a clear rebuke to the MAGA Republicans who had forced their colleagues in swing districts to vote for dramatic and unpopular cuts in services and then refused to fund the government anyway.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said, “The American people have won. The extreme MAGA Republicans have lost. It was a victory for the American people and a complete and total surrender by right-wing extremists who throughout the year have tried to hijack the congress.”

McCarthy, explaining his sudden about-face to work with the Democrats, also blamed the extremists. It was very clear he had done all he could to work with them, he said, but “if you have members in your conference that won’t let you vote for appropriation bills, doesn’t [sic] want an omnibus, and won’t vote for a stopgap measure so the only answer is to shut down and not pay our troops, I don't want to be a part of that team. I want to be part of a conservative group that wants to get things done.”

More colloquially, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) wrote: “Here’s what went down: we just won a clean 45 day gov extension, stripped GOP’s earlier 30% cuts to Social Security admin etc, staved off last minute anti-immigrant hijinks, and averted shutdown (for now). People will get paychecks and MTG threw a tantrum on the way out. Win-win[.]”

Still at stake is funding for Ukraine, but members promise to make sure that happens. “We will get the Ukraine funding next,” Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) wrote. “This is a 45-day bill to make sure government is open and troops/cops/air-traffic controllers etc get paid. With the same leverage we used to bear back MAGA, we will keep Ukraine in the fight.”

The issue of funding for Ukraine is not a small one. Former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) noted that it was on September 30, 1938, that British prime minister Neville Chamberlain announced he would not stand in the way of Adolf Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland, a key move in Hitler's rise. “Members of the House and Senate who are voting to deny Ukraine assistance on the 85th anniversary of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 “peace in our time” speech should read some history,” she wrote. “Appeasement didn’t work then. It won’t work now.”

The votes should be there for Ukraine aid. Just two days ago, members of the House voted 311 to 117 for Ukraine funding, and the Senate, too, strongly favors Ukraine aid. But there is no doubt the removal of this funding signals that Trump and the MAGA Republicans favor a foreign policy that helps Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The biggest loser in today’s vote was former president Trump, who had urged his loyalists to shut down the government until they got all their demands. He is an agent of chaos and recognized that hurting the nation—including our credit around the world—would make voters more likely to turn against the sitting president.

Getting himself or someone like him back into the White House is becoming his only hope for turning back his legal troubles, especially now that a judge has decided that he, his older sons, a number of associates, and the Trump Organization engaged in fraud that requires the dissolution of many of his businesses. That is a psychic blow as well as a financial one, and he cannot afford either.

The biggest winner is the American people, not only because Congress has agreed to do as the vast majority of us wish and fund the government. It’s far too early to say Republican leadership might really be breaking away from the MAGA crowd, but for today, at least, we can see what’s possible. It is clear at the very least that McCarthy cannot hold the speakership without Democratic votes.

Tonight the Senate also passed the continuing resolution, by an overwhelming vote of 88 to 9. The nine were all Republicans.

President Biden is expected to sign the measure. Tonight he released a statement saying that the agreement would prevent “an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans. This bill ensures that active-duty troops will continue to get paid, travelers will be spared airport delays, millions of women and children will continue to have access to vital nutrition assistance, and so much more.” “But I want to be clear,” he continued: “[W]e should never have been in this position in the first place. Just a few months ago, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement to avoid precisely this type of manufactured crisis. For weeks, extreme House Republicans tried to walk away from that deal by demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans. They failed.”
 
Biden noted that despite the bill’s lack of aid for Ukraine, McCarthy and the overwhelming majority of Congress have been strong supporters of Ukraine. He said, “We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted. I fully expect the Speaker will keep his commitment to the people of Ukraine and secure passage of the support needed to help Ukraine at this critical moment.”

mickeyrat

  October 1, 2023 (Sunday)

On Friday, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley spoke in Arlington, Virginia, at a farewell ceremony before his retirement after four years in the position to which former president Trump appointed him. Milley’s position as the highest-ranking and most senior military officer in the United States Armed Forces and the nation’s top military advisor during a stretch of U.S. history in which a president tried to overturn the results of a presidential election and undermine our democracy made his tenure perhaps more difficult than any of his predecessors’.

Milley had been at Trump’s side at the start of the former president’s march across Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020, to threaten Black Lives Matter protesters, although Milley peeled off when he recognized what was happening and later said he thought they were going to review National Guard troops. Since then, Milley has spoken out against strongman rule and vocally defended the U.S. Constitution.

The day after the debacle, Milley wrote a message to the joint force reminding every member that they swore an oath to the Constitution. “This document is founded on the essential principle that all men and women are born free and equal, and should be treated with respect and dignity. It also gives Americans the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly…. As members of the Joint Force—comprised of all races, colors, and creeds—you embody the ideals of our Constitution,” he wrote. “We all committed our lives to the idea that is America,” he wrote by hand on the memo. “We will stay true to that oath and the American people.”

Trump and his loyalists turned on Milley, and that fury has only increased. On September 22, 2023, former president Trump suggested that Milley, who has served in the military for more than 40 years, had committed what some would call treason when he reassured his Chinese counterpart that the U.S. would not attack in the last days of the Trump administration—an assurance administration officials signed off on—in the face of Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior. Milley has told associates that if Trump is reelected, he expects to be thrown into prison.

Milley responded to Trump’s attempted intimidation in his farewell address. He began by thanking President Biden for his “unwavering leadership.” “I’ve seen you in the breach, I’ve seen you on the watch,” Milley told the president, “and I know firsthand that you’re a man of incredible integrity and character.”

After thanks to the president and vice president and to his colleagues, friends, wife, and children, and after good wishes for the incoming chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Air Force general Charles Q. “CQ” Brown, Milley went on to explain his principles for the nation. His speech did not mention any names, but it was nonetheless a sharp rebuke to former president Trump and those who would abandon our democracy in favor of a dictator:

“Today is not about anyone up here on this stage…. It’s about something much larger than all of us,” Milley said.

“It’s about our democracy. It’s about our republic…. It’s about the ideas and values that make up this great experiment in liberty. Those values and ideas are contained within the Constitution of the United States of America, which is the moral North Star for all of us who have the privilege of wearing the cloth of our nation.

“It is that document…that gives purpose to our service. It is that document that gives purpose to our lives. It is that document that all of us in uniform swear to protect and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

“That has been true across generations, and we in uniform are willing to die to pass that document off to the next generation. So it is that document that gives ultimate purpose to our death. The motto of our country is “E Pluribus Unum,” from the many, come one. We are one nation under God. We are indivisible, with liberty for all. And the motto of our army, for over 200 years…has been “This We’ll Defend,” and the “this” refers to the Constitution….

“You see, we in uniform are unique… among the world's armies. We are unique among the world’s militaries. We don’t take an oath to a country. We don’t take an oath to a tribe. We don’t take an oath to a religion. We don’t take an oath to a king or a queen or to a tyrant or a dictator. And we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We don’t take an oath to an individual.

“We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we’re willing to die to protect it.…

“Those who sacrificed themselves on the altar of freedom in the last two and a half centuries of this country must not have done so in vain. The millions wounded in our nation’s wars did not sacrifice their limbs and shed their blood to see this great experiment in democracy perish from this earth. No. We the United States military will always be true to those that came before us. We will never, under any circumstances, turn our back on our duty….

“From the earliest days, before we were even a nation, our military stood…in the breach, has suffered the crucible of combat, and has stood the watch and defended liberty for all Americans. Each of us signs a blank check to this country to protect our freedom. The blood we spill pays for our freedom of speech. Our blood pays for the right to assemble, our due process, our freedom of the press, our right to vote, and all the other rights and privileges that come with being an American….

“We the American people, we the American military, must never turn our back on those that came before us. And we will never turn our back on the Constitution. That is our North Star, that is who we are, and that is why we fight.”

It was a pointed statement, coming as it did from the highest ranking military officer of the U.S. as he voluntarily stepped down from his position.

mickeyrat

October 2, 2023 (Monday)  The trial of former president Trump, his oldest sons, two associates, and the Trump Organization began today in Manhattan. Jose Pagliery, political investigations reporter for The Daily Beast, noted that the presiding judge, New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, started with a reference to Friday’s rainstorm that flooded New York City, saying: "Weeks ago, I said we would start today 'come hell or high water.’ Meteorologically speaking, we’ve had the high water."  New York Attorney General Letitia James launched the investigation in 2019 after Trump fixer Michael Cohen testified before Congress that Trump had been engaging in fraud by inflating the value of his property. Last week, Justice Engoron issued a partial decision establishing that the organization and its executives committed fraud. Engoron canceled the licenses under which the organization’s New York businesses operated, provided for those businesses to be dissolved, and provided for an independent monitor to oversee the company.   With that major point already established, the trial that began today will establish how much of the ill-gotten money must be given up, or “disgorged,” by the defendants and whether they falsified records or engaged in insurance fraud in the process of committing fraud. James has asked for a minimum of $250 million in disgorgement, along with a ruling permanently prohibiting Trump and his older sons from doing business in New York, and a five-year ban on commercial real estate transactions for Trump and the organization.   Trump is attending the trial in person, likely because, as Pagliery noted, he cited this trial as the reason he couldn’t show up for two days of depositions in his federal case against Michael Cohen. If he didn’t show up, he would be in contempt of court. So he is there, but his goal in all his legal cases seems to be to play to the public, where his displays of victimization and dominance have always served him.   He has already said it is “unfair” that he isn’t getting a jury trial in New York, but his lawyers explicitly said they did not want one, possibly because a bench trial gives Trump a single judge to attack rather than a jury. Today, his lawyer Alina Habba, who along with her law firm and Trump has been fined close to $1 million by a federal judge for filing a frivolous lawsuit, gave a fiery opening statement aimed at “the American people” rather than the judge. When the court broke for lunch, Trump went straight to reporters to rail at the prosecutors holding him to account.  Historian Lawrence Glickman noted that the press is emphasizing Trump’s anger at the proceedings as if a defendant’s anger matters, but it is starting to feel as if bullying and bluster to get away with breaking the rules is not as effective as it used to be. Legal analyst Lisa Rubin notes that this case is a form of “corporate death penalty” that strikes at his wealth and image, both of which are central to his identity and to his political power.  And it is not just Trump; another case announced on Friday suggests the era of real estate crime is ending. The Department of Justice announced that a California real estate executive had pleaded guilty the previous day to a multi-year scheme that looked a lot like the one Trump’s organization is charged with: fraudulently inflating the value of real estate holdings of a Michigan company in order to defraud lenders.   “My office will not hesitate to prosecute those who lie in order to engage in financial crimes, regardless of the titles they may have,” said U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan Dawn N. Ison.  The drive for the impartial application of the rule of law is showing up among the Democrats, as they seek to illustrate the difference between them and the Republicans. New Jersey Democratic senator Bob Menendez is insisting that the federal indictment against him and his wife for bribery, fraud, and extortion in exchange for helping Egypt is a political smear campaign, but more than half of Democratic senators have called on him to resign.   Trump is increasingly being held to account by former staff, as well. In the wake of his attacks on former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, Trump’s former chief of staff Marine Corps General John Kelly went on the record today with Jake Tapper of CNN, confirming a number of the damning stories that emerged during Trump’s presidency about his denigration of wounded, captured, or killed military personnel as “suckers” and “losers,” with whom he didn’t want to be seen.   Kelly called Trump: “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason—in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law…. There is nothing more that can be said,” he added. “God help us.”  The confirmation of Trump’s attacks on wounded or killed military personnel will not help his political support. After reading Kelly’s remarks, retired Army Major General Paul Eaton, a key advocate for veteran voting, released a video he recorded more than two years ago when he first heard the stories about Trump’s attack on the military. “Who could vote for this traitor Trump?” he asked on social media. In the video, Eaton urges veterans to “vote Democratic,” because “our country’s honor depends on it.”   That Trump is concerned about his ebbing popularity showed tonight when his campaign released a statement demanding that the Republican National Committee cancel all future debates and focus on Trump’s evidence-free allegations that the Democrats are going to steal the 2024 election. If it refuses, the statement says, it will just show that national Republicans are “more concerned about helping Joe Biden than ensuring a safe and secure election.”   Popular pressure against the extremism of the Republican Party showed up today when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recused himself from participating in a case related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Thomas’s wife, Ginni, was a staunch supporter of Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and in the past, Thomas had voted on related cases nonetheless. Today’s case involved John Eastman, formerly one of Thomas’s law clerks.   There were interesting signs today that the tide seems to be turning against the MAGA Republicans elsewhere, too. In an op-ed in the New York Times, former South Carolina representative Bob Inglis told his “Fellow Republicans: It’s Time to Grow Up.” He expressed regret for his votes in 1995 to shut down the government and in 1998 to impeach President Bill Clinton, and for his opposition to addressing climate change on the grounds that if Al Gore was for it, Republicans should be against it.   But he had come to realize that “the fight wasn’t against Al Gore; it was against climate change. Just as the challenge of funding the government isn’t a referendum on Speaker McCarthy; it’s a challenge of making one out of many—E pluribus unum—and of bringing the country together to do basic things.” He called on Republicans to remember that we must face the huge challenges in our future together: language that echoes President Joe Biden, who has been making that pitch since he took office.   The fight over funding the government has contributed to growing pressure on the extremists. The chaos in the Republican Party as the factions fought each other with no plan to fund the government until McCarthy finally had to rely on the Democrats for help passing a continuing resolution was a sign that the extremists’ power is at risk.   Today, there was much chafing over the threats of Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) to challenge Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, and he actually did it this evening, although it is not clear that he has the votes either to remove McCarthy or to prevent his reelection as speaker. What is clear is that Gaetz is forcing a showdown between the extremists and the rest of the party, and while such a showdown is sure to garner media attention, it is unlikely to leave the extremists in a stronger position.  Indeed, when he left the floor after making the motion to vacate the chair, some Democrats laughed.

mickeyrat

  October 3, 2023 (Tuesday)

Wow.

Today, House Republicans made history by being the first to throw out their own Speaker of the House, while the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination made history by being the first candidate to be gagged by a judge after threatening one of the judge’s law clerks by posting a lie about her on social media.

Ever since Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) made a deal with the extremists in his conference to win the speakership after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in January 2023, he has catered to those extremists in an apparent bid to hold on to his position. From the first, he gave them key positions on committees, permitted them to introduce extreme measures and load up bills with poison pills that meant the bills could never make it through Congress, and recently to open impeachment hearings against President Joe Biden.

But the extremists have continued to bully him, especially since they opposed a deal he cut with Biden before McCarthy would agree to raise the debt ceiling, threatening to make the United States default on its debt for the first time in U.S. history. When their refusal to pass either appropriations bills or a continuing resolution to buy more time to pass those bills meant the U.S. was hours away from a government shutdown, McCarthy finally had to rely on the Democrats for help passing a continuing resolution on Saturday.

A shutdown would have hurt the country and, in so doing, would have benefited former president Trump, to whom the extremists are loyal. Led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, they were vocal about their anger at McCarthy’s pivot to the Democrats to keep the government open,

Yesterday, Gaetz challenged McCarthy’s leadership, apparently with the expectation that the Democrats would step in to save McCarthy’s job, although it is traditionally the majority party that determines its leader. According to Paul Kane of the Washington Post, McCarthy did reach out to Democrats for votes to support his speakership. But Democrats pointed to McCarthy’s constant caving to the MAGA Republicans—as recently as Sunday, McCarthy blamed the threat of a shutdown on the Democrats—and were clear the problem was the Republicans’ alone.

“It is now the responsibility of the [Republican] members to end the House Republican Civil War. Given their unwillingness to break from MAGA extremism in an authentic and comprehensive manner, House Democratic leadership will vote yes on the pending Republican Motion to Vacate the Chair,” minority leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote to the Democratic caucus.

And so, when the House considered blocking Gaetz’s motion to vacate the chair, the measure failed by a vote of 208 to 218. Eleven Republicans voted against blocking it. And then, on the voting over the measure itself, 216 members voted to remove McCarthy while 210 voted to keep him in the speaker’s chair. Eight Republicans abandoned their party to toss him aside, making him the first speaker ever removed from office.

The result was a surprise to many Republicans, and there is no apparent plan for moving forward. House Rules Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK), who released a statement supporting McCarthy, called the outcome “simply a vote for chaos.”

Speakers provide a list of people to become temporary speakers in case of emergency, so the gavel has passed to Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC), who has power only to recess, adjourn, and hold votes for a new speaker. McCarthy says he will not run for speaker again. The House has recessed for the rest of the week, putting off a new speaker fight.

Until then, Republicans seem to be turning their fury at their own debacle on the Democrats, blaming them for not stepping in to fix the Republicans’ mess. One of McHenry’s first official acts was to order former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to vacate her private Capitol office by tomorrow, announcing that he was having the room rekeyed. Pelosi was not even there for today’s votes; she is in California for the memorial services for the late Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA).

McHenry’s action is unlikely to make the Democrats more eager to work with the Republicans; Pelosi noted that this “sharp departure from tradition” seemed a surprising first move “[w]ith all the important decisions that the new Republican Leadership must address, which we are all eagerly awaiting….” Pelosi might have been sharp, but she is not wrong. The continuing resolution to fund the government runs out shortly before Thanksgiving, and funding for Ukraine has an even shorter time frame than that. The House cannot do business without a speaker, and each day this chaos continues is a victory for the extremists who are eager to stop a government that does anything other than what they want from functioning, even as it highlights the Republicans' inability to govern.

Phew. But that was not the end of the day’s news.

Jose Pagliery of The Daily Beast, who is watching the New York trial of Trump, his two older sons, two of his associates, and the Trump Organization, wrote that New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur F. Engoron said today that he had warned Trump’s lawyer that Trump must not continue his attacks on the justice system. Rather than heed the warning, Trump today went after Engoron’s own law clerk, posting a lie about her with a photo on social media. “Personal attacks on members of my court staff are unacceptable, inappropriate, and I will not tolerate them under any circumstances,” Engoron said.

Engoron ordered Trump to delete the post, and the former president did so. Engoron forbade “all parties from posting, emailing, or speaking publicly about any members of my staff” and warned there would be “serious sanctions” for those who did so.

The New York case strikes close to Trump’s identity as a successful businessman by showing that he lied about the actual value of his properties, and by dissolving a number of his businesses by canceling their licenses. Adding to Trump’s troubles today is that he fell off Forbes’ list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, a status that in the past he has cared deeply about.

In the midst of the Republican chaos, the Biden administration announced that the manufacturers of all the ten drugs selected for negotiation with Medicare to lower prices have agreed to participate in the program, although they are pursuing lawsuits to stop it. Several of the pharmaceutical companies have complained of being “essentially forced” to sign on; one says it is participating “under protest” but feels it has no choice given the penalties their products would bear if they are unwilling to negotiate prices.

According to the White House, the ten drugs selected for negotiation accounted for a total of $3.4 billion in out-of-pocket costs for an estimated 9 million Medicare enrollees in 2022. The negotiations were authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed without any Republican votes.

The Department of Justice announced eight indictments against China-based companies and their employees for crimes relating to street fentanyl and methamphetamine production, distribution of synthetic opioids, and sales resulting from precursor chemicals used to make street fentanyl. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) administrator Anne Milgram noted that the supply chain that brings street fentanyl to the U.S. starts in China, from which chemical companies ship fentanyl precursors and analogues into our country and into Mexico, where the chemicals “are used to make fentanyl and make it especially deadly.” Milgram promised that the “DEA will not stop until we defeat this threat.”

Finally, while the Republicans were making history on the House side of the U.S. Capitol, the Democrats were making history on the Senate side. Vice President Kamala Harris swore into office Senator Laphonza Butler to complete the term of Senator Dianne Feinstein, which ends next year. Before her nomination, Butler was the president of EMILYs List, a political action committee dedicated to electing Democratic female candidates who back reproductive rights to office, and has advised a number of high-profile political campaigns, including that of Harris in 2020.  

Butler is the first Black lesbian in the Senate. She and her wife, Nenike, have a daughter.

mickeyrat

  October 4, 2023 (Wednesday)

Yesterday, eight extremist members of the Republican congressional conference demonstrated that they could stop their party, and the government, from functioning. Indeed, that’s about all those members have ever managed to do. Political scientist Lindsey Cormack noted on social media that Representatives Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) have managed only to name a single facility each; Representatives Ken Buck (R-CO), Tim Burchett (R-TN), Eli Crane (R-AZ), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Matt Rosendale (R-MT) have each sponsored no successful bills; and Bob Good (R-VA) has sent one thing to the president, who vetoed it.

They are not interested in governing; they are interested in stopping the government, apparently working with right-wing agitator Steve Bannon to sink the speakership of Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Indeed, the only two significant legislative achievements the Republicans have made since they took control of the House in January 2023 were raising the debt ceiling and passing a continuing resolution to fund the government for 45 days. In both of those cases, the measures passed because Democrats provided more votes for them than the Republicans did.

The former House speaker was one of many Republicans who tried to turn this internal party debacle into the fault of the Democrats, although he apparently offered them no reason to come to his support and made it clear he would continue to boost the extremists.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo commented: “The idea that D[emocrat]s should have bailed out McCarthy is a codicil of the larger logic of DC punditry in which R[epublican] bad behavior/destruction is assumed, a baseline like weather, and D[emocrat]s managing the consequences of that behavior is a given.” Journalist James Fallows agreed that this understanding “is so deeply engrained in mainstream coverage and ‘framing’ of DC that it doesn’t need to be said out loud.”

Aaron Fritschner, the deputy chief of staff for Representative Don Beyer (D-VA), was more specific, calling the idea the Democrats were refusing to support McCarthy out of spite “silly nonsense.” He noted that on Saturday, the House was preparing to shut down when McCarthy sprung on the Democrats a vote on the continuing resolution the Democrats had never seen. “My immediate read was he wanted and expected us to vote against [it] so we would be blamed for a shutdown,” Fritschner wrote. The Democrats instead lined up behind it.

Then, after it passed, McCarthy said to a reporter that the Democrats were to blame for the threatened shutdown in the first place. “People want us to give the guy credit for stopping a shutdown but it is still not clear to me right now sitting here writing this that he *intended* to do that,” Fritschner wrote.

Meanwhile, Fritschner continued, McCarthy was making it clear that he would “steer us directly back into the crazy cuts and abortion restrictions, the Freedom Caucus setting the agenda, breaking his deal with Biden, and driving us towards a shutdown in November,” refusing to make any reassurances that he would try to work with Democrats. As Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported: “McCarthy’s allies say they will NOT negotiate with Democrats. Even as some house Dems privately say they want to help the California Republican.”

“This came down to trust, and that's the word I saw and heard from House Democrats more than any other word. We did not trust Kevin McCarthy and he gave us no reason to. He could have done so (and I suspect saved his gavel) through fairly simple actions. He chose not to do that,” Fritschner wrote.

Adam Cancryn, Jennifer Haberkorn, Lara Seligman, and Sam Stein of Politico confirmed that both McCarthy’s allies and opponents found him untrustworthy, noting that when negotiating with President Joe Biden on “a particularly sensitive matter,” the speaker privately told allies that he found the president “sharp and substantive in their conversations” while in public he made fun of Biden’s age and mental abilities. That contradiction “left a deep impression on the White House,” the reporters said.

But who will now be able to get the votes necessary to become House speaker?

It seems reasonable to believe that the Democrats will continue to vote as a bloc for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), leaving the Republicans back where they were in January, when it took them 15 ballots to agree on McCarthy. Now, though, they are even angrier at each other than they were then. "Frankly, one has to wonder whether the House is governable at all," Representative Dusty Johnson (R-SD) told Andrew Solender of Axios.

Two Republicans have thrown their hats into the ring: Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Steve Scalise of Louisiana. Both are significantly to the right of McCarthy, and both carry significant baggage. Jordan was involved in a major college molestation scandal and refused to answer a subpoena concerning his participation in the attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Scalise has described himself as like Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke “but without the baggage.”

Republicans from less extreme districts, including the 18 who represent districts Biden won in 2020, are not going to want to go before voters in 2024 with the kinds of voting records Jordan or Scalise would force on them.

The fight over the speakership is unlikely to be quick, and there is urgent business to be done. Congress must fund the government—the continuing resolution that made Gaetz call for McCarthy’s ouster runs out shortly before Thanksgiving. Even more immediate is funding for Ukraine to help its military defend the country against Russia’s invasion. That funding is very popular with members of both parties in both the House and Senate, but Jordan has said he is against moving forward with that funding, believing the extremists’ wish list is more pressing.

Today news broke that Ukrainian attacks have forced Russia to withdraw most of its Black Sea Fleet from occupied Crimea. This is a serious blow to Vladimir Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. It is an unfortunate time for the U.S. to back away from Ukraine funding, and legislators are urging the House to pass that funding quickly.

mickeyrat

     October 5, 2023 (Thursday)

Katherine Faulders, Alexander Mallin, and Mike Levine of ABC News reported today that sources have told them that former president Trump shared information about U.S. nuclear subs with Anthony Pratt, an Australian billionaire who was a member of the Mar-a-Lago club. The sources say Pratt then shared that information with at least 45 others: more than a dozen foreign officials, his own employees, and a few journalists. Trump allegedly shared the exact number of nuclear warheads U.S. submarines carry, and exactly how close they can get to a Russian submarine without being detected.

Former defense secretary William Cohen explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper how information about nuclear submarines fit into the larger picture of what’s known as the nuclear triad, the land, sea, and air systems that protect the U.S. “Out of the triad,” he said, “the submarine is the one that is most secure for us because it's not targetable…. So they're special. And he is giving away special information on what is protecting us around the world.”

FBI agents and the team overseen by special counsel Jack Smith, looking into Trump’s mishandling of national security documents, have interviewed Pratt at least twice. About a year ago, on November 9, 2022, U.S. Navy nuclear engineer Jonathan Toebbe and his wife, Dianna, were sentenced to more than 19 years in prison for conspiring to sell classified information about nuclear-powered warships to a foreign country.

“Naval nuclear engineer Jonathan Toebbe was entrusted with our nation’s critical secrets and, along with his wife Diana Toebbe, put the security of our country at risk for financial gain,” U.S. Attorney Cindy Chung for the Western District of Pennsylvania said at the time. “Their serious criminal conduct betrayed and endangered the Department of the Navy’s loyal and selfless service members. The seriousness of the offense in this case cannot be overstated.”

Trump today endorsed Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) for the speakership. There is an important history to this endorsement. On January 11, 2021—five days after the attack on the U.S. Capitol and the attempt of some Republican lawmakers to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election—Trump awarded Jordan the Medal of Freedom without a real explanation of why he deserved it.

On January 6, 2021, then-Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) told Jordan to get away from her because “You f*ck*ng did this!”

Yesterday, in a speech at the University of Minnesota, Cheney explained: “Jim Jordan knew more about what Donald Trump had planned for January 6 than any other member of the House of Representatives. Jim Jordan was involved, was part of the conspiracy in which Donald Trump was engaged as he attempted to overturn the election…. There was a handful of people, of which he was the leader, who knew what Donald Trump had planned. Now somebody needs to ask Jim Jordan, ‘Why didn’t you report to the Capitol Police what you knew Donald Trump had planned? You were in those meetings at the White House.’”

She concluded: “If the Republicans decide that Jim Jordan should be the Speaker of the House…there would no longer be any possible way to argue that a group of elected Republicans could be counted on to defend the Constitution.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers are trying to get the indictments against him for trying to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 election thrown out, arguing that a president has absolute immunity from prosecution for criminal as well as civil prosecutions. If this argument succeeded, it would mean that a president was above the law and could do anything they wanted without fear of prosecution. In her newsletter Civil Discourse, Joyce White Vance suggests this is likely an attempt to delay the trial at least until after the Republican National Convention nominates a presidential candidate and possibly until after the 2024 election itself.  

Trump’s tangles with the law are not going well, and in a sudden flurry today, his lawyers tried to delay or get rid of them. In his coverage of Trump’s fraud trial in New York this week, Daily Beast political investigations reporter Jose Pagliery noted that Trump likely appeared in person because he had cited the trial as the reason he could not give a deposition in his $500 million lawsuit against his former fixer Michael Cohen for talking about him and thus breaking his fiduciary duty to act solely in Trump’s interest. That deposition was rescheduled for Monday. Today, Trump withdrew his case against Cohen, clearly suggesting he was afraid to testify.

In the New York fraud trial, a document introduced into evidence today undermined the argument that Trump wasn’t involved in the fraudulent valuations at the heart of the case. The Trump Organization’s 2014 statement of financial condition included a note from the organization’s comptroller saying: “DJT TO GET FINAL REVIEW.”

Apparently concerned that Trump would try to move his assets around to hide them, Justice Arthur Engoron today ordered Trump, his older sons, and the two Trump Organization employees in the suit not to move money or open a new business without reporting it to the independent monitor overseeing the businesses. They must also provide a list of each of their businesses and anyone who shares ownership of those businesses.

Trump has also asked Judge Aileen Cannon to delay his trial for mishandling the national security documents he stashed at Mar-a-Lago until after the 2024 election.

mickeyrat

  October 6, 2023 (Friday)

In a Washington Post op-ed today, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) offered House Republicans a “path to a better place” than the “dysfunction and rancor they have allowed to engulf the House.” Democrats have repeatedly offered both in public and in private to enter into a bipartisan governing coalition, he wrote, but under former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Republicans have “categorically rejected making changes to the rules [in order] to…encourage bipartisan governance and undermine the ability of extremists to hold Congress hostage.”  

Jeffries offered to work with willing Republicans “to reform the rules of the House in a manner that permits us to govern in a pragmatic fashion.” Stating up front his willingness to negotiate, Jeffries wrote that the House “should be restructured to promote governance by consensus and facilitate up-or-down votes on bills that have strong bipartisan support.” This would stop a few extremist Republicans from preventing “common-sense legislation from ever seeing the light of day.”

Jeffries called for “traditional Republicans” to “break with the MAGA extremism that has poisoned the House of Representatives since the violent insurrection on Jan[uary] 6, 2021, and its aftermath.”

“House Democrats remain committed to a bipartisan path forward,” he wrote, but “we simply need Republican partners willing to break with MAGA extremism, reform the highly partisan House rules that were adopted at the beginning of this Congress and join us in finding common good for the people.”

Jeffries is reaching out at a delicate moment for Republicans. While the minority leader’s appeal to what is best for the country is an important reminder of what is at stake here, there are also political currents running under the surface of the speaker crisis. The speaker vote will force Republicans to go on the record either for or against former president Trump, a declaration most have so far been able to avoid.

There is enormous pressure from pro-Trump MAGA Republicans to stick with the former president and elect his chosen candidate, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), as House speaker. But Jordan is a very close ally of Trump’s and can be expected to demand an end to investigations into the former president in exchange for doing even the most basic business—Trump, after all, demanded a government shutdown until the cases against him were abandoned. Throwing the speakership to him will mean facing the 2024 election with a fully committed Trump party and government dysfunction as the Republicans’ main argument for why voters should back them.  

That might play well in the gerrymandered districts of the extremists, but there are 18 Republicans who won election in districts President Biden won in 2020, and they will not want to run on a ticket dominated by Trump and Jordan. But a vote for the other declared candidate, Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA), means being on record against Trump and for a man who once described himself as Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke “without the baggage.”

The other calculation those wavering Republican members of Congress must make is what they expect for the future. A number of the state maps that gave Republicans their slim House majority have been found unconstitutional and are now being redrawn in ways that suggest the Democrats might well retake the House in 2024. If that happens, having forged a working relationship with the Democrats would be far more useful than standing with the hard right.

It would take as few as five Republican votes to elect Jeffries speaker, which is an unlikely outcome, but it would also take just a few Democrats to vote present and lower the number needed to enable the Republicans to elect someone more moderate than their current option. Jeffries might well be signaling that the Democrats are willing to enable that outcome, but only for a Republican who is not a bomb thrower.

Republicans who are not committed to Trump may also be paying attention to what increasingly feels like a shift in the country’s popular tide. Today’s news provided more evidence that Biden’s approach to the economy—using the government to invest in ordinary Americans—is working far better than the Republicans’ approach of slashing the government to enable capitalists to organize the economy ever did.

Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics released yet another very strong jobs report showing that the U.S. economy added 336,000 jobs in September, almost twice what economists had predicted. The unemployment rate held steady at 3.8%. The biggest gains were in leisure and hospitality and in government. Average hourly wages went up 4.2% over the past 12 months; more than the inflation rate of 3.4%. The bureau also revised its employment statistics for July and August upward, showing that the employment in those months was up 199,000 more than the gains already reported.  

The country’s shift away from concentrating wealth upward also showed today in positive movement toward a historic settlement between the United Auto Workers and automakers. UAW president Shawn Fain announced that General Motors has agreed to include workers at plants making batteries for electric vehicles in the UAW’s national labor agreement.

While the UAW wanted—and appears to be obtaining—higher wages, its leaders were especially concerned about what the transition to EVs would do to workers. Fain said that automakers had been planning to phase out the engine and transmission plants worked by union laborers and replace those jobs with lower-wage jobs in non-union battery plants. Until now, automakers had said it would be “impossible” to permit the battery plants to be covered by the union umbrella.

Fain called the agreement a “transformative win” and, in light of that agreement, announced that the UAW will not expand its strike into GM’s most profitable plant in Arlington, Texas. Fain said he expects that Ford and Stellantis, which includes Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram, will agree to the same deal, and labor scholars agree.

Trump visited a non-union plant in this dispute, where he attacked the transition to EVs as job killers for autoworkers. This new agreement makes it unlikely that autoworkers will back Trump over this issue.

Biden, on the other hand, weighed in on the fight by joining the UAW picket line.

mickeyrat

  October 7, 2023 (Saturday)

Early this morning, Eastern Daylight Time, Hamas militants broke out of the Gaza Strip, where approximately 2 million Palestinians live, largely unable to leave because of the extensive restrictions Israel has imposed. They pushed as far as 15 miles (about 24 kilometers) into Israel, taking over at least 22 towns and firing at least 2,500 rockets. They have killed at least 250 Israelis, wounded more than 1,500 others, and taken hostages. The attack was a surprise, having an effect on Israelis that observers are comparing to the effect of 9-11 on people in the U.S.

Hamas is a group of Palestinian militants that make up one of the two major political parties in the Palestinian Territories, which consist of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Hamas was established in 1987 and gained control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. Since then, Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have periodically exchanged fire. In May 2021 that tension turned into an 11-day conflict that has simmered along the security fence between Israel and Gaza ever since.

In a video address to Israelis, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “We are at war and we will win it.” Israelis have killed at least 232 people and wounded more than 1,700 in retaliation for the attack. He promised the Israeli military will “take revenge for this black day” but that it “will take time.” He warned that Israel would turn “into ruins” the places where Hamas operates, and told residents of Gaza to “get out of there now,” although they have no way to leave.

There are serious questions about how the Netanyahu government did not see this attack coming. It was either a spectacular intelligence failure or a security failure or both, and it strikes at the heart of the Netanyahu government’s promise to keep the country safe. At the same time, the attack is making Israelis rally together. The hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have been protesting Netanyahu’s strengthening hold on the government have said they would come together in this dangerous moment.  

A number of countries, including the U.S., have designated Hamas a terrorist organization. It is backed by Iran, which provides money and weapons, and last month high-level Iranian officials apparently met with Hamas leaders in Lebanon. Today Iran praised Hamas for the attack. Iran has opposed the recent talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel about normalizing relations. Since the decline of Iraq as an independent power, Iran has viewed the combination of Israel, its main enemy, with Saudi Arabia, its main rival for power, as the greatest threat to its security in the region.

Iran and Russia are allies whose relationship has strengthened considerably as the Russian war against Ukraine has pushed the two increasingly isolated countries together to resist Western sanctions. Former Russian president and deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said the attack was “expected,” and used it to accuse the U.S.

The Middle East, rather than Ukraine, was “what Washington and its allies should be busy with,” he said. “But instead of actively working at Palestinian-Israeli settlement,” he went on, “these morons have interfered with us, and are providing the neo-Nazis with full-scale aid, pitting the two closely related peoples against each other. What can stop America’s manic obsession to incite conflicts all over the planet?”

Today’s assessment of the Russian offensive in Ukraine by the Institute for the Study of War said: “The Kremlin is already [exploiting] and will likely continue to exploit the Hamas attacks in Israel to advance several information operations intended to reduce US and Western support and attention to Ukraine.”

Both Saudi Arabia and Qatar have contextualized the attack by calling out Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people but also are calling for restraint and for the violence to stop.

India, too, has expressed solidarity with Israel.

In the U.S., the administration suggested that it sees a larger hand behind this attack and is working with partners and allies to contain the violence. In a statement, President Biden said the United States “unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, and I made clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that we stand ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the Government and people of Israel.” It went on with a warning—“The United States warns against any other party hostile to Israel seeking advantage in this situation”—and a threat: “My Administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.”

Biden told reporters that he has been in contact with the King of Jordan, has spoken with members of Congress, and is in close touch with Netanyahu. He says he has directed the national security team to engage with their Israeli counterparts—“military to military, intelligence to intelligence,...diplomat to diplomat—to make sure Israel has what it needs.” He has also directed his team “to remain in constant contact with leaders throughout the region, including Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman, the UAE, as well as with our European partners and the Palestinian Authority.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke today with the presidents of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, urging Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to condemn the attack and to work to restore calm. He also spoke with the foreign ministers of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Türkiye, as well as the European Union’s High Representative for foreign affairs. Blinken urged the EU, Türkiye, and the so-called Quint countries—France, Germany, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S.—to continue to engage on the issue, and he promised to stay in close contact with all the parties he talked to today.

In the United States, Republicans used the moment to attack President Biden. In an echo of a similar lie from Trump, who falsely claimed the Obama administration had paid $150 billion to Iran for a nuclear agreement, they took to social media in a flood to say that the U.S. had funded the attack on Israel because it had recently “paid” $6 billion to Iran.

The statement was wrong across the board: the U.S did not pay Iran anything. It helped to ease restrictions on Iranian money that had been frozen in South Korea, enabling Qatar to take control of the money and use it for humanitarian aid. In any case, the money has not yet been transferred. Still, it was a surprising decision to attack the U.S. government at a time when the country would normally be united behind Israel.

Nonetheless, the attack has made the national implications of Republicans’ own troubles even more clear. In times of crisis, the executive branch briefs the so-called Gang of Eight on classified intelligence matters. The Gang of Eight is made up of the leaders of each party in the House and the Senate, and the leaders of each party in each chamber’s intelligence committee. But without a House Speaker, this leading intelligence group is missing a key member. It is not clear if the acting speaker, Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC), who was tapped by former speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and not elected, can participate.

The lack of a speaker is a problem. Although House committees can still meet, the House can’t do much. McHenry is responsible mostly for overseeing the election of a new speaker; he does not have the authority to bring bills or even resolutions to the floor.

Halifax2TheMax

mickeyrat said:

  October 7, 2023 (Saturday)

Early this morning, Eastern Daylight Time, Hamas militants broke out of the Gaza Strip, where approximately 2 million Palestinians live, largely unable to leave because of the extensive restrictions Israel has imposed. They pushed as far as 15 miles (about 24 kilometers) into Israel, taking over at least 22 towns and firing at least 2,500 rockets. They have killed at least 250 Israelis, wounded more than 1,500 others, and taken hostages. The attack was a surprise, having an effect on Israelis that observers are comparing to the effect of 9-11 on people in the U.S.

Hamas is a group of Palestinian militants that make up one of the two major political parties in the Palestinian Territories, which consist of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Hamas was established in 1987 and gained control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. Since then, Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have periodically exchanged fire. In May 2021 that tension turned into an 11-day conflict that has simmered along the security fence between Israel and Gaza ever since.

In a video address to Israelis, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “We are at war and we will win it.” Israelis have killed at least 232 people and wounded more than 1,700 in retaliation for the attack. He promised the Israeli military will “take revenge for this black day” but that it “will take time.” He warned that Israel would turn “into ruins” the places where Hamas operates, and told residents of Gaza to “get out of there now,” although they have no way to leave.

There are serious questions about how the Netanyahu government did not see this attack coming. It was either a spectacular intelligence failure or a security failure or both, and it strikes at the heart of the Netanyahu government’s promise to keep the country safe. At the same time, the attack is making Israelis rally together. The hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have been protesting Netanyahu’s strengthening hold on the government have said they would come together in this dangerous moment.  

A number of countries, including the U.S., have designated Hamas a terrorist organization. It is backed by Iran, which provides money and weapons, and last month high-level Iranian officials apparently met with Hamas leaders in Lebanon. Today Iran praised Hamas for the attack. Iran has opposed the recent talks between Saudi Arabia and Israel about normalizing relations. Since the decline of Iraq as an independent power, Iran has viewed the combination of Israel, its main enemy, with Saudi Arabia, its main rival for power, as the greatest threat to its security in the region.

Iran and Russia are allies whose relationship has strengthened considerably as the Russian war against Ukraine has pushed the two increasingly isolated countries together to resist Western sanctions. Former Russian president and deputy chair of Russia’s Security Council Dmitry Medvedev said the attack was “expected,” and used it to accuse the U.S.

The Middle East, rather than Ukraine, was “what Washington and its allies should be busy with,” he said. “But instead of actively working at Palestinian-Israeli settlement,” he went on, “these morons have interfered with us, and are providing the neo-Nazis with full-scale aid, pitting the two closely related peoples against each other. What can stop America’s manic obsession to incite conflicts all over the planet?”

Today’s assessment of the Russian offensive in Ukraine by the Institute for the Study of War said: “The Kremlin is already [exploiting] and will likely continue to exploit the Hamas attacks in Israel to advance several information operations intended to reduce US and Western support and attention to Ukraine.”

Both Saudi Arabia and Qatar have contextualized the attack by calling out Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people but also are calling for restraint and for the violence to stop.

India, too, has expressed solidarity with Israel.

In the U.S., the administration suggested that it sees a larger hand behind this attack and is working with partners and allies to contain the violence. In a statement, President Biden said the United States “unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, and I made clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that we stand ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the Government and people of Israel.” It went on with a warning—“The United States warns against any other party hostile to Israel seeking advantage in this situation”—and a threat: “My Administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering.”

Biden told reporters that he has been in contact with the King of Jordan, has spoken with members of Congress, and is in close touch with Netanyahu. He says he has directed the national security team to engage with their Israeli counterparts—“military to military, intelligence to intelligence,...diplomat to diplomat—to make sure Israel has what it needs.” He has also directed his team “to remain in constant contact with leaders throughout the region, including Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman, the UAE, as well as with our European partners and the Palestinian Authority.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke today with the presidents of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, urging Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas to condemn the attack and to work to restore calm. He also spoke with the foreign ministers of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Türkiye, as well as the European Union’s High Representative for foreign affairs. Blinken urged the EU, Türkiye, and the so-called Quint countries—France, Germany, Italy, the U.K., and the U.S.—to continue to engage on the issue, and he promised to stay in close contact with all the parties he talked to today.

In the United States, Republicans used the moment to attack President Biden. In an echo of a similar lie from Trump, who falsely claimed the Obama administration had paid $150 billion to Iran for a nuclear agreement, they took to social media in a flood to say that the U.S. had funded the attack on Israel because it had recently “paid” $6 billion to Iran.

The statement was wrong across the board: the U.S did not pay Iran anything. It helped to ease restrictions on Iranian money that had been frozen in South Korea, enabling Qatar to take control of the money and use it for humanitarian aid. In any case, the money has not yet been transferred. Still, it was a surprising decision to attack the U.S. government at a time when the country would normally be united behind Israel.

Nonetheless, the attack has made the national implications of Republicans’ own troubles even more clear. In times of crisis, the executive branch briefs the so-called Gang of Eight on classified intelligence matters. The Gang of Eight is made up of the leaders of each party in the House and the Senate, and the leaders of each party in each chamber’s intelligence committee. But without a House Speaker, this leading intelligence group is missing a key member. It is not clear if the acting speaker, Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC), who was tapped by former speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and not elected, can participate.

The lack of a speaker is a problem. Although House committees can still meet, the House can’t do much. McHenry is responsible mostly for overseeing the election of a new speaker; he does not have the authority to bring bills or even resolutions to the floor.

Leaderlessism is what repubs do.