Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat

 November 30, 2022 (Wednesday)

The Democrats in the House have voted in new leadership. Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who grew up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and who represents a district that includes parts of Brooklyn and Queens, will replace Nancy Pelosi of California as speaker. A 52-year-old lawyer, Jeffries is known for playing a long game, listening to everyone, focusing on getting laws passed. He will be the first Black party leader in the House or the Senate.

Members elected Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts as the number 2 party leader: she will be the party whip, the person who makes sure there are votes to pass certain measures and keeps members behind the party’s program.

And they elected Representative Pete Aguilar of California as caucus chair, overseeing the weekly meetings of the Democratic caucus to discuss policy, legislation, and other issues.

The new Democratic leaders will start in the minority in the new Congress, where the Republicans have a slim majority, but are considered a strong team and hope to be in the majority after 2024.

In a sign that they represent a new era, CNN’s headline for a story about Jeffries’s rise read: “With Hakeem Jeffries’ rise, his members see ‘Democrats in total array.’”

For decades, it has been a stereotype that Democrats are in disarray, but after two years in which Democrats have managed with just a small House majority to pass an extraordinary slate of major laws, after a midterm election in which Democrats did far better than pundits expected, and now with a strong new team of leaders in place with party members standing behind them, “disarray” now belongs to the Republicans.

As if to illustrate the deep factions in the Republican Party that have made them unable to agree on much of anything except what—and whom—they hate, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) today, in response to a logical question, offered to Kristin Wilson, Paul LeBlanc, and Clare Foran of CNN something that sure sounded like word salad.

The House today did as President Joe Biden asked, and passed a bill to impose an agreement on railway corporations and railway employees to avoid a strike that economists say would cost the country $1 billion in its first week. The vote was bipartisan. Seventy-nine Republicans joined all but eight Democrats to pass the bill. McCarthy was one of 129 Republicans who voted no.

When the CNN reporters asked McCarthy why he voted no, he answered: “First Biden told us that inflation was transitory; it wasn’t. He told us immigration was seasonal and it wasn’t. He told us Afghanistan wouldn’t collapse to the Taliban. Then he told us in September that this deal was all worked out. Now he wants the government to go into this? I just think it’s another—it’s another sign of why the economy is weak under this Biden administration.”

Numbers released today show that, in fact, the economy grew at an annual rate of 2.9% in the third quarter—between July and September—lower than it has been, but higher than the growth in former president Trump’s first three years, which averaged 2.5%. Unemployment today is at a 50-year low. While inflation is still high, gas prices have dropped to an average of $3.50 a gallon, where they were in February before Russia invaded Ukraine.  

When the reporters noted that McCarthy’s position would actually have hurt the economy by leading to a strike that tanked it, he responded: “If my position held out, we’d actually have it done by the private sector a long time ago and we’d have efficiency. We wouldn’t have inflation, we’d have a secure border.”
 
McCarthy is scrambling to find the votes he needs from the far right to make him House speaker, making him impossible to pin down as he tries to woo those extremists to his side.
Meanwhile, in the Senate, John Thune (R-SD), the second ranking Republican, has offered a plan, but it is one that is unlikely to make the party more popular. Yesterday, he said that Republicans plan to use the necessary increase in the debt limit to force cuts in the budget, including changes to Social Security and other programs.

In 2019, 57% of Americans said that Social Security was a “major” source of their income, and 74% of Americans said that Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way.

brianlux

She must be taking some time off?  Hope all is well.

mickeyrat

   December 1, 2022 (Thursday)
 
Some stories wrapped up today:
 
In Atlanta the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit said that the district court had no jurisdiction to block the U.S. government from using the records it seized in the criminal investigation of former president Trump. That is, when U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon allowed Trump’s request for a special master to review the documents seized by the FBI in its search of Mar-a-Lago on August 8, she assumed power the district court did not have. Special Master Raymond Dearie will be dismissed, and the criminal investigation of the former president will go forward.
 
The panel noted in their decision that they were unwilling to “carve out an unprecedented exception in our law for former presidents.” The judges acknowledged that “[i]t is indeed extraordinary for a warrant to be executed at the home of a former president,” but “[t]o create a special exception here would defy our Nation’s foundational principle that our law applies ‘to all, without regard to numbers, wealth, or rank.’”
 
It continued: “The law is clear.  We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”
 
All three judges on the panel were nominated by Republican presidents: Judge William H. Pryor by President George W. Bush; Judges Andrew L. Brasher and Britt C. Grant, by Trump.
 
Today, Ye, also known as Kanye West, appeared with right-wing white supremacist Nick Fuentes on Alex Jones’s show InfoWars, and was so vile even Jones began to push back. Eventually, Ye praised Nazis and Adolf Hitler. Then, and only then, did the Twitter account of the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee delete their tweet of October 6, 2022, that read: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”

Other stories began:

House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) yesterday sent a letter to the chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol telling the committee to preserve their records in anticipation of an investigation in the committee once the Republicans take control of the House next year. Of course, House rules already require that preservation; the demand is simply a performance to convince the far-right MAGA Republicans that he is on their team. And, in fact, the committee has said it will release “all the evidence” to the public before the end of the year.   

Republican representative Ralph Norman (R-SC), who opposes electing McCarthy speaker, told right-wing media that those opposing McCarthy have a different candidate for the position. That candidate is not a House member, and Norman said: “It will be apparent in the coming weeks who that person will be. I will tell you, it will be interesting.”

And still other stories showed their enduring power through centuries:
 
Today, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden hosted French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Macron, for the first state visit of Biden’s presidency.
 
In a lunch today at the State Department, hosted by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Vice President Kamala Harris along with their respective spouses Ms. Evan Ryan and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, Blinken emphasized the close ties between France and the United States throughout our shared history. He recalled that France was the first international ally of the United States, recognizing the fledgling nation’s independence from England and providing both military and economic assistance after the two countries contracted a formal alliance in 1778.

Vice President Harris reminded the audience that the close alliance between France and the United States has continued ever since, with the troops of both countries fighting together, and dying together, on the battlefields of the two world wars, and with ties of culture, art, and science. Harris recalled that her mother, Dr. Shyamala Harris, worked at the Institut Pasteur with the legendary French professor Étienne-Émile Baulieu.

The leaders reaffirmed that France and the United States have a historic past and emphasized that our shared past is the basis for shaping a joint future in which the old allies work to defend the rules-based international order now under attack from autocrats who hope to dominate their neighbors with force.

Not only are they defending the rules-based order, but also they are working to make it reflect the realities of the present. In his remarks at the arrival ceremony this morning, Macron explained: “This spirit of fraternity must enable us to build an agenda of ambition and hope, as our two countries share the same faith in freedom, in democratic values, in empowerment through education and work, and in progress through science and knowledge.”

"The post-Cold War era is over,” Blinken said today, “and we face a global competition to define what comes next.” Macron and Biden, as well as Blinken and Harris, all emphasized that the defense of Ukraine as it resists the attempt of Russian president Vladimir Putin to “redraw the borders of a sovereign, independent nation by force” is key to that definition of the future.

They emphasized that those defending a rules-based order are “working together to strengthen European security and advance a free and open Indo-Pacific,” “taking urgent steps to save our planet for future generations,” and “making investments in global health to stamp out diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS, to build greater capacity to prevent and respond to future health emergencies.”

Vice President Harris quoted from Marquis de Lafayette, a French aristocrat who fought in the American Revolutionary War, who wrote to his wife in 1778 from Valley Forge, where the ragtag Continental Army encamped in the bitter winter of 1777-1778.  “My heart has always been completely convinced that in serving the cause of humanity and America," he wrote, "I was fighting in the interests of France.”

Macron responded: “And when your soldiers came during the First and the Second World War in our country, they had exactly the same feeling. And we will never forget that a lot of your families lost children on the soils they never knew before just because they were fighting for liberty and for universal values.”

brianlux

I forgot that she's more of a night owl than I am.  Good letter as always!

mickeyrat

brianlux said:

I forgot that she's more of a night owl than I am.  Good letter as always!

 It would It went up on Facebook about the same time you posted your question about. Fi think she had something to do down in DC that day and I don't know what her plans were after her event.

mickeyrat

 December 2, 2022 (Friday)

On the clear, windy morning of December 2, 1859, just before 11:00, the doors of the jail in Charles Town, Virginia, opened, and guards moved John Brown to his funeral procession. Three companies of soldiers escorted the prisoner, who sat on his own coffin in a wagon drawn by two white horses, for the trip to the gallows.

Once there, Brown mounted the steep steps. The sheriff put a white hood on the prisoner’s head and adjusted a noose around his neck. After a delay of about fifteen minutes while officers arranged the troops that had escorted the wagon, the sheriff swung a hatchet at the rope supporting the trap door below Brown’s feet. The door snapped open and the man who had tried to launch a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry two months before dangled, as one observer said, “between heaven and earth.”

That same observer, John T. L. Preston of the Virginia Military Institute, went on to explain that the “grand point” of the spectacle was its moral: that it was fatal to take up arms against the government.
 
John Brown was the first American to be executed for treason.  

Before 1859 the punishment for treason in America had not been clear. In the early years of independence, as colonies tried to stamp out loyalty to the King, some colonies had broadened the definition of treason to include “preaching, teaching, speaking, writing, or printing,” and by the time of the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, twelve of the thirteen states had written their own laws against treason.

The Framers of the Constitution recognized the danger that leaders in the new nation might expand the definition of treason to sweep in political opposition, and after all, they had been “traitors” themselves just eleven years before. So the Framers specified in the Constitution a very limited definition of treason against the United States, saying that only levying war against the United States or “adhering to their enemies” or giving “aid and comfort” to an enemy could be considered treason. But they did not define a penalty for treason, leaving that to be determined by Congress.

They also voted to leave open the possibility for states to define treason as they wished. In the years after the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, most state constitutional conventions defined treason as a crime in their fundamental state law.
 
As men jockeyed for control of the government in the chaotic early years of the Republic, several men ran afoul of the federal and state treason clauses, but they did not pay the ultimate price for their missteps. Two men were convicted of treason against the federal government during the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s; President Washington pardoned them both. In 1838, Joseph Smith and five other Mormon leaders were charged with treason against Missouri for their part in the violent struggle between Mormons and non-Mormons in the state; they escaped before trial. Thomas Wilson Dorr was convicted of treason against Rhode Island for his part in the Dorr Rebellion of the 1840s and was sentenced to hard labor for life, but a popular protest won him amnesty after he had served a year.

Then, on October 16, 1859, abolitionist John Brown led 18 men to attack the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia—it became West Virginia in 1863—in order to seize guns from the armory, distribute them to local enslaved men, and lead them to freedom and self-government. As they cut the telegraph wires in the town in the dead of night, a free Black man, a baggage handler, stumbled upon them and they shot him. The sound attracted the attention of a local physician, who roused his neighbors. As they started to come awake, Brown’s men took the armory, which was defended by a single watchman who turned over the keys to the raiders.  

At dawn the next day, a train came through the town, and its operators alerted authorities to the trouble in Harpers Ferry as soon as they got to a working telegraph. Meanwhile, Brown’s people captured Armory employees coming to work, and as news of the hostages spread, local militia converged on the site. As firing from the militia pinned Brown’s men down, they moved to a small brick building near the armory’s door. Intermittent shooting over the course of the day killed a number of Brown’s men as well as local militia before federal troops arrived on the morning of the next day, October 18.

Officers, commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee, promised to spare the lives of Brown and his men if they surrendered, but Brown refused. Within minutes, soldiers had broken down the doors to their shelter and taken prisoner Brown and the seven of his men still alive.
 
On October 27 the state of Virginia began the trial of the still-wounded Brown for murder, inciting a slave insurrection, and treason against the state of Virginia. His lawyers argued that he could not have committed treason because he was not a resident of the state and so owed it no allegiance.

But the Virginia jury deliberated for only 45 minutes before they convicted John Brown of treason, agreeing with the prosecution that one did not have to reside in a state to be guilty of taking up arms against its government. On November 2 the judge sentenced Brown to death by hanging, a sentence that would be carried out after a legally required one-month delay.

Virginians like Preston applauded the decision. “Law had been violated by actual murder and attempted treason,” Preston wrote to his wife in a letter reprinted in the local newspaper, “and that gibbet was erected by law, and to uphold law was this military force assembled…. So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such foes of the human race!”
 
The execution of John Brown for treason set a precedent.

And in just over a year, Virginians themselves would take up arms against the federal government. Men like Preston, who became an aide-de-camp to Stonewall Jackson, had to wonder if the precedent of hanging John Brown for treason might come back to haunt them.

mickeyrat

  December 3, 2022 (Saturday)

Today, one of former president Trump’s messages on the struggling right-wing social media platform Truth Social went viral.

In the message, Trump again insisted that the 2020 presidential election had been characterized by “MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,” and suggested the country should “throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or…have a NEW ELECTION.”

Then he added: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

In other words, Trump is calling for the overthrow of the Constitution that established this nation. He advocates the establishment of a dictator.

This outrageous statement seems to reflect desperation from the former president as his political star fades and the many legal suits proceeding against him get closer and closer to their end dates.

The midterm elections, in which the high-profile candidates he backed lost, prompted some members of his party to suggest it’s time to move on to new candidates. At the same time, lawsuits are heating up. The Department of Justice continues to investigate Trump’s role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, an attempt that led to the events of January 6, 2021.

Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the Washington, D.C., District Court recently rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilege and ordered Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, and deputy counsel, Patrick Philbin, to provide additional testimony to a federal grand jury. On Friday, they each testified for several hours. On November 29, Trump advisor Stephen Miller, who worked with Trump on his speech at the Ellipse, also testified before the grand jury,

The Department of Justice is also investigating Trump’s theft of documents when he left the White House. The December 1 decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declaring that Judge Aileen Cannon had no authority to allow Trump a special master to review the materials the FBI took when they searched Mar-a-Lago on August 8, 2022, had a very clear, concise rundown of what the government has so far recovered from the former president, and the list was damning.

In the first group of documents Trump returned to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), after significant pressure to do so, included “184 documents marked at varying levels of classification, including twenty-five marked top secret.” After a subpoena, Trump’s lawyers returned another 38 classified documents, seventeen of which were marked top secret. Trump’s team declared that a “diligent search” had turned up only these items, and there were no more left.

But the FBI learned that there were, in fact, more documents still at Mar-a-Lago and obtained a search warrant. On August 8, FBI agents retrieved about “13,000 documents and a number of other items, totaling more than 22,000 pages of material…. [F]ifteen of the thirty-three seized boxes, containers, or groups of papers contained documents with classification markings, including three such documents found in desks” in Trump’s office. Agents found more than 100 documents marked confidential, secret, or top secret.

Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to oversee these two investigations after Trump announced an early candidacy for president in 2024. Smith got down to work immediately, sending out a letter on Thanksgiving Day itself. It seems likely there is good reason for Trump to be concerned.

Meanwhile, Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and South Carolina’s Supreme Court has ordered Trump’s White House Chief of staff Mark Meadows to testify to that grand jury, another reason for the former president to be concerned.

And the Trump Organization’s trial for tax evasion is reaching a verdict, while the House Ways and Means Committee has finally received six years of Trump’s tax returns after years of attempts by the former president to keep them out of Congress’s hands. At Lawfare, Daniel J. Hemel says that as a matter of law, the committee can make the returns public. He counsels against it for a number of reasons (although he says they should be made public) but notes that the Senate Finance Committee, which will remain in Democratic hands, can now get access to the material easily and will be able to release it. If his attempt to hide his taxes was anything other than principled, there is reason for Trump to be concerned about this as well.

So, the former president has reason to try to grab headlines with an outrageous statement about overthrowing the Constitution.

But the real story here is not Trump’s panic about his fading relevance and his legal exposure; it’s that Trump remains the presumptive presidential nominee for the Republican Party in 2024. The leader of the Republican Party has just called for the overthrow of our fundamental law and the installation of a dictator.

White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates said in a statement: “The American Constitution is a sacrosanct document that for over 200 years has guaranteed that freedom and the rule of law prevail in our great country. The Constitution brings the American people together—regardless of party—and elected leaders swear to uphold it. It’s the ultimate monument to all of the Americans who have given their lives to defeat self-serving despots that abused their power and trampled on fundamental rights. Attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation, and should be universally condemned. You cannot only love America when you win.”

But Republicans, so far, are silent on Trump’s profound attack on the Constitution, the basis of our democratic government.

That is the story, and it is earth shattering.

brianlux

^^^ WOW!

mickeyrat

  December 4, 2022 (Sunday)

On Friday, November 25, 2022, just over a week ago, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced, “On the very first day of the new Republican-led Congress, we will “read every single word of the Constitution aloud from the floor of the House—something that hasn’t been done in years.”

Yesterday, on Saturday, December 3, 2022, former president Donald Trump, the presumptive leader of the Republican Party, mischaracterized a Twitter thread to claim that Joe Biden’s presidential campaign had successfully pressured Twitter to suppress the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop—the thread actually said something else entirely—and called for overthrowing the Constitution. Trump wrote:

“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential election results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great “Founders” did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

In case anyone didn’t get the point, Trump followed that post up with another: “UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES UNPRECEDENTED CURE!”

On Sunday, December 4, all but one Republican lawmaker who expects to stay in office for the next two years stayed resolutely silent about Trump’s open attack on the U.S. Constitution, this nation’s founding document, the basis for our government.

That one lawmaker was Representative Michael Turner (R-OH), the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, who this morning on CBS’s “Face the Nation” condemned Trump’s attack on the Constitution. But Turner would not say he would not support Trump if he were the party’s nominee in 2024.

Even at that, Turner’s was a lone voice. When George Stephanopoulos, host of “This Week” on ABC News, asked Representative David Joyce (R-OH) if he would support Trump in 2024 after the former president had called for “suspending the Constitution” (to be clear, Trump had called for “terminating” it), Joyce tried to avoid the question but finally said, “I’ll support whoever the Republican nominee is." Joyce is the chair of the Republican Governance Group, whose members claim they are the party’s centrists.

Not all Republicans reacted to Trump’s truly astonishing statement with such easy acceptance. Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who was removed from party leadership for holding Trump responsible for the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and who has lost her seat in Congress to a Trump supporter, responded to Trump’s statement by saying: “Donald Trump believes we should terminate ‘all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution’ to overturn the 2020 election. That was his view on 1/6 and remains his view today. No honest person can now deny that Trump is an enemy of the Constitution.”

Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who, like Cheney, took a seat on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol and will also be leaving Congress, tweeted: “With the former President calling to throw aside the constitution, not a single conservative can legitimately support him, and not a single supporter can be called a conservative. This is insane. Trump hates the constitution.” Kinzinger tagged McCarthy, third-ranking House Republican Elise Stefanik (R-NY), and Jim Jordan (R-OH), who is expected to take over the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over issues involving the Constitution.

None of them commented.

Conservative Bill Kristol made his questioning broader: “The Federalist Society claims to defend the Constitution,” he tweeted. “Donald Trump, the ex-president with whom the Society worked so closely, has just attacked the Constitution in an incendiary way. Do the Federalist Society or its members have a word to say in defense of our Constitution?”

Crickets.

McCarthy’s statement a week ago that the whole Constitution hadn’t been read on the floor of Congress “in years” was technically true, but it was misleading. It sounded as if McCarthy was promising to do something novel to demonstrate the Republicans’ loyalty to the Constitution.

In fact, Republicans demanded a reading of the Constitution in the House for the first time in its history in 2011 to try to demonstrate that the government had gone beyond the Framers’ intent, although they also cut out all the parts the Framers wrote that have been amended since the document was written. (That meant they cut out the infamous three-fifths clause counting enslaved African Americans as three fifths of a white person for purposes of representation, leading to accusations that they were cherry-picking the Framers’ words.)

Since then, the House has read the Constitution at least twice more, in 2015 and 2017, to promote the idea that Republicans, and Republicans alone, are standing on the U.S. Constitution, while Democrats are abusing it.

The leader of the Republican Party has called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” and party leaders are silent.

Representatives had not taken the time to read the entirety of the U.S. Constitution on the floor of the House before 2011 because they were presumed to know it. What they did have to say aloud was something far more important for each individual to have on record: their oath of office.

It reads: “I…do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

mickeyrat

  December 5, 2022 (Monday)

On Friday, December 2, President Joe Biden signed into law House Joint Resolution 100, “which provides for a resolution with respect to the unresolved disputes between certain railroads represented by the National Carriers’ Conference Committee of the National Railway Labor Conference and certain of their employees.”
 
What that long title means is that the U.S. government has overridden the usual union ratification procedures of a tentative agreement to hammer out differences between employers and the 115,000 workers covered by the agreement. Eight of the 12 involved unions had agreed to the deal, which provides 24% wage increases but no sick days, and four had not.

Their refusal to agree seemed almost certain to lead to a strike in which all the unions would participate, shutting down key supply chains and badly hurting the U.S. economy. Some estimated the costs of a strike would be about $2 billion a day, freezing almost 30% of freight shipments by weight, and causing a crisis in all economic sectors—including retail, just before the holidays. It would also disrupt travel for up to 7 million commuters a day and stop about 6300 carloads of food every day from moving. So the government stepped in.

Biden asked Congress on Monday, November 28, to act to prevent a rail strike, but there was a long history behind this particular measure, and an even longer one behind the government’s pressure on railroad workers.

The story behind today’s crisis started in 2017 when former president Trump’s trade war hammered agriculture and manufacturing, leading railroad companies to fire workers—more than 20,000 of them in 2019 alone, dropping the number of railroad workers in the U.S. below 200,000 for the first time since the Department of Labor began to keep track of such statistics in the 1940s. By December 2020, the industry had lost 40,000 jobs, most of them among the people who actually operated the trains.

Those jobs did not come back even after the economy did, though, as railroad companies implemented a system called precision scheduled railroading, or PSR. “We fundamentally changed the way we operate over the last 2½ years,” Bryan Tucker, vice president of communications at railroad corporation CSX told Heather Long of the Washington Post in January 2020. “It’s a different way of running a railroad.”

PSR made trains longer and operated them with a skeleton crew that was held to a strict schedule. This dramatically improved on-time delivery rates but sometimes left just two people in charge of a train two to three miles long, with no back-up and no option for sick days, family emergencies, or any of the normal interruptions that life brings, because the staffing was so lean it depended on everyone being in place. Any disruption in schedules brought disciplinary action and possible job loss. Workers got an average of 3 weeks’ vacation and holidays, but the rest of their time, including weekends, was tightly controlled, while smaller crews meant more dangerous working conditions.

PSR helped the railroad corporations make record profits. In 2021, revenue for the two largest railroad corporations in the U.S., the Union Pacific and BNSF (owned by Warren Buffett), jumped 12% to $21.8 billion and 11.6% to $22.5 billion, respectively.  

About three years ago, union leaders and railroad management began negotiating new contracts but had little luck. In July, Biden established a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to try to resolve the differences. The PEB’s August report called for significant wage increases but largely kicked down the road the problems associated with PSR. The National Carriers Conference Committee, which represents the railroads, called the report “fair and appropriate”; not all of the involved unions did.

And here is the deeper historical background to this issue: the government has no final power to force railroad owners to meet workers’ demands. In 1952, in the midst of the Korean War, believing that steel companies were being unreasonable in their unwillingness to bargain with workers, President Harry S. Truman seized control of steel production facilities to prevent a strike that would stop the production of steel defense contractors needed. But, in the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer decision, the Supreme Court said that the president could not seize private property unless Congress explicitly authorized it to do so. This means that the government has very little leverage over corporations to force them to meet workers’ demands.

But, thanks to the 1926 Railway Labor Act, Congress can force railroad workers to stay on the job. The 1926 law was one of the first laws on the books to try to stop strikes by providing a mechanism for negotiations between workers and employers. But if the two sides cannot agree after a long pattern of negotiations and cooling off periods, Congress can impose a deal that both sides have to honor.

The idea was to force both sides to bargain, but a key player in this policy was the American consumer, who had turned harshly against railroad workers when the two-month 1894 Pullman Strike, after drastic wage cuts, shut down the country. For the most part, Americans turned against the strikers as travel became diabolically difficult and goods stopped moving. Even reformer Jane Addams, who generally sympathized with workers, worried that the economic crisis had made forgiving the strikers “well-nigh impossible.”

While management generally likes the current system, workers point out that it removes their most effective leverage. Employers can always count on Congress to step in to avoid a railroad strike that would bring the country’s economy to its knees. On November 28, CNN Business reported that more than 400 business groups were asking Congress to enforce the tentative deal in order to prevent a strike. At the same time, the Supreme Court in 1952 took away the main leverage the government had against companies.

And so the House passed the measure forcing the unions to accept the tentative deal on Wednesday, November 30, by a vote of 290 to 137. Two hundred and eleven (211) Democrats voted yes; 8 voted no. Seventy-nine (79) Republicans voted yes; 129 voted no.  

But then the House promptly took up a measure, House Concurrent Resolution 119, to correct the bill by providing a minimum of 7 paid sick days for the employees covered by the agreement. That, too, passed, by a vote of 221 to 207, with three Republicans joining all the Democrats to vote yes. Those three Republicans were Don Bacon (R-NE), who has gotten attention lately for trying to carve a space for himself away from the rest of the party as someone concerned about practical matters; Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA); and John Katko (R-NY).

It was a neat way for Congress to impose its will on the companies under the terms of the Railway Labor Act.

The Senate approved the bill on Thursday by a vote of 80 to 15, with Rand Paul (R-KY) voting “present” and four others not voting. The 80 yes votes were bipartisan and so were the 15 no votes. Five Democrats—Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT)—joined ten Republicans to oppose the measure.

Then the Senate took up the concurrent resolution, which it rejected by a vote of 52 yes votes to 43 no votes, with five not voting. That is, the measure won a majority—52 votes—but because of the current understanding of the filibuster rule, the Senate cannot pass a measure without a supermajority of 60 votes. The yes votes for the sick leave addition were nearly all Democrats, along with six Republicans. The no votes were all Republicans, with the addition of one Democrat: Joe Manchin of West Virginia.  

Biden maintains he supports paid sick leave for all workers, not just railroad workers, and promises to continue to work for it.

But the railway struggle was about more than sick leave. It was about a system that has historically made it harder for workers than for employers to get what they want. And it is about consumers, who—in the past at any rate—have blamed strikers rather than management when the trains stopped running.

mickeyrat

  December 6, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today, President Joe Biden traveled to Arizona to highlight how the CHIPS & Science Act is bringing innovation and jobs to the country. He visited a facility that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is building north of Phoenix, where he met with chief executive officers from several companies and with lawmakers. TSMC has recently committed to investing $40 billion in Arizona to produce advanced semiconductors, the very sort of investment the CHIPS & Science Act was designed to attract.

Biden noted that this investment will bring more than 10,000 construction jobs and 10,000 jobs in high tech, and he emphasized that the Democrats’ investment in the nation’s economy is paying off. The country has added jobs in every month of Biden’s administration—10.5 million of them—and exports are up, helping the economy to grow at 2.9% last quarter. And Walmart’s chief executive officer yesterday said that prices are coming down for toys, clothing, and sports equipment, while the chief executive officer of Kroger says prices for fresh food products are also easing.

But, Biden said, he is “most excited” about the fact that “people are starting to feel a sense of optimism as they see the impact of the achievements in their own lives. It’s going to accelerate in months ahead, and it’s part of the broad story about the economy we’re building that works for everyone: one…that positions Americans to win the economic competition of the 21st century.”

​​“Where is it written that America can’t lead the world once again in manufacturing?” Biden said. “We’re proving it can.”

Biden has apparently tried to undercut the radical right by ignoring its demands and demonstrating an America in which everyone works together to solve our biggest problems. His trip to Arizona was in keeping with that program, with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre telling reporters that his trip was about “the American manufacturing boom we’re seeing all across the country thanks to, again, his economic policies… [and] in large part thanks to the CHIPS and Science Act the President signed into law—and a historic—let’s not forget—a bipartisan piece of legislation.”

But reporters immediately asked if President Biden would visit the border in Arizona, bowing to a right-wing talking point. Jean-Pierre responded that Biden would not engage in a political “stunt,” as the Republicans have been doing, and was instead going to Arizona “to talk about an important initiative that’s going to change Americans’ lives, specifically in Arizona.”

The follow-up? “If the President is not going to make time to visit the border during [this] trip…, will he do it…in the new year?”

The news from the right-wing faction in the nation often seems to steal the oxygen from the sober, stable politicians trying to address real issues and doing so with more than a little success.

Today, fewer eyes were on the $40 billion investment in Arizona than were on the verdict in the trial of the Trump Organization and the Trump Payroll Corporation. Late this afternoon, the jury found the two entities guilty on all counts for a range of crimes surrounding the company’s payments to its senior employees through apartments, school tuition, cars, and so on, to avoid taxes. The company was charged with scheming to defraud, criminal tax fraud, falsifying business records, and conspiracy. The key witness was Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to tax fraud, grand larceny, and conspiracy last August and received a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against the company (but not against former president Trump or members of his family).  

Trump promptly issued a statement. He blamed everything on Weisselberg and promised to appeal.

House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told reporters today the committee will make criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. Those referrals, a source told Sara Murray, Annie Grayer, and Zachary Cohen of CNN, “will be focused on the main organizers and leaders of the attacks.” The Department of Justice is engaged in its own investigation, of course, but such a referral places a marker from a bipartisan group of lawmakers—many of whom are lawyers—indicating that they believe crimes have been committed.

Special counsel Jack Smith is now in charge of investigating the events surrounding January 6 as well as Trump’s theft of government documents, and news broke today that on November 22, just two days after he began work, he sent grand-jury subpoenas to officials in Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, asking for all communications officials had with Trump, his campaign, or many individuals associated with the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.   

Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration continues to govern. Tomorrow, Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff will convene a roundtable discussion with leaders from 13 Jewish groups from across the country to discuss the rise in antisemitism. Mr. Emhoff is the first Jewish individual married to a president or a vice president, and he has called out the escalating antisemitism as the former president elevates white supremacists.

“I do not see this just as a Jewish issue,” Emhoff said. “This is an issue for all of us. Because we’ve seen this before. This is how it started 70 years ago. So I don’t want it to feel normal. I don’t want people to think, ‘Well it’s just words, it’s just Kanye.’ No. This matters.”

And finally, tonight, as I finished up this letter, the news networks called the Georgia Senate runoff race for Democratic senator Raphael Warnock, giving the Democrats a 51–49 majority in the Senate. This means that the Democrats will have the power to issue subpoenas without getting Republicans to sign on to them. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post pointed out a few weeks ago that Democrats could use this power to demonstrate what actual congressional oversight should look like, compared to House Republicans’ threatened investigation of Hunter Biden, perhaps drowning out the Republicans’ tactic of endless “investigations” to tarnish their opponents.

After the results came out, Vox senior correspondent Ian Millhiser tweeted: “Huh, so Democrats managed to pick up a Senate seat in a cycle where they should have been crushed. Consider the possibility that Joe Biden is very good at his job.”

mickeyrat

  December 7, 2022 (Wednesday)

In October, prosecutors told a court they did not believe Trump had turned over all the documents with classified markings in his possession, and they were particularly concerned that he carried documents with him on flights between Mar-a-Lago and his properties in New York and New Jersey. On the advice of his lawyers, Trump hired a team to search for more documents, and they have found at least two more items marked classified and have turned them over to the FBI.

A spokesperson for Trump said in a statement that Trump and his lawyers “continue to be cooperative and transparent, despite the unprecedented, illegal and unwarranted attack against President Trump and his family by the weaponized Department of Justice.”

Trump’s lawyers are doubling down on the idea that presidential immunity protects Trump from anything he did in office, even “seeking to destroy our constitutional system.” Today, Trump lawyer Jesse Binnall argued before the D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that the former president cannot be sued by police officers and members of Congress for inciting the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, that he is immune from lawsuits even if he had urged his followers to “burn Congress down.”

Such an argument is fingernails down a chalkboard to anyone who knows anything at all about how the Framers of our Constitution thought about unchecked power.

There is, though, ongoing congressional review of the Trump administration. Last night the chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, Ron Wyden (D-OR), and the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY), wrote to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III, asking for information in their “ongoing investigations into whether former Senior White House Adviser Jared Kushner’s financial conflicts of interest may have led him to improperly influence U.S. tax, trade, and national security policies for his own financial gain.”

The letter outlines the timing of the 2018 financial bailout of the badly leveraged Kushner property at 666 Fifth Avenue (now known as 660 Fifth Avenue) with more than $1 billion paid in advance from Qatar. Qatar had repeatedly refused to invest in the property, but after Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates imposed a blockade on Qatar—after Kushner discussed isolating Qatar with them without informing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson—Qatar suddenly threw in the necessary cash. Shortly after that, the Saudi and UAE governments lifted the blockade, with Kushner taking credit for brokering the agreement.

Because of this case, and a number of others covered in the letter, the committees have asked the Defense Department to provide any correspondence it had with the Kushners during the Trump administration, or about the various dealings in which business and government appeared to overlap. They have asked for the information by January 13, 2023.

The ideas of the Framers on the nature of government was also in the news today thanks to arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of Moore v. Harper, a crucially important case about whether state legislatures have exclusive control of federal elections in their states, or if state courts can override voting laws they believe violate state laws or the state constitution. Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig, who sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in October called Moore v. Harper “the most important case for American democracy in the almost two and a half centuries since America’s founding.”

The case comes from North Carolina, where the state supreme court in February declared that new congressional and state legislature maps so heavily favored Republicans as to be “unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt.” The Republican-dominated legislature says that it alone has the power to determine state districts and cannot be checked by state courts or the state constitution.

The legislature claims this power thanks to the “independent state legislature” doctrine, a new legal theory based on the election clause of the U.S. Constitution, which reads that "the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” Lawyers for the legislatures today claimed this clause means that the legislature alone can determine election laws in a state.

In October, Luttig published an article in The Atlantic with the unambiguous title: “There Is Absolutely Nothing to Support the ‘Independent State Legislature’ Theory.” The subtitle explained: “Such a doctrine would be antithetical to the Framers’ intent, and to the text, fundamental design, and architecture of the Constitution.”

Politicians, voting rights advocates, state attorneys general, senators, former governors, military officers, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the American Bar Association, and so on, all offered their own briefs to the court sharing Luttig’s position, with historians of the Founding Era agreeing that “[n]othing in the records of the deliberations at Philadelphia or the public debates surrounding ratification” supports the idea that state legislatures have exclusive power to regulate congressional elections. “There is no evidence that anyone at the time expressed [this] view…. [T]he interpretation is also historically implausible in view of the framers’ general fear of unchecked power and their specific distrust of state legislatures. There is no plausible eighteenth-century argument” for the independent state legislature theory, they say.

The historians also observed that those embracing the theory ignore the ample documentary evidence and rely extensively on a document that scholars proved long ago was written ten years after the actual Constitutional Convention.

Ouch.

The independent state legislature theory would also permit legislators to choose their presidential electors however they wish. Had such a theory been in place in 2020, Trump’s scheme for throwing out Biden’s electors in favor of his own would have worked, and he would now be in the White House.

The potential for this case to upend our right to have a say in our government has had democratic advocates deeply concerned, but observers watching the court today seemed to think the right-wing justices would not embrace the theory fully. Perhaps this is in part because they know well that their legitimacy is fraying as they are increasingly perceived as partisan politicians, or perhaps the Supreme Court is wary of undermining the idea of judicial review. In any case, both Marc Elias of Democracy Docket and Rick Hasen of Election Law Blog analyzed the justices’ questions today and guessed they would find a middle ground that preserves some measure of state courts’ oversight of legislatures’ election shenanigans.

Their analysis is only a guess, of course. Elias suggested the court would likely hand down a decision in the case in June.

mickeyrat

  December 8, 2022 (Thursday)

“Well, good morning, folks. And it is a good morning,” President Joe Biden said in remarks today at the White House. “Moments ago, standing together with her wife, Cherelle, in the Oval Office, I spoke with Brittney Griner. She’s safe. She’s on a plane. She’s on her way home.”

A star center for the Phoenix Mercury of the Women’s National Basketball Association, who played in Russia during the off-season, Griner was arrested by Russian officials in an airport near Moscow on February 17, 2022, for drug smuggling after they allegedly found less than a gram of cannabis oil in her luggage. Griner had a prescription for medical marijuana from her doctor,  but cannabis is still illegal in Russia. The arrest was just a week before Russia invaded Ukraine, and in the aftermath of that invasion, the administration’s attempts to bring Griner home failed. In August a court sentenced her to 9 years in prison and a fine of a million rubles (about $16,000).

Today the administration exchanged Griner for convicted arms dealer Viktor Bout, nicknamed the “Merchant of Death,” who was sentenced to 25 years in prison by the U.S. in 2012 after agreeing to provide military weapons to a terrorist organization targeting Americans.

The negotiations have been long and complicated, involving not only federal officials but also former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and negotiators from the Richardson Center for Global Engagement.

While Biden and Cherelle Griner celebrated Griner’s release, they emphasized their ongoing concern for Paul Whelan, detained in Russia since December 2018. Russia accuses Whelan of spying and refused to free him together with Griner. Biden promised the Whelan family the administration would not give up and would keep negotiating for his release.

Whelan’s brother, David, supported the decision to bring Griner home without Whelan. He expressed the family’s disappointment but said: "It is so important to me that it is clear that we do not begrudge Ms. Griner her freedom. As I have often remarked, Brittney's and Paul's cases were never really intertwined. It has always been a strong possibility that one might be freed without the other."

It is worth noting that Russian operatives work to sow division in the U.S., and permitting Biden to win the freedom of a Black married lesbian while keeping a white former Marine in prison is the sort of ploy that could turn the repatriation of an American into a cultural flashpoint. Impressively, both the Griner family and the Whelan family avoided that trap and kept a united front.

Former president Trump, however, played along, complaining bitterly about “a ‘stupid’ and unpatriotic embarrassment for the USA!!!” that had  secured the release of “a basketball player who openly hates our Country” instead of “former Marine Paul Whelan,” who “would have been let out for the asking.” Other MAGA Republicans followed suit.

In fact, Whelan was taken during Trump’s administration. John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security advisor when Whelan was arrested, said tonight on the CBS News Streaming Network that “the possibility of a Bout for Whelan trade existed back then, and it wasn’t made, for very good reasons having to deal with Viktor Bout.”

Bolton called today’s exchange “a huge victory for Moscow over Washington” and warned that such a swap would put Americans in danger around the world as bad actors grab them as bargaining chips.

Possibly. But the Russia to which Bout is going back in 2022 is not the same as the Russia of 2019, and the Biden administration’s work to bring Griner home had a domestic effect: it demonstrated that the U.S. government cares about all of its citizens.

The Department of Justice appears to be picking up the pace of its investigations into the events surrounding former president Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, as well as into his theft of documents with classified markings when he left the White House. Both of those investigations are now being directed by special counsel Jack Smith, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland after Trump declared he is running for president in 2024.

Officials in the offices of the secretary of state for Michigan and Arizona have confirmed that they received grand jury subpoenas just days after Smith sent grand jury subpoenas to local officials in Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin. The secretary of states' offices have not offered details about what the subpoenas request.

The documents also remain in the news. After yesterday’s revelation that a team hired by Trump found at least two more documents with classified markings, a Trump spokesperson issued a statement that Trump and his lawyers “continue to be cooperative and transparent, despite the unprecedented, illegal and unwarranted attack against President Trump and his family by the weaponized Department of Justice.”

It felt as if they were trying to get ahead of a story, and it turns out they were.

According to Spencer S. Hsu, Josh Dawsey, Jacqueline Alemany, Devlin Barrett and Rosalind S. Helderman of the Washington Post, lawyers for the Department of Justice have recently asked U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell to hold Trump’s office in contempt of court. He and his lawyers have not complied with a subpoena from May requiring them to return all documents in his possession with classified markings on them (the subpoena specified documents bearing classified markings, as opposed to classified documents, thus avoiding Trump’s insistence that he declassified things without leaving a record).

The reporters have sources who tell them that Trump’s lawyers refuse to sign a document saying all the relevant documents have been returned. The lawyers say that requiring them to make such a claim, under oath, is unreasonable, but it is likely they’re remembering lawyer Christina Bobb, who signed such a document in June 2022 only to discover that it was a lie and that Trump continued to hold documents. The reporters’ sources say lawyers don’t want to sign such a document on Trump’s assurances alone, and the Justice Department wants to be certain there are no more documents bearing classified markings in Trump’s possession.

Los Angeles Times legal correspondent Harry Litman tweeted: “Wow. DOJ wants to hold Trump in contempt for violation of subpoena. A natural outgrowth of the trickling out of documents and failure to comply with subpoena from last May. But quite a strike across the bow.”

According to the Washington Post reporters, Judge Howell will hold a hearing on the matter tomorrow.

mickeyrat

  December 9, 2022 (Friday)

On Wednesday, December 7, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III hosted the defense ministers of Australia and the United Kingdom at the Pentagon to discuss the Australia–United Kingdom–United States Security Partnership, called AUKUS.

AUKUS is a security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It was formally introduced on September 15, 2021, and commits the three partners to cooperate on a wide range of security issues, including cybersecurity. Because it focuses on military capabilities, it is separate from the older intelligence-sharing alliance that includes all three of the same countries, as well as New Zealand and Canada.

That intelligence-focused group is called Five Eyes and has its roots first in secret meetings of U.S. and British code breakers in 1941, and then in the more formal sharing of intelligence to streamline cooperation during World War II. The conviction that democracies needed to share information during the Cold War broadened the alliance to include Australia and New Zealand as countries who could see certain intelligence. The name came from a term used in the classification of secret documents: "AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY" was easier to say as “Five Eyes.”

The organization of AUKUS is separate from Five Eyes. It is part of the Biden administration’s focus on the Indo-Pacific region, seeking to support a region that is “stable, prosperous, and respectful of sovereignty,” as Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong put it on Tuesday in a different forum. Wong added: “U.S. engagement in the Indo‑Pacific makes an indispensable contribution to such a region…and I want to commend the administration for its significant investments in the Indo‑Pacific” alongside increased efforts on the part of Australia.

The U.S. focus on the Indo-Pacific is designed to counterbalance the power and influence of China in the region. That focus has included U.S. investment there, as well as high-profile interactions with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)—a political and economic alliance that includes Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, informally known as the Quad, which is a strategic security dialogue including Japan, Australia, India, and the U.S.

Just today, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan welcomed the first 100 Quad Fellows, 25 from each Quad country, to study in fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics to promote “innovation and collaboration among our four great democracies and an enthusiasm for building a better tomorrow for the Indo-Pacific and the world.”   

The organization of AUKUS last year created significant tension between the U.S. and France when Australia abruptly canceled a contract for a number of submarines built by France but powered by technology that reflects France’s limits on nuclear technologies. In place of the French submarines, which were running late and over budget as well, the Australians announced they would buy nuclear-powered submarines built with American technology.  

Macron had made the Indo-Pacific, where France holds island territories, one of his priorities. He was angry at his country’s exclusion from discussions about the region, blindsided by the loss of the lucrative submarine contracts, and facing an election in which his chief opponent was a staunch nationalist who backs Russian president Vladimir Putin over the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

So, in the wake of the AUKUS announcement, French President Emmanuel Macron made a strong statement of outrage, and for the first time in our shared history, France recalled its ambassador to the U.S. for consultations—less serious than a permanent recall, but still a breach. It also recalled its ambassador to Australia for consultations, but in our case, it was an especially significant rebuke because we identify France as our oldest friend and ally because of its significant military aid during the Revolutionary War (although France-allied Morocco recognized American independence the year before French troops arrived).

It was likely in part to patch up that rift that when Biden finally held a full-scale official state visit, the first leader invited—the one given the pride of place—was Macron. The effusive reaffirmations of friendship between the countries reinforced Macron’s standing both in the U.S. and in Europe. (E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post observed that the two men “competed over who could say the nicest things about the alliance between the two countries—and about democracy, liberty and justice.”)

But there was plenty of discussion in meetings about French concerns that regulations in the Inflation Reduction Act that require electric vehicle parts to be made in the U.S. will hurt France and Germany. Biden indicated that those restrictions were an attempt to make car batteries in the U.S. rather than depending on batteries from China, and could be tweaked to make sure they did not hurt allies. He said: “We’re going to continue to create manufacturing jobs in America, but not at the expense of Europe.”

Macron agreed, saying: “We want to succeed together, not against each other.”

On Tuesday, after that official state visit, Australia and the U.S. announced they were inviting Japan to integrate forces with the two countries, as Japan, too, worries about the power of China. The U.S. also said it would help to increase Australia’s military readiness.

On Wednesday, the AUKUS defense secretaries said they believed that AUKUS would “make a positive contribution to peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region by enhancing deterrence.” They called for increased surveillance technologies in the area and more work with defense and academic communities. They also promised “continued openness and transparency with international partners on AUKUS.”

Next week, from December 13 to December 15, President Biden will host the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, inviting 49 African heads of state as well as the chair commissioner of the African Union, an organization of 55 African member states launched in 2002 to promote peace on the continent, advocate for the interests of the people of the continent in global affairs, promote sustainable development, and raise standards of living on the continent.

Today, Yasmeen Abutaleb of the Washington Post reported that the president is expected to announce that the U.S. supports the African Union’s membership in the G-20, an intergovernmental forum that includes most of the world’s largest economies and addresses issues important to the global economy. Those issues include climate change, financial policies, and international trade. Right now, the only country on the continent that is a member of the G-20 is South Africa, and it and other African nations have pushed for the African Union’s inclusion in the G-20, pointing out that African nations often bear the burden of decisions they were not part of making.  

Judd Devermont, the White House National Security Council’s senior director for African Affairs, said in a statement: “It’s past time Africa has permanent seats at the table in international organizations and initiatives. We need more African voices in international conversations that concern the global economy, democracy and governance, climate change, health, and security.”

The administration’s determination to include all voices in global affairs is, in the short term, an effort to undermine China’s growing power in the Indo-Pacific region and Africa. But in the longer term, it should help our increasingly interconnected world to combat climate change and pandemic threats, while also reinforcing the idea that people have the right to consent to the government under which they live.

mickeyrat

  December 10, 2022 (Saturday)

After traveling all week, I am just now home in my rocking chair by the woodstove... but not for long. I'm going to call it quits early tonight.

I'll leave you with this, an image inspired by all the photos you all share from all over the country, and all over the world, every time I post a picture. I look at them throughout the rest of the week and marvel.

A relative caught this image camping in the Indiana Dunes National Park, and sent it to show me a different shore than the Maine coast I know so well.

This really is a spectacularly beautiful country.

I'll see you tomorrow.

mickeyrat

 December 11, 2022 (Sunday)

The Keystone Pipeline ruptured Wednesday night near a creek in northern Kansas, spilling what its operator, TC Energy, says is about 14,000 barrels of oil. This is equivalent to about 588,000 gallons (an Olympic swimming pool holds about 666,000 gallons). TC Energy says the leak is now contained.

This is the largest land-based crude pipeline spill in the U.S. in nine years. Although the Keystone Pipeline has leaked 22 times before this, this week’s spill is bigger than all the others put together. A spill in July 2010 was more expensive-- costing more than $1 billion-- because it affected the Kalamazoo River in Michigan.  

The leak recalls arguments over the extension of the Keystone Pipeline, known as the XL Pipeline, that right-wing Republicans made a symbol of what they considered an antigrowth attack on U.S. energy production by Democrats.

A reminder: the Keystone Pipeline runs from oil sand fields in Alberta, Canada, into the United States and to Cushing, Oklahoma. It is fully operational. The XL Pipeline—the one that folks often confuse with the actual Keystone Pipeline—consists of two new additions to the original pipeline. As planned, they would have added up to 1700 new miles. One addition was designed to connect Cushing to oil refineries in Texas, on the Gulf Coast. That section was built and started operating in January 2014.

The second extension is the one that caused such a fuss. It was supposed to carry crude oil from Alberta to Kansas, traveling through Montana and North Dakota, where it would pick up U.S. crude oil to deliver it to the Gulf Coast of Texas. This leg crossed an international border, and thus the Canadian company building it needed approval from the State Department.

Frustrated by the U.S. government’s continuing focus on fossil fuels and worried that the Obama administration would approve the XL, climate change activists began to protest at the White House in August 2011. Likely recognizing the political danger of either approving or disapproving the permit, Obama tried to put it off until after the 2012 election, but congressional Republicans passed an order demanding a decision before it. Obama rejected the permit but let the company reapply.

Then–House speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) called Obama’s decision “sickening.” "By rejecting this pipeline, the president is rejecting tens of thousands of good-paying jobs. He is rejecting our largest trading partner and energy supplier. He is rejecting the will of the American people and a bipartisan majority of the Congress. If the president wants to spend the rest of his time in office catering to special interests, that's his choice to make. But it's just wrong. In the House, we are going to pursue a bold agenda of growth and opportunity for all."

The XL was now a political football.

Climate activists continued to protest the extension of the pipeline, and in 2015, Obama rejected the XL. But, as Jamie Henn of 350 dot org, an organization dedicated to ending reliance on fossil fuels, recalled with irony, that was the same week that Donald Trump hosted Saturday Night Live on his road to the presidency. One of the first things Trump did in office was to speed up approval of the pipeline, which the State Department did in March 2017.

In the meantime, tensions were mounting over another pipeline that often got confused with the XL: the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAP). The DAP was a 1,172-mile-long pipeline from North Dakota to southern Illinois, traveling through South Dakota and Iowa and crossing under the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, as well as under part of a lake near the Standing Rock Reservation of Lakotas, where Sitting Bull lived and was killed at the end of the nineteenth century.

Construction of the DAP began in June 2016, and at construction sites, protests escalated between workers and Indigenous Americans, especially the Lakotas, who had a long history of abuse at the hands of developers, whose water supplies were downstream from the pipeline, and whose sacred cultural lands were in its way. The pipeline was on private land, but Lakotas pointed to the potential of oil spills to destroy their water supply on the reservation downstream, as well as the destruction of their sacred lands. Calling themselves water protectors, they defended cultural preservation and the protection of the environment on which culture depends.

Conflicts between the Indigenous protesters and law enforcement officers protecting the construction sites escalated until in September 2016, workers on private land bulldozed an area Lakotas claimed as sacred. Security workers used attack dogs on the protesters who tried to protect the area, prompting the Departments of Justice and Interior to join the Army in issuing a joint statement to defend the right to protest and to ask the pipeline company to stop construction near Standing Rock until environmental impacts were clear.  

But in October, law enforcement cleared the area. And on November 20, just four days after the other pipeline in the news—the Keystone Pipeline—leaked about 210,000 gallons of oil in South Dakota, police used water cannons on the protesters in freezing weather. On February 22, 2017, after newly elected president Trump had signed an executive order permitting the construction of both the XL Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline, the National Guard and law enforcement officers cleared the last of the protesters.

Construction of the DAP was finished in April 2017.

But despite Trump’s support for the XL, judges slowed the construction of that pipeline, citing the need for more information about its environmental impact. Then, as soon as he took office, Biden revoked the permit for the construction and five months later, TC Energy halted the project. When oil prices skyrocketed after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exacerbated the low oil production in place because of the pandemic, Republicans blamed Biden for killing the construction of the XL extension.

Now the U.S. has invested heavily in switching the United States to renewable energy with the Inflation Reduction Act, and a major oil spill resurrects concerns about the transportation of oil.

It is poetic timing. On Friday, as part of their yearlong investigation of the fossil fuel industry, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform released documents from executives at major oil companies revealing that they recognize that their products are creating a climate emergency but that they have no real plans for changing course.

mickeyrat

  December 12, 2022 (Monday)

Today the leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) met virtually and reiterated their staunch support for Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression. The G7 is a political organization of the world’s most advanced economies and liberal democracies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine joined the meeting.

The leaders issued a statement saying they would continue to back Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” That means continued military support for Ukraine as well as continuing sanctions against Russia, especially Russian oil, and aid to countries, especially those in Africa, suffering from the shortages caused by the war. They condemned Russia’s war crimes, including attacks on critical infrastructure, particularly energy and water facilities. They pledged to help civilians in Ukraine through the winter and promised to set up a donor program to funnel money to rebuild the country quickly.

But, they noted, Russia will have to pay to repair the damage it has done with its illegal war.

Also today, the foreign ministers of the European Union met in Brussels and pledged another 2 billion euros to Ukraine’s military support, signaling the E.U.’s continued support for Ukraine.

After reiterating their support for Ukraine, the G7 leaders reaffirmed their more general commitments to liberal democracy. They promised to take “urgent, ambitious, and inclusive climate action in this decade to limit global warming,” bolster biodiversity, realize gender equality, and improve “our capacity to prevent, prepare for and respond to future global health emergencies and to achieve universal health coverage.”

Taken together, the G7 and its international partners, the statement says, are demonstrating their resolve to work together to address both major systemic challenges and immediate crises. “Our commitments and actions,” they say, “pave the way for progress towards an equitable world…[and] a peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable future for all.”

Meanwhile, Russian president Vladimir Putin has canceled his traditional end-of-the-year news conference in which reporters can ask him questions on live television. Despite his tight control of the media, it appears he is unwilling to risk questions about the war or the suffering economy in front of an audience.

Democracy is at risk in the U.S. as well as in Ukraine, of course, and as we wait for the report of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, there have been some revealing developments.

On Saturday night, at the annual gala of the New York Young Republican Club in New York City, whose attendees included a number of far-right figures, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) deflected accusations that she and Trump ally Stephen Bannon were behind the events of January 6 by saying: “I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates condemned the statement, saying: “It goes against our fundamental values as a country for a Member of Congress to wish that the carnage of January 6th had been even worse, and to boast that she would have succeeded in an armed insurrection against the United States government.”

Greene then backed away from her statement, saying it was “sarcasm.”

We already know that Greene worked hard to get then–Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler on board with the attempt to challenge the legitimate electors for Biden, attended meetings about the challenges, and—according to Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows—asked for a presidential pardon.

Greene’s downplaying her statement after criticism from the White House suggests she is getting nervous about her role in the attack on the Capitol, or at least trying to distance herself from it.

She is not the only one. Today, Talking Points Memo began an explosive series covering texts to and from Meadows in the time around the 2020 election and its aftermath. These are texts Meadows voluntarily turned over to the January 6 committee, although we know they are not the entire catalog of communications because he stopped cooperating after an initial period.

The series, by Hunter Walker, Josh Kovensky, and Emine Yücel, examines texts not previously available to the public as well as some we have already seen. They show that 34 members of Congress wrote to Meadows as part of the attempt to install Trump back in the White House by counting out Biden’s legitimate electors.

The congress members identified in the texts include the ones we have come to expect to see leading the MAGA Republicans in the effort to steal the election: Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), for example, Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL), whom Trump advisor Jason Miller identified as “the ringleader on the Jan 6th deal.”

But those implicated either explained away their participation—unconvincingly—or refused to respond to inquiries from the Talking Points Memo reporters.  Representative Brian Babin (R-TX) wrote to Meadows: “Mark, When we lose Trump we lose our Republic. Fight like hell and find a way. We’re with you down here in Texas and refuse to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship. Liberty!” Babin did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Representative Ralph Norman (R-SC), who wrote on January 17, three days before Biden’s inauguration: “Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall [sic] Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!”

MAGA Republicans have hitched their political identity to Trump, and his star is falling after his candidates did so poorly in the 2022 election.

On Saturday the executive committee of the Texas Republican Party voted 62–0 for a resolution calling for the replacement of Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, who has allied closely with Trump.

The former president is also in trouble as the investigation of the stolen national security documents proceeds. Today, Judge Aileen Cannon formally dismissed the special master she allowed Trump to claim, after the Eleventh Circuit decided she had no jurisdiction to take on the case. Philip Rotner in The Bulwark cut to the chase in the title of an article about the documents: “It’s Time to Indict Donald Trump.”

And then there is the January 6th investigation. Special counsel Jack Smith has sent a grand jury subpoena to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger. Smith took office just before Thanksgiving and has already sent requests for information to five states—all of which were 2020 battlegrounds– asking for any communications officials there had with Trump, his allies, and his campaign.

And the report of the January 6 committee is scheduled to go to the printer this week.

mickeyrat

  December 13, 2022 (Tuesday)

This afternoon, in front of a crowd of more than 5,000 people on the South Lawn of the White House, President Joe Biden signed H.R. 8404, the Respect for Marriage Act, into law. The new law protects same-sex and interracial marriages after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision brought their safety into question.

The new law overrides the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which said the federal government could not recognize marriages that were not between a woman and a man. It also requires states to recognize marriages performed in other states. The Supreme Court protected the right to interracial marriage in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, and the right to same-sex marriage in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges.

The Loving case came from the marriage of Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving, who married in 1958 in Washington, D.C., to avoid their home state of Virginia’s so-called Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which criminalized interracial marriage. When they returned to Virginia, police raided their home, and when Mrs. Loving showed them their marriage certificate, the officers said it was invalid in Virginia. The Lovings were charged with violating the law and pleaded guilty to “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.” In 1959 the court sentenced them to a year in prison, suspending it if they left Virginia for at least 25 years. They moved to Washington, D.C.,  where they asked the American Civil Liberties Union to defend their rights.

The Obergefell case, which was one of the many that made up the Supreme Court’s decision, revealed another danger of states refusing to recognize marriage. James Obergefell and John Arthur married in Maryland, but their home state of Ohio refused to recognize the marriage. Arthur was terminally ill and wanted Obergefell identified as his surviving spouse on his death certificate. In June 2015 a majority of the court decided that states must recognize marriages performed in other states. Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito all dissented. Arthur died before the decision was handed down.

The present Supreme Court, stacked by Trump with three far-right justices, has backed away from permitting the Fourteenth Amendment to protect civil rights. When its radical majority overturned Roe v. Wade this summer, Justice Clarence Thomas indicated he thought the right to same-sex marriage should also be revisited. He did not mention Loving v. Virginia—he himself is in an interracial marriage—but others noted that the court protected it, as well as the other cases, under the same clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

And so, Congress has protected the right to have marriages recognized, although not the right for same-sex couples to marry in states that prohibit it. That limit is due in part to the need for Republican votes to break a filibuster. In the final vote, 39 Republicans in the House supported the new law and 12 Republican Senators joined the Democrats to pass the measure, while 36 Republican Senators opposed it. The willingness of the Republicans to sign on reflects the popularity of same-sex and interracial marriage in the country: a Gallup poll in June 2022 showed support for same-sex marriage at 71%, and a September 2021 poll showed support for interracial marriage at 94%.

In his remarks about the law, Biden emphasized its bipartisan support, apparently hoping to build consensus on other issues going forward.

In 2012, Biden got out ahead of the Barack Obama White House when he publicly supported gay marriage. Today he reiterated his sentiments of a decade ago as he signed the bill into law. “Marriage is a simple proposition: Who do you love, and will you be loyal to that person you love?” Biden said in the signing ceremony. “It's not more complicated than that. We all recognize that everyone should have the right to answer those questions for themselves without…government interference.”

As if right on cue, Trump-appointed Texas judge Matthew Kacsmaryk last week handed down a decision claiming that Title X, a federal program that offers grants to family-planning services, which can treat minors, “violates the constitutional right of parents to direct the upbringing of their children.” If upheld, according to Ian Millhiser of Vox, that decision would undermine a minor’s right to privacy, including the right to contraception. The plaintiff in the case says he is “raising each of his daughters in accordance with Christian teaching on matters of sexuality, which requires unmarried children to practice abstinence and refrain from sexual intercourse until marriage,” and while he doesn’t say they’ve used contraceptive services, he doesn’t want them to have that option.

Still, the mood was upbeat at the White House today. New numbers out this morning show that inflation is slowing faster than expected, hitting 7.1% in November—still high, but lower than the 7.3% economists predicted, and down significantly from October’s 7.7%. The moderation was not just in a single product—like gas, which is selling for less than it was a year ago, before Russia invaded Ukraine—but across the board.

The worst category is the price of eggs, which is high because of a virulent outbreak of bird flu in the U.S., affecting layers but not birds raised for meat. But everything transported with diesel is also costly, as diesel is still close to $5 a gallon.

In remarks in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Biden noted that this was the fifth month in a row of good news about inflation. “Prices are still too high,” he said, “but things are getting better, headed in the right direction.” He reiterated that his economic plan is working: “We’re just getting started.”

Finally, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility formally announced the first nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it took to create the reaction. This is a huge deal. If it can be recreated at scale, it would provide limitless, carbon-free energy. While that application is still decades away, today’s announcement is the culmination of decades of work to get to this point. Heartfelt congratulation s* to the scientists.

So it has been a day that looks to the future. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the first Black person and the first openly LGBTQ person to serve in the position, opened today’s press briefing by calling this “an extremely historic day, a proud day for me and so many of us here at the White House and so many Americans…across the country.”

A reporter asked her whether the president had shared with her his reflections on this historic day, or if she had any thoughts. Uncharacteristically, she answered not for him, but for herself.

“This is a big day for me, but not just me; there are many colleagues that I work with here who are allies, who are also part of the community, who are very incredibly proud…. And the thing that I remember was, 10 years ago…[Biden] said something that, really, no other national elected official was saying at the time: that marriage is a proposition…about…who you love, but also about if you're going to be loyal to that person. And I think that's important.”

Jean-Pierre continued: “[Biden] has always been an ally. I think I speak for many of us at the White House today that we could not be prouder to be working for this administration, to be working for this particular President, and to working on all the issues that are going to change Americans’ lives….”

--
* I separated this word to avoid the annoying balloons.

mickeyrat

 December 14, 2022 (Wednesday)

Today, survivors of the mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado, testified before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Club Q is an LGBTQ club in the city of about 500,000 people. The shooter opened fire there on the night of November 19-20, during a dance party. He used an AR-15 style rifle, murdering five people and wounding 19 more. Six others were hurt in the chaos.

Pointing to Republican anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that calls LGBTQ individuals “groomers” and abusers,” survivors of the mass shooting said that Republican rhetoric was “the direct cause” of the massacre. Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) drew a wider lens: “The attack on Club Q and the LGBTQI community is not an isolated incident, but part of a broader trend of violence and intimidation across our country.”

James Comer (R-KY), who will likely chair the committee in the upcoming Republican-controlled House, disagreed. Blaming Democratic policies that he claims are soft on crime, he said that “Republicans condemn violence in all forms,” and that the survivors have his “thoughts and prayers.”

But Comer’s insistence that Republicans do not celebrate guns is not entirely honest. Just last year, four days after a mass shooting at a school in Oxford, Michigan that killed four students and wounded seven other people, Comer’s colleague Thomas Massie (R-KY) posted on Twitter a Christmas photo of him, his wife, and five children holding assault weapons in front of a Christmas tree. The caption read: “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) immediately posted her own family photo with her four sons all posing with firearms.

In 2020, according to the New York Times Editorial Board, “Republican politicians ran more than 100 ads featuring guns and more than a dozen that featured semiautomatic military-style rifles.”

Democrats do not do this. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) shot a hole in a climate bill in 2010 but, according to the New York Times Editorial Board, that was the last time a Democrat used a gun in an ad.

The national free-for-all in which we have 120 guns for every 100 people—the next closest country is Yemen, with about 52 per one hundred people—is deeply tied to the political ideology of today’s Republican Party. It comes from the rise of Movement Conservatism under Ronald Reagan.

Movement Conservatism was a political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the social and economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors.

In the 1960s, leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government. They emphasized individualism, the idea that a man should take care of his own family, defending it with weapons, if need be, and fighting off a dangerous government and those who wanted to use the government for “socialism” or “Marxism.”

In 1972, the Republicans still embraced the idea that the government had a role to play in making the country safer for everyone, and their platform called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns.” But in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun safety. In 1980 the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms.

In 1980 the National Rifle Association endorsed Reagan. This was the first time it had endorsed a presidential candidate, and showed an abrupt change in what had, until 1977, been a sporting organization that emphasized gun safety and rejected the idea of working with manufacturers of guns and ammunition.

In the past, NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. Until the mid-1970s, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks.

But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”
Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA began to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.

After a gunman trying to kill Reagan in 1981 paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases.

The NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike the law down, and in 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional.

Now a player in national politics, the NRA PAC was awash in money from gun and ammunition manufacturers, 99% of it going to Republican candidates. By 2000 it was one of the three most powerful lobbies in Washington. It spent more than $40 million on the 2008 election, and in that year, the landmark Supreme Court decision of District of Columbia v. Heller struck down gun regulations and declared for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.

The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shootings as one in which four people are shot, not including the shooter: in 2021 alone, we had 692 of them.
 
While gun ownership has actually declined since the 1970s, there are far more guns in fewer hands: a study in 2017 showed that about half of US guns are owned by about 3% of the population, and that was before Americans launched a new gun-buying spree after 2020.  

Ten years ago today, a 20-year-old in Newtown, Connecticut, shot and killed 20 children between the ages of six and seven, and six adult staff members at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. In the wake of those horrific murders, Congress tried to pass a bipartisan bill requiring background checks for gun purchases, but even though 90% of Americans—including nearly 74% of NRA members—supported background checks, and even though 55 senators voted for the measure, it died with a filibuster.

Dave Cullen, who writes about school shootings, argued yesterday in a New York Times op-ed that there is reason to hope we will finally address our gun problem. The Sandy Hook Massacre galvanized Americans into pushing back to reclaim our safety, as Shannon Watts and congressional representative Gabrielle Giffords—herself a survivor of gun violence–—organized the gun safety movement. That movement, in turn, got a dramatic boost from the activism of the survivors of the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in which a 19-year-old gunman murdered 17 people and injured 17 others.

This June, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had to acknowledge that support for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act was “off the charts, overwhelming,” and 15 Republican senators bucked the NRA to vote for basic gun safety legislation.

But, also in June, the Supreme Court handed down the sweeping New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision requiring those trying to place restrictions on gun ownership to prove similar restrictions were in place when the Framers wrote the Constitution. Already, a Texas judge has struck down a rule preventing domestic abusers from possessing firearms on the grounds that domestic violence was permissible in the 1700s.
 
The decision is being appealed.

mickeyrat

  December 15, 2022 (Thursday)

Yesterday, former president Trump took to his Truth Social media platform to announce that he would be making “a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT” today. Since he recently threw his hat in the ring for president in 2024, there was a great deal of speculation about what political move this would be.

When it came today, it turned out that his announcement was for digital trading cards with images of him as a superhero…available for $99 apiece. Radio personality John Melendez promptly called them “Broke’mon cards.”

Ron Filipkowski, a former federal prosecutor and Republican who now monitors right-wing extremism, tweeted: “All I can say is that those of us who have lost friends, fought with relatives, resigned positions, been called traitor, left our party, all because we saw very clearly what a con-man, huckster and fraud this man is, have never felt more vindicated.”

The reduction of the former president to a cartoon grifter seems likely to have political repercussions. Right-wing media personality Baked Alaska, who is facing six months in jail after pleading guilty to parading, demonstrating or picketing inside a Capitol building for his participation in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, tweeted: “i can’t believe i’m going to jail for an nft salesman,” with a sad face emoji.

Meanwhile, three members of the “Wolverine Watchmen” who hatched a plot to kill police and elected officials and to kidnap Governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer in summer 2020 as Trump urged his supporters to “LIBERATE” the state from her coronavirus restrictions were sentenced today to a minimum of 7 to 12 years in prison. Kara Berg of The Detroit News recorded their reactions: "I had a lapse in judgment," said one; "I sincerely regret ever allowing myself to have any affiliation with people who had those kinds of ideas,” said another; "I was caught up highly in the moment,” said a third. Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel noted that, “appropriate consequences for illegal acts are necessary to deter criminal behavior.”  

Trump’s political star is fading, leaving the Republican Party without plan or policy: recall that in 2020, for the first time in its history, the party didn’t write a political platform. Instead, it said that if it had written a platform, it “would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party's strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration.” Going forward, they simply resolved “[t]hat the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President's America-first agenda.”

Now the former president is increasingly toxic. As the party tries to find someone to blame for its poor 2022 showing, some seem to have concluded the party hasn’t been extremist enough. Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel, who remade the party to serve Trump, is now in a fight to keep her position, challenged by a woman who has backed election challenges and worked directly as Trump’s lawyer, rather than coming up from within the party.

The lawmakers Trump helped to usher into Congress are also doubling down on their extremism. In 2022 the Republicans just barely won control of the House—and that with the help of gerrymandered districts—leaving them very little room to argue with each other.

But while leadership in the Senate is determined by the party in power alone, the speakership of the House is voted on by the whole House. This means that with such a small majority, current House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who intends to become House speaker, can lose only a few votes and yet win.

The far-right wing of his conference, some of whom were prominent in the newly released texts to and from Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows as they tried to keep Trump in power despite the will of the voters, have said they will not back McCarthy. He appears to have promised them plum committee assignments, investigations, and even impeachments, but so far, they aren’t budging.

Today, McCarthy put off the choosing of committee leadership slots until after the January 3 election for speaker, which also means the Republican membership of the committees is unclear (in contrast, the Democrats will have made their decisions by next week). This enables McCarthy to use seats as leverage—Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who was stripped of her committee assignments in this Congress, has already said she expects a prime spot on the Committee on Oversight and Reform—but it also means that the House cannot organize to start the upcoming session. It can’t even hire staff.

Republicans who style themselves the “governing wing” of the party are quietly talking about stripping their more extreme members from committees. “From a governing perspective, it’s important that Republicans don’t start January 3 by going face down and not having some clarity as to what we’re going to be able to accomplish,” Representative Steve Womack (R-AR) told Annie Grayer and Melanie Zanona of CNN. “We need to be able to hit the ground running and demonstrate to the American people that the trust and confidence they’ve given to us by giving us a majority, albeit slim, was a good decision.”

Indeed. And first on that list is keeping the government funded. Yesterday, the House approved a stopgap funding measure to keep the government operating another week while Congress prepares an omnibus bill to fund — until the end of the fiscal year on September 30, 2023. The omnibus bill must be bipartisan to get through the Senate, but House Republican leaders urged Republican members to vote against the short-term measure, saying it was an “attempt to buy additional time for a massive lame-duck spending bill in which House Republicans have had no seat at the negotiating table.” Nine Republicans voted for it nonetheless, but at the very least, it seems that negotiations next year will be difficult.

Meanwhile, over at the White House, President Joe Biden has spent the last three days hosting the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit. Both Russia and China have invested heavily in Africa in the past, and Biden, who is trying to weaken Chinese and Russian power around the globe, announced that the U.S. is committed “to expanding and deepening our partnership with African countries, institutions, and people.” This week he announced not only that he backs the African Union’s membership in the G-20, the intergovernmental forum of leading economies, but that the U.S. will invest at least $55 billion in the continent over the next three years. The U.S. hopes to work with African nations on issues of security, health, food security—Somalia is facing drought conditions that will affect food supplies, while the Russian invasion of Ukraine has cut down fertilizer shipments to Africa more generally—climate change, corruption, and so on.

Biden announced that he and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as Dr. Jill Biden, Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff, and several members of the Cabinet, will travel to the African continent in 2023 to demonstrate the U.S. commitment to African countries and citizens.

But while the White House this week was all about geopolitics and representation, the person who handles the president’s personal Twitter account apparently couldn’t resist poking a little fun at Trump’s news. “I had some MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENTS the last couple of weeks, too…” the account read:

“Inflation’s easing
I just signed the Respect for Marriage Act
We brought Brittney Griner home
Gas prices are lower than a year ago
10,000 new high-paying jobs in Arizona”

If the Democrats are trying to portray themselves as the competent party, the Republicans seem to be trying to give them a leg up.