Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat

  April 10, 2024 (Wednesday)

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan and his wife, Yuko Kishida, are in Washington, D.C., tonight at a state dinner hosted by President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden. The dinner is part of a state visit, the fifth for this administration.

Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have worked to strengthen ties to countries in the Indo-Pacific to weaken the dominance of China in the region, and Japan is the key nation in that partnership. “We celebrate the flourishing friendship between the United States and Japan,” Dr. Biden said Tuesday. “Our nations are partners in building a world where we choose creation over destruction, peace over bloodshed, and democracy over autocracy.”

During talks today, Biden and Kishida committed to strengthening the defense and security frameworks of the two countries so they can work together effectively, especially in a crisis. The new frameworks include intelligence sharing, defense production, satellite cooperation, pilot training, cybersecurity, humanitarian assistance, and technological cooperation. Affirming the ties of science and education between the countries, the leaders announced that two Japanese astronauts would join future American missions and, Biden said, “one will become the first non-American ever to land on the moon.”

That cooperation both takes advantage of and builds on economic ties between the two countries. In a press conference with Kishida on Wednesday, Biden noted that Japan is the top foreign investor in the U.S., and the U.S. is the top foreign investor in Japan. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon have announced investments of $2.9 billion, $1 billion, and $15 billion respectively in Japan over the next several years, largely in computer and digital advances. Japanese corporations Daiichi Sankyo, Toyota, Honda Aircraft, Yaskawa Electric Corporation, Mitsui E&S, and Fujifilm announced investments in the U.S., primarily in manufacturing.

In a press conference, Kishida told reporters that “[t]he international community stands at a historical turning point. In order for Japan, the U.S., the Indo-Pacific region, and, for that matter, the whole world to enjoy peace, stability, and prosperity lasting into the future, we must resolutely defend and further solidify a free and open international order based on the rule of law.”

“This is the most significant upgrade in our alliance…since it was first established,” Biden said. While he noted that lines of communication with China remain open—he spoke with Chinese president Xi Jinping last week—the strengthening of ties to Japan comes in part from concern about the Chinese threat  to Taiwan, a self-ruled island that the Chinese government considers its own. Leaders are increasingly concerned that the Republicans’ refusal to fund Ukraine has emboldened not only Russia but also China.

Tomorrow, President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., of the Philippines will join Biden in a bilateral meeting before Marcos, Biden, and Kishida join in the first trilateral meeting of the three. Kishida will also address a joint session of Congress.

Kenneth Weinstein of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, suggested today that Japan “has quietly become America’s most important ally,” “playing a central role in meeting our nation’s principal strategic challenge: the threat posed by the People’s Republic of China, especially the defense of Taiwan.” Weinstein also notes that Japan’s longstanding engagement in Southeast Asia means it has “forged relations of deep trust” there among countries that often eye the U.S. with deep distrust.

Outside of news about the Japanese prime minister’s visit, U.S. news today was consumed by reactions to yesterday’s decision by the Arizona Supreme Court to permit the enforcement of an 1864 law that is currently interpreted as a ban on all abortions except to save the mother’s life.

President Biden issued a statement condemning the “extreme and dangerous abortion ban,” calling it “a result of the extreme agenda of Republican elected officials who are committed to ripping away women’s freedom.”
 
“Vice President Harris and I stand with the vast majority of Americans who support a woman’s right to choose,” he continued. “We will continue to fight to protect reproductive rights and call on Congress to pass a law restoring the protections of Roe v. Wade for women in every state.”

Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to Tucson, Arizona, on Friday to respond to the ruling. According to Hans Nichols of Axios, she had been planning to travel to Arizona anyway but quickly shifted her visit to make it a campaign trip, allowing her to comment more freely on Trump and the Republicans who were responsible for the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the imposition of abortion bans since.

Harris has been out front on the issue of reproductive rights, meeting more than 50 times with groups in at least 16 states since the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June 2022, overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the right to abortion. This year, on the January 22 anniversary of the Roe decision, she announced a “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour.

“Extremists across our country continue to wage a full-on attack against hard-won, hard-fought freedoms as they push their radical policies,” she said. “I will continue to fight for our fundamental freedoms while bringing together those throughout America who agree that every woman should have the right to make decisions about her own body—not the government.”

Yesterday illustrated what the overturning of Roe v. Wade has wrought. The Republicans who were celebrating that overturning two years ago are now facing an extraordinary backlash, and they are well aware that Arizona is a key state in the 2024 presidential election. Former president Trump has boasted repeatedly that he was responsible for nominating the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe, supported a national abortion ban, and even called for women who get an abortion to be punished.

But today he swung around again, telling reporters that he would not sign a national abortion ban if it came to his desk. To be sure, as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes, there’s no reason to think he wouldn’t sign such a bill, but the fact he is denying that he would and is running away from the issue shows just how much it hurts the Republicans with voters.

Harris’s trip, along with Biden’s constant travel, shows a willingness to crisscross the country to meet voters that dovetails with new statistics out about the Biden-Harris campaign. While Trump has largely stayed at Mar-a-Lago, has fewer than five staffers in each of the battlefield states, and has closed all the offices that made up the Republican National Committee's minority outreach program, the Biden-Harris campaign has 300 paid staffers in 9 states, and 100 offices in regions crucial to the 2024 election.

mickeyrat

   April 11, 2024 (Thursday)

When Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida addressed a joint meeting of Congress today, he tried to remind lawmakers of who Americans are. “The U.S. shaped the international order in the postwar world through economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power,” he reminded them. “It championed freedom and democracy. It encouraged the stability and prosperity of nations, including Japan. And, when necessary, it made noble sacrifices to fulfill its commitment to a better world.”

He explained the bigger picture. “The United States policy was based on the premise that humanity does not want to live oppressed by an authoritarian state, where you are tracked and surveilled and denied from expressing what is in your heart and on your mind,” he said. “You believed that freedom is the oxygen of humanity.”

Keenly aware that MAGA Republicans have rejected the nation’s role in protecting freedom and democracy and are standing between Ukraine and U.S. aid, Kishida said: “The world needs the United States to continue playing this pivotal role in the affairs of nations.”

“Freedom and democracy are currently under threat around the globe,” he said. “Climate change has caused natural disasters, poverty, and displacement on a global scale. In the COVID-19 pandemic, all humanity suffered. Rapid advances in AI technology have resulted in a battle over the soul of AI that is raging between its promise and its perils. The balance of economic power is shifting. The Global South plays a greater role in responding to challenges and opportunities and calls for a larger voice…. China's current external stance and military actions present an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge, not only to the peace and security of Japan but to the peace and stability of the international community at large.”

In the midst of all this dramatic change, Kishida said, “the leadership of the United States is indispensable. Without U.S. support, how long before the hopes of Ukraine would collapse under the onslaught from Moscow?” he asked. “Without the presence of the United States, how long before the Indo-Pacific would face even harsher realities?”

He noted that Japan has pledged $12 billion to Ukraine and “will continue to stand with” the vulnerable country. In this fraught hour, he said, “[t]he democratic nations of the world must have all hands on deck. I am here to say that Japan is already standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States. You are not alone. We are with you.”

As Kishida gently warned lawmakers that the United States is abdicating its role in world affairs by its apparent abandonment of Ukraine, Russian forces last night destroyed the largest power plant in the Kyiv region. U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Bridget A. Brink reported that “Russia last night launched more than 40 drones and 40 missiles into Ukraine…. The situation in Ukraine is dire; there is not a moment to lose,” she wrote.

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) surely knows the situation in Ukraine is dire; he has held up U.S. aid for six months. The Senate passed a national security supplemental bill that would provide aid to Ukraine back in February, but while Johnson has said he would bring the supplemental bill to the House floor, where it will certainly pass, somehow it has never been the right time.

American refusal to support Ukraine is causing global concern. When British foreign secretary David Cameron came to the U.S. this week, he not only met with lawmakers and State Department officials, but also traveled to Florida to meet with former president Trump at Mar-a-Lago in hopes of persuading him to support additional U.S. military aid to Ukraine. That Johnson refused to meet with Cameron when he returned to Washington, D.C., the next day suggests that Cameron’s effort achieved little.

Johnson is facing pressure from extremists in his conference like Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene who oppose aid to Ukraine and who are threatening to challenge his speakership if he brings the bill to the floor of the House. Those extremists fired another shot across his bow today when they blocked a law to extend a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after Trump urged them to kill it.

When the measure failed, security expert and former Trump administration official Miles Taylor wrote: “The House’s failure to renew FISA is *BAD.* If these powers lapse, it would be like blind-folding U.S. spies and tying their hands behind their backs as they try to protect Americans from China, Russia, terror groups & beyond. Get it together, Congress.”
 
To enable Johnson to ignore the extremists if it means getting aid to Ukraine, Democrats have thrown Johnson a lifeline, if only he will use it. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) suggested today that Democrats would vote against a challenge to Johnson’s speakership, keeping him in place. Jeffries said: "If the speaker were to do the right thing and allow the House to work its will with an up or down vote on the national security bill, then I believe there are a reasonable number of Democrats [who] would not want to see the speaker fall as a result of doing the right thing."

But instead of actually doing the people’s business and passing a measure the White House, Pentagon, and a majority of Congress think is vital to our national security, MAGA Republicans appear to be consumed by the effort to get Trump back into the presidency.

Today the House Rules Committee got a new chair as Michael Burgess (R-TX) took the reins from Tom Cole (R-OK). Burgess will oversee his first hearing on Monday as the committee meets to examine six bills that appear to be designed to feed the Republicans’ culture wars by denying the secretary of energy’s power to establish new energy conservation standards. Those bills are the “Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act,” the “Liberty in Laundry Act,” the “Clothes Dryers Reliability Act,” the “Refrigerator Freedom Act,” the “Affordable Air Conditioning Act,” and the “Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards Act.”

Johnson is also in on the act. He is scheduled to visit Mar-a-Lago tomorrow to promote a bill to prevent noncitizens from voting. This is purely political theater: it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Trump seems eager to push the idea of “election integrity” to bolster his lie that the 2020 election was stolen and the 2024 election will be too, evidently trying to chum up distrust of American elections.

Under its new co-chairs, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Trump loyalist Michael Whatley, the Republican National Committee last week sent out a robocall to voters’ phones saying that Democrats committed “massive fraud” in the 2020 presidential election and that “If Democrats have their way, your vote could be canceled out by someone who isn’t even an American citizen.” This is a straight-up lie, of course—Trump and his loyalists have never produced any evidence for their accusations and lost more than 60 court cases over it—but Trump clearly intends to make it a centerpiece of his campaign.

While Republicans are pushing the Big Lie, in The Bulwark today, conservative commentator Mona Charen noted that Ukraine president Volodomyr Zelensky this week warned the U.S. that Ukraine will lose the war against Russia’s aggression if it does not get U.S. aid.

“Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history,” Charen wrote. “If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the [Republicans] than anyone other than Trump…. [T]hey mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin,” she said, “must be pinching himself.”

mickeyrat

  April 12, 2024 (Friday)

At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort built on an artificial island in Charleston Harbor.

Attacking the fort seemed a logical outcome of events that had been in play for at least four months. On December 20, 1860, as soon as it was clear Abraham Lincoln had won the 1860 presidential election, South Carolina lawmakers had taken their state out of the Union. “The whole town [of Charleston] was in an uproar,” Elizabeth Allston recalled. “Parades, shouting, firecrackers, bells ringing, cannon on the forts booming, flags waving, and excited people thronging the streets.”

Mississippi had followed suit on January 9, 1861; Florida on January 10; Alabama on January 11; Georgia on January 19; Louisiana on January 26; and Texas on February 1. By the time Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, seven southern states had left the Union and formed their own provisional government that protected human enslavement.

Their move had come because the elite enslavers who controlled those southern states believed that Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860 itself marked the end of their way of life. Badly outnumbered by the northerners who insisted that the West must be reserved for free men, southern elites were afraid that northerners would bottle up enslavement in the South and gradually whittle away at it. Those boundaries would mean that white southerners would soon be outnumbered by the Black Americans they enslaved, putting not only their economy but also their very lives at risk.

To defend their system, elite southern enslavers rewrote American democracy. They insisted that the government of the United States of America envisioned by the Founders who wrote the Declaration of Independence had a fatal flaw: it declared that all men were created equal. In contrast, the southern enslavers were openly embracing the reality that some people were better than others and had the right to rule.

They looked around at their great wealth—the European masters hanging in their parlors, the fine dresses in which they clothed their wives and daughters, and the imported olive oil on their tables—and concluded they were the ones who had figured out the true plan for human society. As South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explained to his colleagues in March 1858, the “harmonious…and prosperous” system of the South worked precisely because a few wealthy men ruled over a larger class with “a low order of intellect and but little skill.” Hammond dismissed “as ridiculously absurd” the idea that “all men are born equal.”

On March 21, 1861, Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, the newly-elected vice president of the Confederacy, explained to a crowd that the Confederate government rested on the “great truth” that the Black man “is not equal to the white man; that…subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” Stephens told listeners that the Confederate government “is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Not every white southerner thought secession from the United States was a good idea. Especially as the winter wore into spring and Lincoln made no effort to attack the South, conservative leaders urged their hot-headed neighbors to slow down. But for decades, southerners had marinated in rhetoric about their strength and independence from the federal government, and as Senator Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana later wrote, “[t]he prudent and conservative men South,” were not “able to stem the wild torrent of passion which is carrying everything before it…. It is a revolution...of the most intense character…and it can no more be checked by human effort, for the time, than a prairie fire by a gardener’s watering pot.”

Southern white elites celebrated the idea of a new nation, one they dominated, convinced that the despised Yankees would never fight. “So far as civil war is concerned,” one Atlanta newspaper wrote in January 1861, “we have no fears of that in Atlanta.” White southerners boasted that “a lady’s thimble will hold all the blood that will be shed” in establishing a new nation. Senator James Chesnut of South Carolina went so far as to vow that he would drink all the blood shed as a consequence of southern secession.

Chesnut’s promise misread the situation. Northerners recognized that if Americans accepted the principle that some men were better than others, and permitted southern Democrats to spread that principle by destroying the United States, they had lost democracy. "I should like to know, if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?” Lincoln had asked in 1858.

Northerners rejected the white southerners’ radical attempt to destroy the principles of the Declaration of Independence. They understood that it was not just Black rights at stake. Arguments like that of Stephens, that some men were better than others, “are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world,” Lincoln said. “You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden…. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent….”

Northerners rejected the slaveholders’ unequal view of the world, seeing it as a radical reworking of the nation’s founding principles. After the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for 75,000 to put down the rebellion against the government. He called for “loyal citizens to favor, facilitate, and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government; and to redress wrongs already long enough endured.”

Like their southern counterparts, northerners also dismissed the idea that a civil war would be bloody. They were so convinced that a single battle would bring southerners to their senses that inhabitants of Washington, D.C., as well as congressmen and their wives packed picnics and took carriages out to Manassas, Virginia, to watch the Battle of Bull Run in July 1861. They decamped in panic as the battle turned against the United States army and soldiers bolted past them, flinging haversacks and rifles as they fled.

For their part, southerners were as shocked by the battle as the people of the North were. “Never have I conceived,” one South Carolina soldier wrote, “of such a continuous, rushing hailstorm of shot, shell, and musketry as fell around and among us for hours together. We who escaped are constantly wondering how we could possibly have come out of the action alive.”

Over the next four years, the Civil War would take more than 620,000 lives and cost the United States more than $5 billion. By 1865, two-thirds of the assessed value of southern wealth had evaporated; two-fifths of the livestock— horses and draft animals for tilling fields as well as pigs and sheep for food— were dead. Over half the region's farm machinery had been destroyed, most factories were burned, and railroads were gone, either destroyed or worn out. But by the end of the conflagration, the institution of human enslavement as the central labor system for the American South was destroyed.

On March 4, 1865, when a weary Lincoln took the oath of office for a second time, he reviewed the war’s history. “To strengthen, perpetuate and extend [slavery] was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it,” he said. “Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding.

“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

“Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish,” he said.

“And the war came.”

mickeyrat

 April 13, 2024 (Saturday)

There are really two major Republican political stories dominating the news these days. The more obvious of the two is the attempt by former president Donald Trump and his followers to destroy American democracy. The other story is older, the one that led to Trump but that stands at least a bit apart from him. It is the story of a national shift away from the supply-side ideology of Reagan Republicans toward an embrace of the idea that the government should hold the playing field among all Americans level.

While these two stories are related, they are not the same.

For forty years, between 1981, when Republican Ronald Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democrat Joe Biden did, the Republicans operated under the theory that the best way to run the country was for the government to stay out of the way of market forces. The idea was that if individuals could accumulate as much money as possible, they would invest more efficiently in the economy than they could if the government regulated business or levied taxes to invest in public infrastructure and public education. The growing economy would result in higher tax revenues, enabling Americans to have both low taxes and government services, and prosperity would spread to everyone.

But the system never worked as promised. Instead, during that 40-year period, Republicans passed massive tax cuts under Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump, and slashed regulations. A new interpretation of antitrust laws articulated by Robert Bork in the 1980s permitted dramatic consolidation of corporations, while membership in labor unions declined. The result was that as much as $50 trillion moved upward from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

To keep voters on board the program that was hollowing out the middle class, Republicans emphasized culture wars, hitting hard on racism and sexism by claiming that taxes were designed by Democrats to give undeserving minorities and women government handouts and promising their evangelical voters they would overturn the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion. Those looking for tax cuts and business deregulation depended on culture warriors and white evangelicals to provide the votes to keep them in power.

But the election of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 proved that Republican arguments were no longer effective enough to elect Republican presidents. So in 2010, with the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission decision, the Supreme Court freed corporations to pour unlimited money into U.S. elections. That year, under Operation REDMAP, Republicans worked to dominate state legislatures so they could control redistricting under the 2010 census, yielding extreme partisan gerrymanders that gave Republicans disproportionate control. In 2013 the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision greenlighted the voter suppression Republicans had been working on since 1986.  

Even so, by 2016 it was not at all clear that the cultural threats, gerrymandering, and voter suppression would be enough to elect a Republican president. People forget it now because of all that has come since, but in 2016, Trump offered not only the racism and sexism Republicans had served up for decades, but also a more moderate economic program than any other Republican running that year. He called for closing the loopholes that permitted wealthy Americans to evade taxes, cheaper and better healthcare than the Democrats had provided with the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., and addressing the long backlog of necessary repairs to our roads and bridges through an infrastructure bill.

But once in office, Trump threw economic populism overboard and resurrected the Republican emphasis on tax cuts and deregulation. His signature law was the 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy at a cost of at least $1.9 trillion over ten years. At the same time, Trump continued to feed his base with racism and sexism, and after the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, he increasingly turned to his white nationalist base to shore up his power. On January 6, 2021, he used that base to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Republican senators declined to convict Trump of that attempt in his second impeachment trial, apparently hoping he would go away. Instead, their acquiescence in his behavior has enabled him to continue to push the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election. But to return to power, Trump has increasingly turned away from establishment Republicans and has instead turned the party over to its culture war and Christian nationalist foot soldiers. Now Trump has taken over the Republican National Committee itself, and his supporters threaten to turn the nation over to the culture warriors who care far more about their ideology than they do about tax cuts or deregulation.

The extremism of Trump’s base is hugely unpopular among general voters. Most significantly, Trump catered to his white evangelical base by appointing Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and in 2022, when the court did so, the dog caught the car. Americans overwhelmingly support reproductive freedoms, and Republicans are getting hammered over the extreme abortion bans now operative in Republican-dominated states. Now Trump and a number of Republicans have tried to back away from their antiabortion positions, infuriating antiabortion activists.

It is hard to see how the Republican Party can appeal to both Trump’s base and general voters at the same time.

That split dramatically weakens Trump politically while he is in an increasingly precarious position personally. He will, of course, go on trial on Monday, April 15, for alleged crimes committed as he interfered in the 2016 election. At the same time, the $175 million appeals bond he posted to cover the judgment in his business fraud trial has been questioned and must be justified by April 14. The court has scheduled a hearing on the bond for April 22. And his performance at rallies and private events has been unstable.

He seems a shaky reed on which to hang a political party, especially as his MAGA Republicans have proven unable to manage the House of Representatives and are increasingly being called out as Russian puppets for their attacks on Ukraine aid.  

Regardless of Trump’s future, though, the Reagan Era is over.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have quite deliberately rejected the economic ideology that concentrated wealth among the 1%. On their watch, the federal government has worked to put money into the hands of ordinary Americans rather than the very wealthy. With Democrats and on occasion a few Republicans, they have passed legislation to support families, dedicate resources to making sure people with student debt are receiving the correct terms of their loans (thus relieving significant numbers of Americans), and invested in manufacturing, infrastructure, and addressing climate change. They have also supported unions and returned to an older definition of antitrust law, suing Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple and allowing the federal government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices.

Their system has worked. Under Biden and Harris the U.S. has had unemployment rates under 4% for 26 months, the longest streak since the 1960s. Wages for the bottom 80% of Americans have risen faster than inflation, chipping away at the huge disparity between the rich and the poor that the policies of the past 40 years have produced.

Today, in an interview with Jamie Kitman of The Guardian, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, who negotiated landmark new union contracts with the country’s Big Three automakers, explained that the world has changed: “Workers have realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades, and they’re fed up.”

mickeyrat

  "When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring."

mickeyrat

  April 14, 2024 (Sunday)

Today, on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu about his recent switch from supporting former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for the Republican presidential nomination to supporting former president Trump.

“Just to sum up,” Stephanopoulos said, “You support [Trump] for president even if he's convicted in [the] classified documents [case]. You support him for president even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection. You support him for president even though you believe he's lying about the last election. You support him for president even if he's convicted in the Manhattan case. I just want to say, the answer to that is yes, correct?”

Sununu answered: “Yeah. Me and 51% of America.”

Aside from its overstatement of Trump’s national support, Sununu’s answer illustrated the triumph of politics over principle. Earlier in the interview, Sununu explained that he could swallow all of Trump’s negatives because he wanted a Republican administration. “This is about politics,” he said.

Sununu is part of the Republican faction that focuses on cutting taxes and slashing regulations. Trump has promised further tax cuts, while Biden has said he will raise taxes on the very wealthy and on corporations to make sure the nation does not have to cut Social Security benefits and Medicare. Republicans have suggested they will make those cuts to balance the budget, although at least 90% of the current budget deficit is not due to emergencies like Covid, but is a result of tax cuts under George W. Bush and Trump.  

Sununu may be embracing Trump for his fiscal policies. But there is possibly another dynamic at play in the shift of Republican leaders behind Trump. As Thomas Edsall outlined in the New York Times on April 10 in a piece about donors, they appear to be afraid of retaliation if they don’t join his team. Certainly he has worked to instill that fear, warning in January that anyone who contributed to Haley’s campaign “from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them, and will not accept them.”

Trump has been very clear that he intends to use the power of the state to crush those who he feels have been insufficiently supportive of him. There is every reason to take him at his word, as he tried to do exactly that during his presidency. He used the Internal Revenue Service to harass former FBI director James Comey—who refused to kill the investigation into the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives as Trump demanded—and Andrew McCabe, who took over as acting FBI director after Trump fired Comey.

He demanded investigations and indictments of former president Barack Obama and then–former vice president Joe Biden, former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, as well as a Democratic lawyer. Former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman, whom Trump appointed after he fired Preet Bharara, recalled: “Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney, Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining—in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”

That dynamic already appears to be at work as people are obeying in advance. On April 10, Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer David Hume Kennerly resigned from the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation after his fellow trustees declined to present the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service to former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney out of concern that a future President Trump would retaliate against the organization by taking away its tax-exempt status.

​​”The historical irony was completely lost on you,” Kennerly wrote. “Gerald Ford became president, in part, because Richard Nixon had ordered the development of an enemies list and demanded his underlings use the IRS against those listed. That’s exactly what the executive committee fears will happen if there’s a second coming of Donald Trump.”

Harking back to Ford’s service in the World War II Navy, Kennerly wrote: “Did [Lieutenant] Gerald Ford meet the enemy head-on because he thought he wouldn’t get killed? No. He did it despite that possibility. This executive committee, on the other hand, bolted before any shots were fired. You aren’t alone. Many foundations, organizations, corporations, and other entities are caught up in this tidal wave of timidity and fear that’s sweeping this country. I mistakenly thought we were better than that. This is the kind of acquiescent behavior that leads to authoritarianism. President Ford most likely would have come out even tougher and said that it leads directly to fascism.”

As Princeton sociology professor Kim Lane Scheppele told Edsall, those still operating under the impression that they will curry favor with a dictator are painfully unaware of how dictators actually operate: like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, if he is returned to power, Trump will use the power of the state to squeeze the wealthy as well as his political opponents, threatening them with investigations, audits, regulation—even criminal charges—unless they do as they are told.

But Sununu’s cynical announcement that he would destroy American democracy if it meant his party could stay in power is not only a misguided approach to trying to appease a dictator. It is a profound rejection of the meaning of American democracy: that we all are created equal and have a right to a say in our government. Throughout our history, Americans have found those principles so fundamental to human self-determination that they have given their lives for them.

It’s hard to miss that Sununu’s statement fell on the anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who stood at the cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where those who had died to defend the United States in July 1863 were buried and asked his fellow Americans to rededicate themselves “to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

mickeyrat

  April 15, 2024 (Monday)

April 15 is a curiously fraught day in American history.

In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down a rebellion in the southern states.

In 1865, Lincoln breathed his last at 7:22 a.m., and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who adored the president, said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

In 1912 the British passenger liner RMS Titanic sank at 2:20 a.m. after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic.

In 1920, two security guards in Braintree, Massachusetts, were murdered on this date; Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti would be accused of the crime, convicted, and, in 1927, executed.

In 1947, Jackie Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers, breaking the color line in baseball’s major leagues.

In 2013, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding 264 others.

And on April 15, 2024, the criminal case of The People of New York v. Donald J. Trump began in Manhattan.

For the first time in history, a former president is facing criminal prosecution.

The case has been dubbed a “hush money” case by the media, but it is really a case about election interference. In 2016, shortly after the Access Hollywood tape in which then-candidate Trump boasted of sexually assaulting women became public, Trump allegedly falsified business records of the Trump Organization to hide payments to individuals who possessed damaging stories about him, especially about his behavior with women, before the election.

Then–Trump fixer Michael Cohen paid adult film actress Stormy Daniels, who alleged she had had an affair with Trump, $130,000 through a shell company. He also set up a $150,000 payment from the publisher of the National Enquirer to Playboy model Karen McDougal, who also claimed to have had an affair with Trump. That money would give the National Enquirer exclusive rights to the story, meaning they could decline to publish it and she could not take it elsewhere. This practice is known as “catch-and-kill.”

Trump then allegedly falsified business records to reimburse Cohen for “legal expenses.” Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying those records. The case might last as long as 8 weeks.

In many ways, this trial is a vindication of the rule of law. Despite his many attempts to delay it, a former president is facing accountability for his actions just as any American should.

The trial schedule reflected that standard practice. Presiding judge Juan Merchan set out the terms of the trial, covering what information the jury can hear about Trump and reminding Trump that, per the laws of New York, if he fails to appear in court as required, a warrant will be issued for his arrest.

But as jury selection began today, it was also clear that this is no normal trial. The names of the jurors will not be released outside the courtroom out of concerns for their safety, underscoring the degree to which Trump has urged his supporters to violence. And the country is so deeply divided over Trump and his movement that more than half of the first batch of jurors were excused when they said they could not judge the case impartially. No jurors were chosen today.

Trump has used this case—like his others—to try to undermine the rule of law. Rarely arguing that he didn’t commit any of the offenses for which he was charged in four different cases—two civil, two criminal—he has insisted instead that he is being unfairly prosecuted. The Democrats have rigged the judicial system against him, he repeatedly claims, and enough of his loyalists have bought that idea that today some of them urged Trump supporters in the jury pool to undermine the rule of law by lying to get on the jury, then refusing to convict (a plea that observers noted sounded like jury tampering).

Trump’s effort to signal that he remains disgusted by the charges against him continued today. New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman noted that “[s]hortly before court adjourned for the day, Trump’s campaign sent out a fundraising email falsely claiming he had just stormed out of court.” But it was notable that only a few dozen of his supporters showed up at the court today, and they did not stay long.

Trump has also refused to stop attacking the judge and other participants in the trial despite a gag order imposed by the judge. Today, even as prosecutors were asking Judge Merchan to find Trump in contempt for violating the gag order, Trump posted a video in which one of his allies attacked the judge’s wife as well as primary witness Michael Cohen.

Judge Merchan has scheduled a hearing on potential violations of the gag order for the morning of April 23.

Trump is trying to undermine the rule of law not only out of apparent fear of the outcome of his trials, but also because his appearance in court is likely to hurt his popularity. Last month an Ipsos poll showed that 32% of respondents said a conviction in this case would make them less likely to support Trump for the presidency. And that is before we have heard any of the new evidence that various sources have said we will hear, and which, by the nature of the case, is likely to be sordid.

Seeing Trump treated like any defendant is almost certain to damage his brand as a man who commands his surroundings. Today, Haberman noted: “One thing that is striking: Trump has used the previous court appearances in other cases to project an image of grandeur. That is hard to do in this dingy courtroom, which smells slightly off and where he is an island amid a sea of people.”

Further, the public nature of this trial will make it harder for Trump to present himself only through carefully curated appearances. Haberman also noted that Trump, who has repeatedly attacked President Joe Biden as “Sleepy Joe,” appeared to fall asleep during today’s proceedings. “Repeatedly, his head would fall down,” Haberman said. “He didn’t pay attention to a note his lawyer…passed him. His jaw kept falling on his chest and his mouth kept going slack.” (While Trump was nodding off in court, President Biden was meeting in the Oval Office with Prime Minister Mohammed Shyaa al-Sudani of the Republic of Iraq, and then with Prime Minister Petr Fiala of the Czech Republic.)

Outside of this case, Trump’s image as a wealthy man is also crumbling. Today was the day by which Trump’s lawyers needed to prove that the $175 million appeals bond he posted against the $454 million judgment in the fraud case would really secure the judgment. Late tonight, his lawyers filed their justification of the bond, insisting it was secure and saying there was no need for the hearing about it, scheduled for April 22. Legal analysts on social media immediately found errors in the document.

Trump’s lawyers also filed paperwork today with the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue more than 20 million more shares of common stock in the Trump Media & Technology Group. The price of the company’s stock has been dropping since the spike after the initial public offering of March 26. Upon today’s news it dropped another 18%. It has dropped 62% since public trading began.

Although news from Manhattan took up most of the oxygen today, the Commerce Department also made a major announcement: through the CHIPS and Science Act it is investing up to $6.4 billion in a Samsung Electronics chip manufacturing and research cluster in Taylor, Texas. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said the two proposed factories will create at least 17,000 construction and 4,500 manufacturing jobs.  

In addition to its historical significance, April 15 is also Tax Day. Biden reinstated the tradition of voluntarily releasing tax returns after Trump ended it, and today Biden, First Lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff all released their taxes, revealing that their salaries make up most of their income.

Ken Thomas and Ashlea Ebeling of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump campaign did not answer questions about whether Trump would release his tax returns.

mickeyrat

  April 16, 2024 (Tuesday)

On Sunday, April 14, 2024, Iran fired about 170 drones, more than 120 ballistic missiles, and more than 30 cruise missiles from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and areas controlled by Hezbollah in Lebanon toward Israel. The strike was in retaliation for a strike on Iran’s diplomatic complex in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, which killed two top commanders in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, along with other officials. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the Syrian strike, but officials from other countries believe Israel is responsible. Iran warned its attack was coming, and Israel and the U.S., along with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and France, shot the missiles down. Israel sustained almost no damage. One Arab-Israeli girl was critically injured.

In the leadup to the attack, Arab countries shared intelligence and radar tracking, opened their airspace while closing it to Iran, and even supplied forces to withstand Iran’s attack. According to David S. Cloud, Dov Lieber, Stephen Kalin, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal, in March 2022, top military officials from Israel and Arab countries met in Egypt at the invitation of U.S. Marine General Frank McKenzie, then the top U.S. commander in the region, to discuss coordination against Iran’s growing military capabilities.  

That prospective coordination had never been tested, but the fact that Arab states stood alongside Israel against Iran highlights changing dynamics in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the attack, a source connected to the Saudi royal family charged Iran with instigating the Gaza war to stop normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hezbollah in Lebanon are Iran’s proxies.

Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping more than 250 others, President Joe Biden’s apparent top priority has been making sure the crisis doesn’t spread. On October 10, he warned: “to any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Don’t. Don’t.”

The U.S. moved two of its eleven carrier battle groups, which usually consist of an aircraft carrier, at least four other ships, and about 7,500 personnel, to the region. At the same time, while Biden has been careful to note that the U.S. cannot dictate policy to another country, he warned Israel against a planned preemptive strike against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The U.S. has also led the effort to stop Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen from attacking ships in the Red Sea. The attacks have disrupted global shipping, forcing ships to reroute around Africa.

Since the early days of the conflict, the approach of Israel’s government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to destroying Hamas has caused a deepening rift with the Biden administration. While the U.S. supports Israel’s right to self-defense and “legitimate military objectives,” it has repeatedly called out mounting Palestinian civilian casualties. Then, while the administration has consistently called for the establishment of a Palestinian state, the plan for a postwar settlement Netanyahu finally proposed in February rejected that policy and instead called for Israel to maintain military control of Gaza indefinitely.

Increasingly, the Israeli government has rejected U.S. requests to protect civilian lives, including by allowing more humanitarian aid into Gaza, where people are starving. After a brief humanitarian pause in fighting in November, efforts to achieve another pause to get more humanitarian aid into Gaza have failed repeatedly. Frustration in the U.S. over mounting civilian deaths and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has led to widespread protests against Biden as well as against Israel, and has led Democratic critics of Israeli policy to demand that the U.S. condition military aid to Israel on a ceasefire.

Tensions rose higher when Israel announced it would launch a ground offensive against Hamas in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, without a plan for protecting civilians. More than a million Palestinians have taken shelter there. In March, national security advisor Jake Sullivan said that the president would not support “a military operation in Rafah that does not protect civilians, that cuts off the main arteries of humanitarian assistance and that places enormous pressure on the Israel-Egypt border.”

Israel did not notify the U.S. when on April 1 it attacked the Iranian diplomatic complex in Syria, a strike U.S. defense officials believed put U.S. forces at risk. Also on April 1, Israeli forces killed seven aid workers—including individuals from Australia, Poland, and the United Kingdom, as well as a Palestinian and a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen—with the humanitarian aid group World Central Kitchen. The workers had coordinated with the military and were in three separate marked vehicles.

On April 3, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directly called out Israel’s silence about its attack on Iranian leaders in Syria in a telephone call to his Israeli counterpart, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

On April 4, in a telephone call, Biden told Netanyahu that “the strikes on humanitarian workers and the overall humanitarian situation are unacceptable.” He said Israel must “announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers.” He reiterated support for Israel but appeared to distinguish between Israel and its current government. Vice President Kamala Harris, who was on the call, told a reporter: "The president made clear we will make sure Israel isn't left without the ability to defend itself. At the same time, if there are no changes to their approach, we are likely to change our approach.”

Israel has pointed to the inefficient distribution of aid within Gaza as a cause of hardship, but three hours after the call, Israel announced that it would open the Erez crossing into northern Gaza for the first time since October 7, use the Port of Ashdod in Israel as a hub for supplies, and allow more Gaza-bound aid trucks into Israel from Jordan. Days later, Israeli officials dropped the plan to open Erez, and the Ashdod port is not yet accepting aid shipments; Defense Minister Gallant said, “We plan to flood Gaza with aid and we are expecting to reach 500 trucks per day,” but he did not say when that would happen.

While this was taking place, according to the four Wall Street Journal reporters, the administration pressed Arab states for intelligence about a retaliatory strike from Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia shared intelligence, and Jordan allowed warplanes to use its airspace while also intercepting Iranian missiles with its own planes. The White House coordinated Israeli and Arab defensive measures. According to U.S. officials, officials from the State Department, the Defense Department, and the National Security Council were “in constant, ongoing, continuous contact with Israelis, with other partners in the region, as well as Iran with a series of direct communications through the Swiss channel and other relevant players,” as well as with “Turkey and China,” “in anticipation of the events that transpired.”

This was the background when Iran attacked Israel on Sunday.

In the aftermath of the attack, Iran’s mission to the United Nations said, “The matter can be deemed concluded.” The White House immediately gathered the leaders of the Group of 7 wealthy democracies, who issued a statement calling on all parties to “avoid further escalation.” Then Biden urged Netanyahu to “think very carefully and strategically” about retaliation and noted that Israel had “got the best of it,” as it had killed senior Iranian military commanders but lost none of its own leaders. Netanyahu is under great pressure from his right-wing coalition to retaliate, but some members of his war cabinet have stressed that they want “to establish an international coalition and strategic alliance to counter the threat posed by Iran.”

The U.S. warned Israel it would not participate in any offensive counterstrike against Iran, although it has announced new economic sanctions against Iran. Matt Bradley of NBC News pointed out that an aggressive Israeli response would run the risk of dissolving the fragile cooperation between Arab states and Israel that helped to repel the Iranian attack. That cooperation illustrated that Iran is increasingly isolated, but as Oraib Al Rantawi, director of a Jordanian think tank, told Bradley, “Those Arab countries are in a very critical situation. There is no easy position to take….”

In the U.S., Republicans, including House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner (R-OH) and Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, immediately said the U.S. should join Israel if it launched a retaliatory attack, saying they hoped to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. (David Sanger of the New York Times reminded readers yesterday that in 2015, in a deal with seven countries after two years of negotiations, Iran agreed to surrender 97% of its uranium, but Trump pulled out of that deal in 2018, and Iran returned to developing weapons-grade uranium.)

In the House, Republicans who have been refusing to pass the national security supplemental bill that provides additional funding for Ukraine and Israel, as well as the Indo-Pacific and humanitarian aid to Gaza, have suddenly snapped to and are demanding additional funding for Israel. A researcher at an Israeli think tank estimated the cost of Israel’s interception of the Iranian weapons on Sunday at more than $550 million.

The Senate passed the measure in February, and the House is expected to as well if House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) brings it up for a vote. But Johnson is facing a revolt from MAGA Republicans who are so adamantly opposed to aiding Ukraine they threatened to oust him as speaker if he tries to pass it. Yesterday, Johnson said he would break the measure up and try to pass it in four pieces. Extremists don’t like this either. Two Republicans—Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kentucky’s Thomas Massie—have said they will challenge Johnson’s speakership, meaning that Johnson will have to rely on Democratic votes not only to pass an aid measure, but also to keep his speakership.

The House is due to recess from Thursday, April 18, until Monday, April 29. This afternoon, House Intelligence Committee chair Turner and the top Democrat on the committee, Jim Himes (D-CT), released a statement: “We must pass Ukraine aid now,” they wrote. “Today, in a classified briefing, our Committee was informed of the critical need to provide Ukraine military aid this week. The United States must stand against Putin’s war of aggression now as Ukraine’s situation on the ground is critical.”

Today the House finally delivered impeachment articles against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate, two months after approving them, and demanded a full trial.

mickeyrat

  April 17, 2024 (Wednesday)

Yesterday on the social media site X, formerly Twitter, Miles Taylor wrote: “After 2016, I helped lead the US gov[ernmen]t response to Russia’s election interference. In 2024, foreign interference will be *worse.* Tech[nology is] more powerful. Adversaries more brazen. American public more susceptible. Political leaders across party lines MUST UNITE against this.”

Taylor served as chief of staff in the Department of Homeland Security under Trump.

Today, Catherine Belton of the Washington Post reported on a secret 2023 document from Russia’s Foreign Ministry calling for an “offensive information campaign” and other measures that attack “‘a coalition of unfriendly countries’ led by the United States. Those measures are designed to affect “the military-political, economic and trade and informational psychological spheres” of Russia’s perceived adversaries.

The plan is to weaken the United States and convince other countries, particularly those in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, that the U.S. will not stand by its allies. By weakening those alliances, Russian leaders hope to shift global power by strengthening Russia’s ties to China, Iran, and North Korea and filling the vacuum left by the crumbling democratic alliances (although it is not at all clear that China is on board with this plan).

According to Belton, one of the academics who advised the authors of the Russian document suggested that Russia should “continue to facilitate the coming to power of isolationist right-wing forces in America,” “enable the destabilization of Latin American countries and the rise to power of extremist forces on the far left and far right there,” increase tensions between the U.S. and China over Taiwan, and “escalate the situation in the Middle East around Israel, Iran and Syria to distract the U.S. with the problems of this region.”

The Russian document suggests that the front lines of that physical, political, and psychological fight are in Ukraine. It says that the outcome of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine will “to a great degree determine the outlines of the future world order.”

Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky told Belton: “The Americans consider that insofar as they are not directly participating in the war [in Ukraine], then any loss is not their loss. This is an absolute misunderstanding.”

Media and lawmakers, including those in the Republican Party, have increasingly called out the degree to which Russian propaganda has infiltrated American politics through Republican lawmakers and media figures. Earlier this month, both Representative Michael R. Turner (R-OH), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, warned about Russian disinformation in their party. Turner told CNN’s State of the Union that it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Russian propaganda. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.” When asked which Republicans had fallen to Russian propaganda, McCaul answered that it is “obvious.”

That growing popular awareness has highlighted that House Republicans under House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) have for six months refused to pass a national security supplemental bill with additional aid for Ukraine, as well as for Israel and the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. After the Senate spent two months negotiating border security provisions House Republicans demanded, Republicans killed that bill with the provisions at Trump’s direction, and the Senate then passed a bill without those provisions in February.

Johnson has been coordinating closely with former president Trump, who has made his admiration for Russia and his disregard for Ukraine very clear since his people weakened their support for Ukraine in the 2016 Republican Party platform. Johnson is also under pressure from MAGA Republicans in the House, like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who oppose funding Ukraine, some of them by making statements that echo Russian propaganda.

While the White House, the Pentagon, and a majority of both chambers of Congress believe that helping Ukraine defend itself is crucial to U.S. security, Johnson has refused to take the Senate measure up, even though the House would pass it if he did. But as Ukraine’s ability to defend itself has begun to weaken, pressure for additional aid has ramped up. At the same time, in the wake of Iran’s attack on Israel last weekend, Republicans have suddenly become eager to provide additional funds to Israel. It began to look as if Johnson might bring up some version of foreign aid.

But discussions of bringing forward Ukraine aid brought not only Greene but also Thomas Massie (R-KY) to threaten yesterday to challenge Johnson’s speakership, and there are too few Republicans in the House to defend him.

Today, Johnson brought forward not the Senate bill, but rather three separate bills to fund Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and Ukraine, with pieces that House Republicans have sought. A fourth bill will include other measures Republicans have demanded. And a fifth will permit an up-or-down vote on most of the measures in the extreme border bill the House passed in 2023. At the time, that measure was intended as a signaling statement because House Republicans knew that the Democratic Senate would keep it from becoming law.

Johnson said he expected to take a final vote on the measures Saturday evening. He will almost certainly need Democratic votes to pass them, and possibly to save his job. Democrats have already demanded the aid to Gaza that was in the Senate bill but is not yet in the House bills.

Reese Gorman, political reporter for The Daily Beast, reported that Johnson explained his change of heart like this: “Look, history judges us for what we do. This is a critical time right now…  I can make a selfish decision and do something that is different but I'm doing here what I believe to be the right thing.… I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important.… I’m willing to take personal risk for that.”

His words likely reflect a changing awareness in Republican Party leadership that the extremism of MAGA Republicans is exceedingly unpopular. Trump’s courtroom appearances—where, among other things, he keeps falling asleep—are unlikely to bolster his support, while his need for money is becoming more and more of a threat both to his image and to his fellow Republicans. Today the Trump campaign asked Republican candidates in downballot races for at least 5% of the money they raise with any fundraising appeal that uses Trump’s name or picture. They went on: “Any split that is higher than 5% will be seen favorably by the RNC and President Trump’s campaign and is routinely reported to the highest levels of leadership within both organizations.”

Nonetheless, Greene greeted Johnson’s bills with amendments requiring members of Congress to “conscript in the Ukrainian military” if they voted for aid to Ukraine.

A headline on the Fox News media website today suggested that a shift away from MAGA is at least being tested. It read: “Marjorie Taylor Greene is an idiot. She is trying to wreck the [Republican Party].” The article pointed out that 61% of registered voters disapprove of the Republican Party while only 36% approve. That approval rating has indeed fallen at least in part because of the performative antics of the extremists, among them the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that made him the first cabinet officer to be impeached in almost 150 years. Today the Senate killed that impeachment without a trial.

As soon as Johnson announced the measures, President Joe Biden threw his weight behind them. In a statement, he said: "I strongly support this package to get critical support to Israel and Ukraine, provide desperately needed humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza, and bolster security and stability in the Indo-Pacific. Israel is facing unprecedented attacks from Iran, and Ukraine is facing continued bombardment from Russia that has intensified dramatically in the last month.

“The House must pass the package this week and the Senate should quickly follow. I will sign this into law immediately to send a message to the world: We stand with our friends, and we won’t let Iran or Russia succeed.”

mickeyrat

  April 18, 2024 (Thursday)
 
I will not spend the rest of 2024 focusing on Trump and the chaos in the Republican Party, but today it has been impossible to look away.
 
In Trump’s election interference trial in Manhattan, Judge Juan Merchan this morning dismissed one of the selected jurors after she expressed concern for her anonymity and thus for her safety. All of the reporters in the courtroom have shared so much information about the jurors that they seemed at risk of being identified, but Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters not only ran a video segment about a juror, he suggested she was “concerning.” Trump shared the video on social media.
 
The juror told the judge that so much information about her had become public that her friends and family had begun to ask her if she was one of the jurors. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted jurors’ fear for their safety was a concern normally seen only “in a case involving violent organized crime.”

Nonetheless, by the end of the day, twelve people had been chosen to serve as jurors. Tomorrow the process will continue in order to find six alternate jurors.

It is a courtesy for the two sides at a trial to share with each other the names of their next witnesses so the other team can prepare for them. Today the prosecution declined to provide the names of their first three witnesses for the defense out of concern that Trump would broadcast them on social media. “Mr. Trump has been tweeting about the witnesses. We’re not telling them who the witnesses are,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said.

Merchan said he “can’t blame them.” Trump’s defense attorney Todd Blanche offered to "commit to the court and the [prosecution] that President Trump will not [post] about any witness" on social media. "I don't think you can make that representation," Merchan said, in a recognition that Trump cannot be trusted, even by his own lawyers.

An article in the New York Times today confirmed that the trial will give Trump plenty of publicity, but not the kind that he prefers. Lawyer Norman L. Eisen walked through questions about what a prison sentence for Trump could look like.
 
Trump’s popular image is taking a hit in other ways, as well. Zac Anderson and Erin Mansfield of USA Today reported that Trump is funneling money from his campaign fundraising directly into his businesses. According to a new report filed with the Federal Election Commission, in February and March the campaign wrote checks totaling $411,287 to Mar-a-Lago and in March a check for $62,337 to Trump National Doral Miami.
 
Experts say it is legal for candidates to pay their own businesses for services used by the campaign so long as they pay fair market value. At the same time, they note that since Trump appears to be desperate for money, “it looks bad.”
 
Astonishingly, Trump’s trial was not the biggest domestic story today. Republicans in Congress were in chaos as members of the extremist Freedom Caucus worked to derail the national security supplemental bills that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has introduced in place of the Senate bill, although they track that bill closely.

The House Rules Committee spent the day debating the foreign aid package, which appropriates aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan separately. The Israel bill also contains $9.1 billion in humanitarian aid for Gaza and other countries. A fourth bill focuses on forcing the Chinese owners of TikTok to sell the company, as well as on imposing sanctions on Russia and Iran.

At stake in the House Rules Committee was Johnson’s plan to allow the House to debate and vote on each measure separately, and then recombine them all into a single measure if they all pass. This would allow extremist Republicans to vote against aid to Ukraine, while still tying the pieces all together to send to the Senate. As Robert Jimison outlined in the New York Times, this complicated plan meant that the Rules Committee vote to allow such a maneuver was crucial to the bill’s passage.

The extremist House Republicans were adamantly opposed to the plan because of their staunch opposition to aid for Ukraine. They wrote in a memo on Wednesday: “This tactic allows Johnson to pass priorities favored by President Biden, the swamp and the Ukraine war machine with a supermajority of House members, leaving conservatives out to dry.”

Extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) vowed to throw House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) out of the speakership, but Democrats Tom Suozzi of New York and Jared Moskowitz of Florida have said they would vote to keep him in his seat, thereby defanging the attack on his leadership.
 
So the extremists instead tried to load the measures up with amendments prohibiting funds from being used for abortion, removing humanitarian aid for Gaza, opposing a two-state solution to the Hamas-Israel war, calling for a wall at the southern border of the U.S., defunding the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and so on.

Greene was especially active in opposition to aid to Ukraine. She tried to amend the bill to direct the president to withdraw the U.S. from NATO and demanded that any members of Congress voting for aid to Ukraine be conscripted into the Ukraine army as well as have their salaries taken to offset funding. She wanted to stop funding until Ukraine “turns over all information related to Hunter Biden and Burisma,” and to require Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to resign. More curiously, she suggested amending the Ukraine bill so that funding would require “restrictions on ethnic minorities’, including Hungarians in Transcarpathia, right to use their native languages in schools are lifted.” This language echoes a very specific piece of Russian propaganda.

Finally, Moskowitz proposed “that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene…should be appointed as Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.”

Many congress members have left Washington, D.C., since Friday was to be the first day of a planned recess. This meant the partisan majority on the floor fluctuated. Olivia Beavers of Politico reported that that instability made Freedom Caucus members nervous enough to put together a Floor Action Response Team (FART—I am totally not making this up) to make sure other Republicans didn’t limit the power of the extremists when they were off the floor.
 
The name of their response team seems likely to be their way to signal their disrespect for the entire Congress. Their fellow Republicans are returning the heat. Today Mike Turner (R-OH) referred to the extremists as the Bully Caucus on MSNBC and said, “We need to get back to professionalism, we need to get back to governing, we need to get back to legislating.” Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) told Juliegrace Brufke of Axios:  "The vast majority of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives...are sick and tired of having people who...constantly blackmail the speaker of the House.”

Another Republican representative, Jake LaTurner of Kansas, announced today he will not run for reelection. He joins more than 20 other Republican representatives heading for the exits.

After all the drama, the House Rules Committee voted 6–3 tonight to advance the foreign aid package to the House floor. Three Republicans voted nay. While it is customary for the opposition party to vote against advancing bills out of the committee, the Democrats broke with tradition and voted in favor.

mickeyrat

  April 19, 2024 (Friday)

The last several weeks of news have been relentless, and I suspect things will not slow down anytime soon. In the midst of all of it, I don’t think I took a night off last weekend, and have hit the wall tonight.

Going to bed and will regroup tomorrow.

Here's one of Peter's peaceful photos. We've certainly earned it.

[Photo, “Seal Bay,” by Peter Ralston]

mickeyrat

   April 20, 2024 (Saturday)

Cheering broke out in the gallery and among Democrats on the floor of the House of Representatives this afternoon when the House passed the $60.8 billion aid bill for Ukraine. The vote was 311–112, with all Democrats and 101 Republicans voting in favor and 112 Republicans voting against. One Republican voted present.

The House also voted on the three other bills that will be packaged with the Ukraine bill as a single measure to go in front of the Senate. The House voted in favor of providing $8.1 billion in support for Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific by a vote of 385–34. It approved more than $26 billion for Israel, including $9.2 billion in humanitarian aid not specifically for Gaza but for populations in crisis, by a vote of 366–58. And it voted 360–58 to place additional sanctions on Iran, seize Russian assets, and require the Chinese owners of TikTok to sell the company within nine months if they want it to continue to be available on U.S. app stores.  

The total price tag of the measures is about $95.3 billion. About $50 billion of it will be used here in the U.S. to replenish the supplies that will go abroad.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) says the Senate will take up the measure on Tuesday. Senators had gone home for recess but will come back to vote. The Department of Defense says it is ready to rush crucial supplies as soon as it gets the go-ahead. "We have a very robust logistics network that enables us to move material very quickly; as we've done in the past, we can move within days," Pentagon press secretary Air Force Major General Pat Ryder said Thursday.  

Aid to Ukraine has been stalled since Biden first asked for it in October 2023. First, MAGA Republicans said they would never pass such a national security supplemental bill until the U.S. addressed the need for better security at the country’s southern border. Senators, including Republican James Lankford (R-OK) took them at their word and hammered out a strong border security measure, only to have Republicans reject it when Trump demanded they preserve border security as a campaign issue. The Senate then passed the national security supplemental bill without a border measure, but that was back in February. Although it was clear the measure would pass the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has steadfastly refused to take it up.

Meanwhile, countries around the globe have been stepping into the breach, providing funds and weapons for Ukraine as Ukraine’s war effort has faltered without U.S. war matériel.

Suddenly, the dam has broken.

The MAGA extremists who oppose aid to Ukraine expressed anger over the measure’s passage, but outside of that group, there was bipartisan relief and mutual congratulations. The chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), who has been vocal in his belief that Republicans have fallen prey to Russian propaganda, compared today’s vote to the period before World War II, when British prime minister Neville Chamberlain tried to appease dictator Adolf Hitler in 1938 by agreeing to Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland. To Chamberlain’s successor, Winston Churchill, fell the task of fighting World War II.

“Our adversaries are watching us here today, and history will judge us on our actions here today,” McCaul said. “So as we deliberate on this vote, you have to ask yourself: Am I Chamberlain or am I Churchill?”

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said: “For months, the national security priorities of the American people have been obstructed by pro-Putin extremists determined to let Russia win. A bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans has risen up to work together and ensure that we are getting the national security legislation important to the American people over the finish line.”

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also released a statement welcoming the passage of the measure. “This bipartisan legislation will allow the Department to surge lifesaving security assistance to help Ukraine defend itself from Russia’s aggression, support Israel’s defense from Iran and its proxies, and increase the flow of urgently needed humanitarian aid to suffering Palestinians in Gaza.” It is also, he wrote, “an important investment in America's future.”  

President Joe Biden said that “members of both parties in the House voted to advance our national security interests and send a clear message about the power of American leadership on the world stage. At this critical inflection point, they came together to answer history’s call, passing urgently-needed national security legislation that I have fought for months to secure.”

The reiteration of the bipartisan nature of the vote suggests support for the idea that the breaking dam refers not just to the national security supplemental bill but also to the power of MAGA Republicans more generally. Representative Tom Cole (R-OK) suggested this interpretation in an interview today with Ryan Lizza of Politico.

MAGAs are Trump loyalists, counting on his return to power, and Trump is visibly diminished. For the last week, he has been sitting in a courtroom with no choice but to do as he is told by the judge while potential jurors have expressed their dislike of him to his face. This is novel for him, and it is clearly taking a toll.

Trump’s financial troubles have not gone away, either. Yesterday, New York attorney general Letitia James asked a judge to void the $175 million appeals bond Trump posted to secure the $454 million judgment against him in the business fraud case. She says that the defendants have failed to show that there is enough collateral behind the bond to secure it. She has asked for a replacement bond within a week. Without a bond, James can begin to seize Trump’s property.

Since Republicans took control of the House, Republican leaders have had to turn to Democrats to find the votes to pass crucial legislation like the national security supplemental bill, preventing a U.S. default, and funding the government. Republicans interested in governing and eager to protect the institutions of democracy appear to be getting fed up with the attention-seeking and bomb-throwing MAGA faction that refuses to do the work of governing.

That frustration might have been on display when the House also voted on a fifth measure: a border bill the extremist Republicans demanded. Because it was considered under a suspension of the rules, it needed a two-thirds majority to pass. The measure failed with a vote of 215–211. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a lawyer with the American Immigration Council advocacy group, noted that the last time the House voted on a similar measure, it got 219 votes. This time it got fewer votes, even with an added $9.5 billion for Texas, Florida, and other states that are restricting immigrants’ rights.

In The Atlantic today, David Frum noted the changing U.S. political dynamic and, referring to the Ukraine vote, wrote: “On something that mattered intensely to [Trump]—that had become a badge of pro-Trump identity—Trump’s own party worked with Democrats in the House and Senate to hand him a stinging defeat. This example could become contagious.” In other words, he said: “Ukraine won. Trump lost.”

For his part, leading Russian politician Dmitry Medvedev had his own reaction to the House’s passage of the national security supplemental bill with aid for Ukraine. He vowed that Russia would win the war anyway and added: “[C]onsidering the russophobic decision that took place I can't help but wish the USA with all sincerity to dive into a new civil war themselves as quickly as possible. Which, I hope, will be very different from the war between North and South in the 19th century and will be waged using aircraft, tanks, artillery, MLRS, all types of missiles and other weapons. And which will finally lead to the inglorious collapse of the vile evil empire of the 21st century—the United States of America."

mickeyrat

 April 21, 2024 (Sunday)

During her confirmation hearings in 2021, Interior Department secretary Deb Haaland promised “to responsibly manage our natural resources to protect them for future generations—so that we can continue to work, live, hunt, fish, and pray among them.” Noting her Indigenous heritage, Haaland tweeted, “A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of Interior…. I’ll be fierce for all of us, our planet, and all of our protected land.”

Her approach was a shift from the practice the Interior Department had established at the beginning of the twentieth century when it began to prioritize mineral, oil, and gas development, as well as livestock grazing, on U.S. public lands. But the devastating effects of climate change have brought those old priorities into question.

Republicans, especially those from states like Wyoming, which collects more than a billion dollars a year in royalties and taxes from the oil, gas, and coal produced on federal lands in the state, opposed Haaland’s focus on responsible management of natural resources for the future  and warned that the Biden administration is “taking a sledgehammer to Western states’ economies.”

On Thursday, April 18, the Interior Department finalized a new rule for a balanced management of America’s public lands. Put together after a public hearing period that saw more than 200,000 comments from states, individuals, Tribal and local governments, industry groups, and advocacy organizations, the new rule prioritizes the health of the lands and waters the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management oversees. Those consist of about 245 million acres, primarily in 12 western states.

The new rule calls for protection of the land, restoration of the places that have been harmed in the past, and a promise to make informed decisions about future use based on “science, data, and Indigenous knowledge.” It “recognizes conservation as an essential component of public lands management, on equal footing with other multiple uses of these lands.” The Bureau of Land Management will now auction off leases not only for drilling, but also for conservation and restoration.

Western state leaders oppose the Biden administration’s efforts to change the Interior Department’s past practices, calling them “colonial forces of national environmental groups who are pushing an agenda” onto states like Wyoming.

The timing of the Interior Department’s new rule can’t help but call attention to Earth Day, celebrated tomorrow, on April 22. Earth Day is no novel proposition. Americans celebrated it for the first time in 1970. Nor was it a partisan idea in that year: Republican president Richard M. Nixon established it as Americans recognized a crisis that transcended partisanship and came together to fix it.

The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of marine biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. Her exposé of how the popular pesticide DDT was poisoning the food chain in American waters illuminated the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms, and it caught readers’ attention. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.

Democratic president John F. Kennedy asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: "Man's attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves."  

As scientists organized the Environmental Defense Fund, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial events. First, on December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders took a color photograph of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live.

Then, over 10 days in January and February 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”

And then, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.

In February 1970, President Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”

“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”

Meanwhile, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War toward efforts to protect the environment. He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country. Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. It is still one of the largest protests in American history.

In July 1970, at the advice of a council convened to figure out how to consolidate government programs to combat pollution, Nixon proposed to Congress a new agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, which Congress created that December.

In honor of Earth Day 2024, Democratic president Joe Biden has called for carrying on the legacy of our predecessors “by building a greener, more sustainable planet and, with it, a healthier, more prosperous nation.”

In a statement, Biden noted that no one can any longer deny the impacts and staggering costs of climate change as the nation confronts historic floods, droughts, and hurricanes.

“Deforestation, nature loss, toxic chemicals, and plastic pollution also continue to threaten our air, lands, and waters, endangering our health, other species, and ecosystems,” he said. He noted the administration’s efforts to build a clean energy economy, providing well-paid union jobs as workers install solar panels, service wind turbines, cap old oil wells, manufacture electric vehicles, and so on, while also curbing air pollution from power plants and lead poisoning from old pipes, the burden of which historically has fallen on marginalized communities.

Biden noted that he brought the U.S. back into the Paris Climate Accord Trump pulled out of, is on track to conserve more lands and waters than any president before him, and has worked with the international community to slash methane emissions and restore lost forests.

And yet there is much more to be done, he said. He encouraged “all Americans to reflect on the need to protect our precious planet; to heed the call to combat our climate and biodiversity crises while growing the economy; and to keep working for a healthier, safer, more equitable future for all.”

Happy Earth Day 2024.

mickeyrat

  April 22, 2024 (Monday)

With the passage of the national security supplemental bill through the House of Representatives on Saturday, Punchbowl News noted today, President Joe Biden became the winner of this Congress. When the Republicans took control of the House in January 2023, they vowed to impeach Biden and members of his Cabinet, overturn the signature legislation the Democrats had passed in 2021 and 2022, and force the Democrats to accept draconian  immigration policies.

Instead, the impeachment effort against Biden collapsed into ridiculousness as, after months of hearings by the Committee on Oversight, Democrat Jared Moskowitz of Florida moved to impeach Biden and asked committee chair James Comer (R-KY) to second the motion. Comer refused. That admission that the point of the investigation into Biden was to create media soundbites against him was widely assumed to be the end of that project. Last week, on April 17, the top Democrat on the committee, Jamie Raskin of Maryland, called it “a propaganda experiment” and asked Comer: “What is the crime that you want to impeach Joe Biden for and keep this nonsense going?... Tell America right now.” Comer answered: “You’re about to find out very soon.”  

The House did, in fact, vote to impeach Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas—the first time that a cabinet secretary has been impeached in almost 150 years—but senators refused even to hold a trial, saying that Mayorkas’s implementation of Biden’s policies in the absence of congressional legislation to provide more security at the border was not a high crime or misdemeanor.

House Republicans did not get the deep cuts they wanted to funding for the Internal Revenue Service, measures to address climate change, social welfare measures, or the budget in general. Instead, leaders have had to rely on Democrats to carry the weight of keeping the government funded, while Republicans have repeatedly been caught touting the internal improvements they voted against. Republicans demanded a strong border security measure, forced senators to spend months hammering one out, and then killed it in an astonishing own goal, at Trump’s demand. And the extremists did not succeed in abandoning Ukraine.

Instead, they have had a bruising fight in which they threw out their own speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), and had trouble replacing him. Shortly thereafter, he left Congress, leading the way for more than 20 Republican representatives, including five committee chairs, who have said they will not seek reelection. They had to expel one of their own members, George Santos (R-NY), a serial liar who is under indictment for crimes associated with campaign financing—only the sixth time in U.S. history the House has expelled a member.

In November 2023, extremist representative Chip Roy (R-TX) charged his colleagues with throwing away their shot at changing the country. He demanded one of them “explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.”

Now those opposed to the extremists are firing back, publicly charging them with killing border security. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) went further, telling Dana Bash of CNN on Sunday: “It’s my absolute honor to be in Congress, but I serve with some real scumbags. Matt Gaetz [R-FL], he paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties. Bob Good [R-VA] endorsed my opponent, a known neo-Nazi. These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime.”

The chaos of the House has shifted the weight of governance toward the White House, and Biden has taken advantage of that shift to put in place measures popular with the majority of Americans. Today, on Earth Day, Biden also honored the idea of a government that works for the people when he spoke at the Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, Virginia, a national park developed in the 1930s by the government’s Works Progress Administration under the New Deal.

Biden called attention to the country’s historic investment in addressing climate change under his administration. He noted that that investment has created a clean-energy manufacturing boom that has attracted hundreds of billions of dollars in private-sector investment and created more than 270,000 new jobs.

In Virginia, Biden announced $7 billion in federal grants for solar projects for more than 900,000 low- and middle-income households, saying those projects would save those households about $400 a year annually, more than $350 million total. The projects will also create nearly 200,000 jobs.

Biden also announced the launch of the website to apply to join the American Climate Corps (ACC), an initiative modeled after New Deal president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). Over its nine-year existence, the CCC employed more than three million young men improving the nation’s public lands, forests, and parks, many of whom earned their high school diplomas thanks to the educational opportunities connected to the program.

When the administration unveiled the American Climate Corps program last year, more than 42,000 young people expressed interest within weeks. The first ACC jobs will start in June. Beginning this summer, ACC members will have access to training in trades, thanks to a partnership between the program and the North America’s Building Trades Unions’ nonprofit partner TradesFutures.

This national shift toward a government focused on the good of ordinary Americans is facing a backlash.

As right-wing voices have lost control in Congress, they have worked aggressively to take over states. There, they have pushed extreme abortion bans, gutted labor laws including for child labor, restricted voting, banned books from public schools, worked to privatize education, and so on—precisely the sort of reactionary state movements the U.S. Supreme Court used the Fourteenth Amendment to undermine from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Today, on Earth Day, The Guardian reported that Louisiana’s flagship state university, Louisiana State University (LSU), has permitted oil and chemical companies to influence research and teaching activities concerning climate change in exchange for donations to the university.

The attempt to cement right-wing dominance in the states in opposition to a more liberal national government is a political tradition almost as old as this country, but in 2024 it is being challenged. On Friday, April 19, Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted overwhelmingly to join the United Auto Workers (UAW), despite a letter from the Republican governors of six southern states—Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—warning the workers that unionization would stop auto manufacturers from expanding in their states.

Similar votes, with similar opposition from Republican leaders and business interests, failed in 2014 and 2019. This time, 73% of the workers voted to join the UAW, which has just negotiated strong contracts with the Big Three U.S. automakers. In a statement, Biden said: “Let me be clear to the Republican governors that tried to undermine this vote: there is nothing to fear from American workers using their voice and their legal right to form a union if they so choose. In fact, the growing strength of unions over the last year has gone hand-in-hand with record small business and jobs growth alongside the longest stretch of low unemployment in more than 50 years. I will continue to stand with American workers and stand against [Republicans’] effort to weaken workers’ voice.”  

Tennessee reporter Phil Williams noted that the Beacon Center, a right-wing think tank in the state, tried to tell Tennesseans that the UAW has a “radical political agenda,” but its own latest poll shows that the people of Tennessee view the UAW’s unionization efforts in the state favorably. (The research also shows that only 12% of likely voters in Tennessee believe the current U.S. tax system is “fair and effectively supports public services.”)

Today also saw the opening statements of The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump. The prosecution outlined a 2015 meeting in Trump Tower in which Trump, his then-fixer Michael Cohen, and David Pecker, the chief executive officer of American Media Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, struck an agreement to influence the 2016 election by finding negative information about Trump and hiding it, publishing flattering stories about Trump, and attacking Trump’s political opponents.

The defense said Trump is innocent and called Cohen a liar, pointing out that he is a convicted felon (without noting that he committed crimes in Trump’s service).

Pecker took the stand for about 20 minutes before court ended for the day. He is expected to testify again tomorrow.

mickeyrat

   April 23, 2024 (Tuesday)

In the past two days, the Biden-Harris administration has announced a wide range of new rules to protect ordinary Americans.

Yesterday, Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the administration has finalized two new rules affecting patients in nursing homes and receiving home care, as well as the workers who care for them. The first sets minimum staffing requirements for facilities funded by Medicare and Medicaid, and the second concerns how home healthcare companies account for Medicaid funding.

In a speech at the Hmong Cultural and Community Agency in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Harris noted the extraordinary value of healthcare workers. She also explained that about 1.2 million Americans live in federally funded nursing homes, which make up about four fifths of the nursing homes in the country. But the majority of those homes—about 75% of them—are understaffed. This is dangerous and isolating for patients and demoralizing for workers, who have high rates of burnout and turnover.  

Now, nursing homes that receive federal funding will have to provide at least 3.48 hours of nursing care per resident every day, less than the 4.1 hours the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services advocate but enough to require the hiring of about 12,000 registered nurses and 77,000 aides, at an annual cost of almost $7 billion.

Consumer organizations and labor unions pushed for the new rule, but nursing home operators strongly oppose the new mandate, saying it will force facilities to close because of a shortage of nurses. In response, Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra told Tami Luhby of CNN that no one should live in facilities that are unsafe or should receive inferior care. Luhby noted that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in September launched a $75 million campaign to increase the number of nurses in nursing homes.

The second rule the vice president announced had to do with home health aides. Medicaid currently pays about $125 billion a year to home healthcare companies, which employ hundreds of thousands of workers providing services for elderly and disabled Americans. These companies have never been required to report how that money was being spent. Now they will be required to spend 80% of the federal dollars they receive on workers’ salaries rather than administrative overhead.

Also yesterday, the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a final rule that strengthens the HIPAA medical privacy rule for people from states that ban abortions who seek reproductive health care in states that permit them. In response to threats by Republican state officials to charge women who cross state lines to obtain abortion, contraception, or fertility treatments, the new rule prohibits health care providers, health plans, and other entities from disclosing patients’ reproductive health care records to state officials when they are being sought to investigate or charge patients, doctors, or others.  

Today, the Labor Department announced a new rule that would guarantee that salaried workers who make less than $59,000 a year are compensated fairly for overtime work. The Trump administration set the salary threshold for those who did not have overtime protections at $35,568. As of July 1, 2024, the threshold will be $43,888, and on January 1, 2025, it will rise to $58,656. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), former chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, said the change could affect 4 million workers.

“Too often, lower-paid salaried workers are doing the same job as their hourly counterparts but are spending more time away from their families for no additional pay,” acting secretary of the Department of Labor Julie Su said. “That is unacceptable. The Biden-Harris administration is following through on our promise to raise the bar for workers who help lay the foundation for our economic prosperity.”

Also today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) voted 3–2 along party lines to ban the noncompete agreements that prevent workers from minimum-wage earners to top executives from changing jobs within the industry in which they work; senior executives can still be bound by such agreements. Initially used to protect trade secrets, noncompete clauses have expanded to cover what the FTC estimates to be 30 million people—one in five U.S. workers. They take away workers’ ability to improve their wages and conditions by quitting their jobs and moving to another company or starting their own. The FTC estimates that the end of such clauses could add almost $300 billion a year to workers’ wages.

“Robbing people of their economic liberty also robs them of all sorts of other freedoms,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said. Neil Bradley, head of strategic advocacy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, countered: “If they can issue regulations with respect to unfair methods of competition, then there’s really no aspect of the U.S. economy they couldn’t regulate.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce plans to sue over the rule.

A CBS News/YouGov poll released Monday found that, although Biden and Harris have made addressing climate change a centerpiece of their administration, only 10% of the people who say they think climate change is a very important issue had heard or read a lot about what the administration has accomplished, and 49% said they had read not much or nothing about it. When told some of the things the administration has done, a strong majority of those who care about addressing climate change support those policies.

“Even people who feel the administration has done too little on climate change support these policies,” reporters for CBS News note. They conclude that the disconnect “may be more about Mr. Biden needing to get his message out there than having to convince this ‘climate constituency’—those who call the climate issue very important—of the substance of his policies.”

Meanwhile, today is the fourth anniversary of the press conference in which former president Donald Trump suggested injecting disinfectant to get rid of Covid, prompting the maker of Lysol to warn people not to use their disinfectant cleaning products internally. Four years later, Trump spent the day in a Manhattan courtroom, where his former friend David Pecker, who ran the company that published the National Enquirer tabloid magazine, testified for the prosecution.

Legal analyst Lisa Rubin summarized Pecker’s testimony, noting that the big takeaways were that Trump and Pecker were transactional friends for decades and that “the agreement they struck in 2015 went way beyond the ‘catch and kill’ aspect of the scheme that has been known for years.” Together, they not only killed stories damaging to Trump, but also pushed fake stories about Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio, who were running against him for the 2016 Republican nomination, as well as Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

As the trial grabs headlines, Trump’s power seems to be diminishing. He is demonstrably not in power in the courtroom, where he must do as the judge tells him and reporters say he has often fallen asleep, and none of his family members have shown up to support him.

Trump seems aware that his power is waning. Early yesterday, he called for supporters to “RALLY BEHIND MAGA,” but only a handful of people gathered outside the courthouse. Today he claimed that the turnout was low because police had “completely CLOSED DOWN” the streets around the courthouse. That was a lie: the streets, the sidewalk, even the courthouse have remained open to the public.

Pennsylvania’s primary election today revealed Trump’s real electoral weakness. He won about 83.5% of the Republican votes, but Nikki Haley, who dropped out of the race in early March and has not campaigned since, won 16.5%. In the suburbs of Philadelphia, the so-called “collar counties,” Haley won closer to 25% of the Republican vote.

Biden, meanwhile, took the fight against MAGA Republicans to Trump’s home state of Florida. There, an extreme abortion ban signed into law by Republican Governor Ron DeSantis will take effect on May 1, but in November, Florida voters will have the option to add protections for abortion before fetal viability to the state constitution, returning the state to the standards it had before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. That measure is expected to energize Democrats in the state.

And then, tonight, by a vote of 79–18, the Senate passed the $95 billion national security supplemental bill that provides funding, mostly for military supplies, to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific and humanitarian aid for war-torn countries; requires the sale of TikTok; and permits confiscating Russian assets. MAGA Republicans are still adamantly opposed to aid for Ukraine, but a strong bipartisan majority has finally gotten the chance to weigh in.

As soon as the measure passed, Biden issued a statement, saying: “Tonight, a bipartisan majority in the Senate joined the House to answer history’s call at this critical inflection point. Congress has passed my legislation to strengthen our national security and send a message to the world about the power of American leadership: we stand resolutely for democracy and freedom, and against tyranny and oppression.”

mickeyrat

  April 24, 2024 (Wednesday)

This morning, President Joe Biden signed into law the $95 billion national security supplemental bill providing military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and the Indo-Pacific, as well as humanitarian aid to Gaza and other peoples suffering humanitarian crises. The Pentagon immediately sent about The Pentagon immediately sent about a billion dollars worth of ammunition, air defense munitions, and artillery rounds, as well as weapons and armored vehicles to Ukraine. The U.S. Department of Defense had moved supplies into Poland and Germany in hopes that the measure would pass; they should move into Ukraine soon.

The Pentagon also said today that in mid-March it provided Ukraine Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, with a range of 185 miles (300 kilometers), twice that of previous weapons sent by the U.S.

For many months, Ukraine has been desperately short of supplies, especially ammunition, and its war effort has suffered as it waited for the reinforcements that are finally on their way.

In a speech after signing the law, Biden explained that the U.S. would send equipment to Ukraine from its own stockpiles and then “replenish those stockpiles with new products made by American companies here in America: Patriot missiles made in Arizona, Javelins made in Alabama, artillery shells made in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. In other words, we’re helping Ukraine while at the same time investing in our own industrial base, strengthening our own national security, and supporting jobs in nearly 40 states all across America.”

Biden emphasized that the law is “going to make America safer. It’s going to make the world safer.  And it continues America’s leadership in the world, and everyone knows it.” But he called out that border security was missing from the bill, and he promised to bring that measure back.

Biden made it a point “to thank everyone in Congress who made it possible, especially the bipartisan leadership: Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson; Leader Jeffries; Leaders Schumer and McConnell. They don’t always agree, but when it matters most, they stepped up and did the right thing. And I mean this sincerely, history will remember this time.”

“We don’t walk away from our allies; we stand with them. We don’t let tyrants win; we oppose them. We don’t merely watch global events unfold; we shape them. That’s what it means to be the…indispensable nation. That’s what it means to be the world’s superpower and the world’s leading democracy. Some of our MAGA Republican friends reject that vision,” he said, “but this vote makes it clear: There is a bipartisan consensus for that kind of American leadership. That’s exactly what we’ll continue to deliver.”

This morning, Arlette Saenz of CNN reported on the six months of behind-the-scenes negotiating Biden and his team engaged in to get House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) behind Ukraine aid. Meetings, phone calls, defense briefings, and so on, laid out for Johnson just what abandoning Ukraine would mean for U.S. and global security.

Biden urged his team to stay in close contact with Johnson, as well as House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), but to avoid attacking Johnson in order to allow room to move discussions forward.

Counselor to the president Steve Ricchetti, a key negotiator, told Saenz: “He just kept saying, ‘Keep talking. Keep working.’ You know, keep finding ways to resolve differences. And that was his direction.”

Biden’s focus on the slow, steady work of governance is a change from the actions of Republican leaders since 1981 whose goal was not to build up successful programs that helped Americans in general, but rather to slash the government. Killing programs requires only saying no to other people’s ideas and riling up voters to endorse that anti-government program by flame-throwing on right-wing media.

Over the years, it seems we have become accustomed to the idea that flame-throwing defines politics, but in fact, Biden’s reliance on slow, careful negotiation harks back to the eras when leaders sought to build coalitions and find common ground in order to pass legislation.   

North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU) acknowledged the power of Biden’s approach today when it endorsed Biden for president in 2024. The union’s president, Sean McGarvey,  noted that Trump had promised to protect pensions and to pass infrastructure laws that would help employment in the building trades, but did neither. In contrast, Biden worked to pass the American Rescue Plan, which protected pensions, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Chips and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which McGarvey said “have brought life-changing, opportunity-creating, generational change focused on the working men and women of this great country who have for far too long been clamoring for a leader to finally keep their word.”

In an ad, McGarvey said: “Donald Trump is incapable of running anything, let alone the most powerful country in the history of the world.”

The NABTU has 3 million members across the country and has committed to investing heavily to organize workers to vote for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where about 250,000 of their members live.

Trump has other problems today, as well, after an Arizona grand jury yesterday indicted 11 of the fake electors in that state with conspiracy, fraudulent schemes and artifices, fraudulent schemes and practices, and forgery for their attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Those charged included state senators Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, former Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, and Tyler Bowyer of the right-wing advocacy organization Turning Point Action. The indictment lists seven other co-conspirators, who are not yet named but who appear from descriptions to include Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Christina Bobb, Boris Epshteyn, and Jenna Ellis; Trump campaign operative Mike Roman; and Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows. Bobb is now senior counsel for “election integrity” for the Republican National Committee.

Trump is listed as an unindicted co-conspirator.

mickeyrat

  April 25, 2024 (Thursday)

“I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the U.S. Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act,’” lawyer Marc Elias, whose firm defends democratic election laws, wrote today on social media. He added: “I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”

Elias was referring to the argument of Trump’s lawyer before the Supreme Court today that it could indeed be an “official act” for which a president should be immune from criminal prosecution if “the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him.”

The Supreme Court today heard close to three hours of oral argument over Trump v. United States, which concerns former president Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal charges for “official acts”: in this case, his attempt to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and to stay in office against the will of the voters.

That is, like the authoritarian leaders he admires, Trump tried to steal the 2020 presidential election and seize the presidency. Sometimes I worry that the enormity of that crime against our democracy is becoming normalized.

It was not normalized by grand jury members who reviewed the evidence of that effort; they indicted Trump in August 2023 on four counts. But Trump responded by claiming that a president cannot be prosecuted for official acts and that a former president cannot be prosecuted unless the House of Representatives has impeached him and the Senate convicted him.

Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Ginni, participated in that effort, did not recuse himself from today’s hearing, and the court did not object to his presence.

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post noted that the justices on the court seemed to be weighing “which poses the greater risk—putting a criminal president above the law or hamstringing noncriminal presidents with the risk of frivolous or vindictive prosecutions brought by their successors.”

The liberals on the court focused on the former—after all, the case is about whether Trump should answer to criminal indictments for trying to overturn our democracy. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted: “If someone with those kinds of powers, the most powerful person in the world with the greatest amount of authority, could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes, I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into, you know, the seat of criminal activity in this country.”

In contrast, the right-wing justices focused on the risk of vindictive prosecutions, which has been the heart of Trump’s argument for complete immunity. Trump insists that without immunity, a president will be afraid to make controversial decisions out of fear of later prosecution. Such a lack of immunity would destroy the presidency, he has argued, claiming that he is simply trying to protect the office.

And yet he is the first of 45 presidents to be charged with a crime, and no previous president made any claim of immunity.

Nonetheless, the right-wing justices made it clear they were more interested in the future than in the present. In their comments they stayed far away from Trump and focused instead on presidents in the past and the future. (Conservative judge J. Michael Luttig noted: “The Court and the parties discussed everything but the specific question presented.”)

Justice Neil Gorsuch said: “I’m not concerned about this case, but I am concerned about future uses of the criminal law to target political opponents based on accusations about their motives.” Justice Samuel Alito tried to turn the argument for accountability upside down by suggesting that complete immunity would be more likely to encourage presidents to leave office, because if a president knew they could be prosecuted for crimes, they would be less likely to leave peacefully.

Indeed, Marcus wrote: “The conservative justices’ professed concerns over the implications of their rulings for imaginary future presidents, in imaginary future proceedings, seemed more important to them than bringing Trump to justice.” Constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis was more concrete in his reaction; he found it “[u]nbelievable that Supreme Court justices who see forgiving student loans, mandating vaccines, and regulating climate change as a slippery slope toward tyranny were not clear-eyed on questions of whether a president could execute citizens or stage a coup without being prosecuted.”

The court’s decision will likely take weeks and thus will delay Trump’s trial for crimes committed in his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, likely until after the 2024 election. On Monday, April 22, former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), who served as vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, called out Trump’s attacks on the legal system and delays to avoid accountability. In a New York Times op-ed, Cheney reminded the justices that delay would mean that the American people would not get to hear the testimony and evidence Special Counsel Jack Smith has uncovered before the 2024 election.

“It cannot be that a president of the United States can attempt to steal an election and seize power but our justice system is incapable of bringing him to trial before the next election four years later,” she wrote.

And yet, here we are.

Voters’ right to know what a candidate for president did to overthrow the will of the people in a previous election is at stake in today’s arguments. But so is the rule of law on which our democracy stands. The rule of law means that laws are made according to established procedures rather than a leader’s dictates, and that they are reasonable. Laws are enforced equally. No one is above the law, and everyone has an obligation to obey the law.

As Justice Elena Kagan noted today: “The framers did not put an immunity clause into the Constitution. They knew how to; there were immunity clauses in some state constitutions. They didn’t provide immunity to the president. And, you know—not so surprising—they were reacting against a monarch who claimed to be above the law. Wasn’t the whole point that the president was not a monarch and the president was not supposed to be above the law?”

Indeed.

“[W]here, say some, is the King of America?” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet that convinced British colonists in North America to cut ties with their king and start a new nation. “[I]n America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

mickeyrat

  April 26, 2024 (Friday)
 
Yesterday, in a long story about “the petty feud between the [New York Times] and the White House,” Eli Stokols of Politico suggested that the paper’s negative coverage of President Joe Biden came from the frustration of its publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, at Biden’s refusal to do an exclusive interview with the paper. Two people told Stokols that Sulzberger’s reasoning is that only an interview with an established paper like the New York Times “can verify that the 81-year-old Biden is still fit to hold the presidency.”

A spokesperson for the New York Times responded to the story by saying the idea that it has skewed its coverage out of pique over an interview is “outrageous and untrue,” and that the paper will continue to cover the president “fully and fairly.”

For his part, Stokols reported, Biden’s frustration with the New York Times reflects “the resentment of a president with a working-class sense of himself and his team toward a news organization catering to an elite audience,” and their conviction that the newspaper is not taking seriously the need to protect democracy.

Today, Biden sat for a live interview of more than an hour with SiriusXM shock jock Howard Stern. Writer Kurt Andersen described it as a “*Total* softball interview, mostly about his personal life—but lovely, sweet, human, and Biden was terrific, consistently clear, detailed, charming, moving. Which was the point. SO much better than his opponent could do.”

Also today, the Treasury Department announced that the pilot program of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that enabled taxpayers to file their tax returns directly with the IRS for free had more users than the program’s stated goal, got positive ratings, and saved users an estimated $5.6 million in fees for tax preparation. The government had hoped about 100,000 people would use the pilot program; 140,803 did.

Former deputy director of the National Economic Council Bharat Ramamurti wrote on social media, “Of all the things I was lucky enough to work on, this might be my favorite. You shouldn’t have to pay money to pay your taxes. As this program continues to grow, most people will get pre-populated forms and be able to file their taxes with a few clicks in a few minutes.” Such a system would look much like the system other countries already use.

Also today, the Federal Trade Commission announced that Williams-Sonoma will pay a record $3.17 million civil penalty for advertising a number of products as “Made in USA” when they were really made in China and other countries. This is the largest settlement ever for a case under the “Made in USA” rule. Williams-Sonoma will also be required to file annual compliance certifications.

FTC chair Lina Khan wrote on social media: “Made in USA fraud deceives customers and punishes honest businesses. FTC will continue holding to account businesses that misrepresent where their product[s] are manufactured.”

In another win for the United Auto Workers (UAW), the union negotiated a deal today with Daimler Trucks over contracts for 7,300 Daimler employees in four North Carolina factories. The new contracts provide raises of at least 25% over four years, cost of living increases, and profit sharing. This victory comes just a week after workers at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted overwhelmingly to join the UAW.

Today was the eighth day of Trump’s criminal trial for his efforts to interfere with the 2016 election by paying to hide negative information about himself from voters and then falsifying records to hide the payments. David Pecker, who ran the company that published the National Enquirer tabloid, finished his testimony.

In four days on the stand, Pecker testified that he joined Michael Cohen and others in killing stories to protect Trump in the election. Trump’s longtime executive assistant Rhona Graff took the stand after Pecker, and testified that both Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels were in Trump’s contacts. Next up was Gary Farro, a bank employee who verified banking information that showed how Michael Cohen had hidden payments to Daniels in 2016.

Once again, Trump appeared to be trying to explain away his lack of support at the trial, writing on his social media channel that the courthouse was heavily guarded. “Security is that of Fort Knox,” he wrote, “all so that MAGA will not be able to attend this trial….” But CNN’s Kaitlan Collins immediately responded: “Again, the courthouse is open [to] the public. The park outside, where a handful of his supporters have gathered on [trial] days, is easily accessible.”

Dispatch Politics noted today that when co-chairs Michael Whatley and Lara Trump and senior campaign adviser Chris LaCivita took over the Republican National Committee (RNC), they killed a plan to open 40 campaign offices in 10 crucial states and fired 60 members of the RNC staff. According to Dispatch Politics, Trump insisted to the former RNC chair that he did not need the RNC to work on turning out voters. He wanted the RNC to prioritize “election integrity” efforts.

The RNC under Trump has not yet developed much infrastructure or put staff into the states. It appears to have decided to focus only on those that are key to the presidential race, leaving down-ballot candidates on their own.

While Trump appears to be hoping to win the election through voter suppression or in the courts, following his blueprint from 2020, Biden’s campaign has opened 30 offices in Michigan alone and has established offices in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Florida.

Finally today, news broke that in her forthcoming book, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem wrote about shooting her 14-month-old dog because it was “untrainable” and dangerous. “I hated that dog,” she wrote, and she recorded how after the dog ruined a hunting trip, she shot it in a gravel pit. Then she decided to kill a goat that she found to be “nasty and mean” as well as smelly and aggressive. She “dragged him to the gravel pit,” too, and “put him down.”  

Noem has been seen as a leading contender for the Republican vice presidential nomination on a ticket with Trump, and it seems likely she was trying to demonstrate her ruthlessness—a trait Trump appears to value—as a political virtue. But across the political spectrum, people have expressed outrage and disgust. In The Guardian, Martin Pengelly said her statement, “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story,” was “a contender for the greatest understatement of election year.”

mickeyrat

  April 27, 2024 (Saturday)

Buddy and I are on the road and my brother just sent me this photo from home.

I figure there's probably nothing I could write tonight that tops it.

So I'm calling it quits tonight. I'll be back at it tomorrow.

[Photo by Irv Richardson.]

mickeyrat

   April 28, 2024 (Sunday)

On Friday, in an interview with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, Trump’s former attorney general William Barr brushed off the recent news that Trump, furious that the story he had taken refuge in a bunker during the Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020 had leaked, called for the White House leaker to be executed.

“I remember him being very mad about that. I actually don’t remember him saying ‘executing,’ but I wouldn‘t dispute it, you know,” Barr said to Collins when she asked him about it. “The president would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would’ve actually carried it out.”

Collins followed up, asking if Trump would call for executions on other occasions. “He would say things similar to that on occasions to blow off steam. But I wouldn’t take them literally every time he did it,” Barr answered.

Why not? Collins asked.

“Because at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be carried out and you could talk sense into him,” Barr said. “I don’t think he would actually go and kill political rivals and things like that.” Barr said he intends to vote for Trump.

“Just to be clear,” Collins said, “you’re voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can’t even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election even after his attorney general told him that the election wasn’t stolen.… You’re going to vote for someone who is facing 88 criminal counts?”

“The answer to the question is yes,” Barr said. “I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

The contention of the former attorney general—who had been responsible for enforcing the rule of law in the United States of America—that a man who has demanded the execution of people he dislikes is a better candidate for the presidency than a man who is using the power of the federal government to create jobs for ordinary people, combat climate change, protect the environment, and promote health and education, illustrates that Republican leaders have abandoned democracy.

In November 2019, in a speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, Barr ignored the Declaration of Independence, which is a list of complaints against King George III, to argue that Americans had rebelled in 1776 not against the king, but rather against Parliament. In the modern world, Barr argued, Congress has grown far too strong. The president should be able to act on his own initiative and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight.

That theory is known as the theory of the “unitary executive,” and it says that because the president is the head of one of the three unique branches of government, any oversight of that office by Congress or the courts is unconstitutional, although in fact presidents since George Washington have accepted congressional oversight.

The theory took root in 1986, when Samuel Alito, then a 35-year-old lawyer for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, proposed the use of “signing statements” to take from Congress the sole power to make laws by giving the president the power to “interpret” them. In 1987, president Ronald Reagan issued a signing statement to a debt bill, declaring his right to interpret it as he wished and saying the president could not be forced “to follow the orders of a subordinate.”

In 2004, when Congress outlawed the newly-revealed U.S. torture program at remote sites around the world, President George W. Bush issued a signing statement rejecting any limitation on “the unitary executive branch.” In April 2020, to justify his demands for states to reopen in the face of the deadly pandemic, Trump told reporters, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total….” Now, in 2024, Trump’s lawyers are in court arguing that the president has criminal immunity for his behavior in the White House, possibly including his right to order the executions of those he sees as enemies.

As Republicans have embraced unlimited power for the president, they have also turned against the right of American citizens to have a say in their government. Beginning with so-called ballot integrity measures in 1986, they embraced methods to knock voters off the voting rolls. That policy intensified after Democrats passed the so-called Motor-Voter Law in 1993, making it easier to register to vote.

After voters nonetheless elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, the Supreme Court handed down the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, permitting unlimited donations to political campaigns, and corporate money flowed into them. In that same year, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP to elect Republicans to state legislatures ahead of the redistricting required after the 2010 census. Operation REDMAP resulted in extreme partisan gerrymandering that would make it virtually impossible for Democrats to win elections even if they won a majority of the vote.

Then, in 2013, the Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law had required states with a history of racial discrimination to get clearance from the Department of Justice before they changed their voting laws. The court said that preclearance was no longer necessary. Within hours of the decision, Republican-dominated states proposed new laws that discriminate against voters of color.   

In 2019, Barr explained to an audience at the University of Notre Dame the ideology behind the strong executive and weakened representation. Rejecting the clear words of the Constitution’s framers, Barr said that the U.S. was never meant to be a secular democracy. When the nation’s founders had spoken so extensively about self-government, he said, they had not meant the right to elect representatives of their own choosing. Instead, he said, the founders meant the ability of individuals to “restrain and govern themselves.” And, because people are willful, the only way to achieve self-government is through religion.

Those who believe the United States is a secular country, he said, are destroying the nation. It was imperative, he said, to reject those values and embrace religion as the basis for American government.

The idea that the United States must become a Christian nation has apparently led Barr to accept the idea that a man who has called for the execution of those he sees as enemies should be president, apparently because he is expected to usher in an authoritarian Christian state, in preference to a man who is using the power of the government to help ordinary Americans.  

Saturday night, journalists, politicians, and celebrities gathered for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual fundraiser for the White House Correspondents’ Association, which protects press passes for journalists who regularly cover the White House, assigns seats in the briefing room, funds scholarships for aspiring journalists, and gives awards for outstanding journalism. It is traditionally an evening of comedy, but last night, after a humorous speech, President Joe Biden implored the press to take the threat of dictatorship seriously.

“I’m sincerely not asking of you to take sides but asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment; move past the horse race numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions, the sideshows that have come to dominate and sensationalize our politics; and focus on what’s actually at stake,” he said. “Every single one of us has…a serious role to play in making sure democracy endures….  I have my role, but, with all due respect, so do you.”
 
George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week apparently took this reminder to heart. “Until now,” he said in the show’s opener on Sunday, “[n]o American president had ever faced a criminal trial. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president ever faced hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse….

“The scale of the abnormality is so staggering, that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year. Those bedrock tenets of our democracy are being tested in a way we haven’t seen since the Civil War. It’s a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.”

Halifax2TheMax

mickeyrat said:

   April 28, 2024 (Sunday)

On Friday, in an interview with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, Trump’s former attorney general William Barr brushed off the recent news that Trump, furious that the story he had taken refuge in a bunker during the Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020 had leaked, called for the White House leaker to be executed.

“I remember him being very mad about that. I actually don’t remember him saying ‘executing,’ but I wouldn‘t dispute it, you know,” Barr said to Collins when she asked him about it. “The president would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would’ve actually carried it out.”

Collins followed up, asking if Trump would call for executions on other occasions. “He would say things similar to that on occasions to blow off steam. But I wouldn’t take them literally every time he did it,” Barr answered.

Why not? Collins asked.

“Because at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be carried out and you could talk sense into him,” Barr said. “I don’t think he would actually go and kill political rivals and things like that.” Barr said he intends to vote for Trump.

“Just to be clear,” Collins said, “you’re voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can’t even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election even after his attorney general told him that the election wasn’t stolen.… You’re going to vote for someone who is facing 88 criminal counts?”

“The answer to the question is yes,” Barr said. “I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

The contention of the former attorney general—who had been responsible for enforcing the rule of law in the United States of America—that a man who has demanded the execution of people he dislikes is a better candidate for the presidency than a man who is using the power of the federal government to create jobs for ordinary people, combat climate change, protect the environment, and promote health and education, illustrates that Republican leaders have abandoned democracy.

In November 2019, in a speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, Barr ignored the Declaration of Independence, which is a list of complaints against King George III, to argue that Americans had rebelled in 1776 not against the king, but rather against Parliament. In the modern world, Barr argued, Congress has grown far too strong. The president should be able to act on his own initiative and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight.

That theory is known as the theory of the “unitary executive,” and it says that because the president is the head of one of the three unique branches of government, any oversight of that office by Congress or the courts is unconstitutional, although in fact presidents since George Washington have accepted congressional oversight.

The theory took root in 1986, when Samuel Alito, then a 35-year-old lawyer for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, proposed the use of “signing statements” to take from Congress the sole power to make laws by giving the president the power to “interpret” them. In 1987, president Ronald Reagan issued a signing statement to a debt bill, declaring his right to interpret it as he wished and saying the president could not be forced “to follow the orders of a subordinate.”

In 2004, when Congress outlawed the newly-revealed U.S. torture program at remote sites around the world, President George W. Bush issued a signing statement rejecting any limitation on “the unitary executive branch.” In April 2020, to justify his demands for states to reopen in the face of the deadly pandemic, Trump told reporters, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total….” Now, in 2024, Trump’s lawyers are in court arguing that the president has criminal immunity for his behavior in the White House, possibly including his right to order the executions of those he sees as enemies.

As Republicans have embraced unlimited power for the president, they have also turned against the right of American citizens to have a say in their government. Beginning with so-called ballot integrity measures in 1986, they embraced methods to knock voters off the voting rolls. That policy intensified after Democrats passed the so-called Motor-Voter Law in 1993, making it easier to register to vote.

After voters nonetheless elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, the Supreme Court handed down the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, permitting unlimited donations to political campaigns, and corporate money flowed into them. In that same year, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP to elect Republicans to state legislatures ahead of the redistricting required after the 2010 census. Operation REDMAP resulted in extreme partisan gerrymandering that would make it virtually impossible for Democrats to win elections even if they won a majority of the vote.

Then, in 2013, the Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law had required states with a history of racial discrimination to get clearance from the Department of Justice before they changed their voting laws. The court said that preclearance was no longer necessary. Within hours of the decision, Republican-dominated states proposed new laws that discriminate against voters of color.   

In 2019, Barr explained to an audience at the University of Notre Dame the ideology behind the strong executive and weakened representation. Rejecting the clear words of the Constitution’s framers, Barr said that the U.S. was never meant to be a secular democracy. When the nation’s founders had spoken so extensively about self-government, he said, they had not meant the right to elect representatives of their own choosing. Instead, he said, the founders meant the ability of individuals to “restrain and govern themselves.” And, because people are willful, the only way to achieve self-government is through religion.

Those who believe the United States is a secular country, he said, are destroying the nation. It was imperative, he said, to reject those values and embrace religion as the basis for American government.

The idea that the United States must become a Christian nation has apparently led Barr to accept the idea that a man who has called for the execution of those he sees as enemies should be president, apparently because he is expected to usher in an authoritarian Christian state, in preference to a man who is using the power of the government to help ordinary Americans.  

Saturday night, journalists, politicians, and celebrities gathered for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual fundraiser for the White House Correspondents’ Association, which protects press passes for journalists who regularly cover the White House, assigns seats in the briefing room, funds scholarships for aspiring journalists, and gives awards for outstanding journalism. It is traditionally an evening of comedy, but last night, after a humorous speech, President Joe Biden implored the press to take the threat of dictatorship seriously.

“I’m sincerely not asking of you to take sides but asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment; move past the horse race numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions, the sideshows that have come to dominate and sensationalize our politics; and focus on what’s actually at stake,” he said. “Every single one of us has…a serious role to play in making sure democracy endures….  I have my role, but, with all due respect, so do you.”
 
George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week apparently took this reminder to heart. “Until now,” he said in the show’s opener on Sunday, “[n]o American president had ever faced a criminal trial. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president ever faced hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse….

“The scale of the abnormality is so staggering, that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year. Those bedrock tenets of our democracy are being tested in a way we haven’t seen since the Civil War. It’s a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.”

People really do need to wake the fuck up. I’m afraid they won’t and that it may be too late.

brianlux

Halifax2TheMax said:

mickeyrat said:

   April 28, 2024 (Sunday)

On Friday, in an interview with CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, Trump’s former attorney general William Barr brushed off the recent news that Trump, furious that the story he had taken refuge in a bunker during the Black Lives Matter protests in summer 2020 had leaked, called for the White House leaker to be executed.

“I remember him being very mad about that. I actually don’t remember him saying ‘executing,’ but I wouldn‘t dispute it, you know,” Barr said to Collins when she asked him about it. “The president would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would’ve actually carried it out.”

Collins followed up, asking if Trump would call for executions on other occasions. “He would say things similar to that on occasions to blow off steam. But I wouldn’t take them literally every time he did it,” Barr answered.

Why not? Collins asked.

“Because at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be carried out and you could talk sense into him,” Barr said. “I don’t think he would actually go and kill political rivals and things like that.” Barr said he intends to vote for Trump.

“Just to be clear,” Collins said, “you’re voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can’t even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election even after his attorney general told him that the election wasn’t stolen.… You’re going to vote for someone who is facing 88 criminal counts?”

“The answer to the question is yes,” Barr said. “I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

The contention of the former attorney general—who had been responsible for enforcing the rule of law in the United States of America—that a man who has demanded the execution of people he dislikes is a better candidate for the presidency than a man who is using the power of the federal government to create jobs for ordinary people, combat climate change, protect the environment, and promote health and education, illustrates that Republican leaders have abandoned democracy.

In November 2019, in a speech to the right-wing Federalist Society, Barr ignored the Declaration of Independence, which is a list of complaints against King George III, to argue that Americans had rebelled in 1776 not against the king, but rather against Parliament. In the modern world, Barr argued, Congress has grown far too strong. The president should be able to act on his own initiative and not be checked by either congressional or judicial oversight.

That theory is known as the theory of the “unitary executive,” and it says that because the president is the head of one of the three unique branches of government, any oversight of that office by Congress or the courts is unconstitutional, although in fact presidents since George Washington have accepted congressional oversight.

The theory took root in 1986, when Samuel Alito, then a 35-year-old lawyer for the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, proposed the use of “signing statements” to take from Congress the sole power to make laws by giving the president the power to “interpret” them. In 1987, president Ronald Reagan issued a signing statement to a debt bill, declaring his right to interpret it as he wished and saying the president could not be forced “to follow the orders of a subordinate.”

In 2004, when Congress outlawed the newly-revealed U.S. torture program at remote sites around the world, President George W. Bush issued a signing statement rejecting any limitation on “the unitary executive branch.” In April 2020, to justify his demands for states to reopen in the face of the deadly pandemic, Trump told reporters, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total….” Now, in 2024, Trump’s lawyers are in court arguing that the president has criminal immunity for his behavior in the White House, possibly including his right to order the executions of those he sees as enemies.

As Republicans have embraced unlimited power for the president, they have also turned against the right of American citizens to have a say in their government. Beginning with so-called ballot integrity measures in 1986, they embraced methods to knock voters off the voting rolls. That policy intensified after Democrats passed the so-called Motor-Voter Law in 1993, making it easier to register to vote.

After voters nonetheless elected Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, the Supreme Court handed down the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision, permitting unlimited donations to political campaigns, and corporate money flowed into them. In that same year, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP to elect Republicans to state legislatures ahead of the redistricting required after the 2010 census. Operation REDMAP resulted in extreme partisan gerrymandering that would make it virtually impossible for Democrats to win elections even if they won a majority of the vote.

Then, in 2013, the Supreme Court decided Shelby County v. Holder, which gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law had required states with a history of racial discrimination to get clearance from the Department of Justice before they changed their voting laws. The court said that preclearance was no longer necessary. Within hours of the decision, Republican-dominated states proposed new laws that discriminate against voters of color.   

In 2019, Barr explained to an audience at the University of Notre Dame the ideology behind the strong executive and weakened representation. Rejecting the clear words of the Constitution’s framers, Barr said that the U.S. was never meant to be a secular democracy. When the nation’s founders had spoken so extensively about self-government, he said, they had not meant the right to elect representatives of their own choosing. Instead, he said, the founders meant the ability of individuals to “restrain and govern themselves.” And, because people are willful, the only way to achieve self-government is through religion.

Those who believe the United States is a secular country, he said, are destroying the nation. It was imperative, he said, to reject those values and embrace religion as the basis for American government.

The idea that the United States must become a Christian nation has apparently led Barr to accept the idea that a man who has called for the execution of those he sees as enemies should be president, apparently because he is expected to usher in an authoritarian Christian state, in preference to a man who is using the power of the government to help ordinary Americans.  

Saturday night, journalists, politicians, and celebrities gathered for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual fundraiser for the White House Correspondents’ Association, which protects press passes for journalists who regularly cover the White House, assigns seats in the briefing room, funds scholarships for aspiring journalists, and gives awards for outstanding journalism. It is traditionally an evening of comedy, but last night, after a humorous speech, President Joe Biden implored the press to take the threat of dictatorship seriously.

“I’m sincerely not asking of you to take sides but asking you to rise up to the seriousness of the moment; move past the horse race numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions, the sideshows that have come to dominate and sensationalize our politics; and focus on what’s actually at stake,” he said. “Every single one of us has…a serious role to play in making sure democracy endures….  I have my role, but, with all due respect, so do you.”
 
George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week apparently took this reminder to heart. “Until now,” he said in the show’s opener on Sunday, “[n]o American president had ever faced a criminal trial. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment for retaining and concealing classified documents. No American president had ever faced a federal indictment or a state indictment for trying to overturn an election, or been named an unindicted co-conspirator in two other states for the same crime. No American president ever faced hundreds of millions of dollars in judgments for business fraud, defamation, and sexual abuse….

“The scale of the abnormality is so staggering, that it can actually become numbing. It’s all too easy to fall into reflexive habits, to treat this as a normal campaign, where both sides embrace the rule of law, where both sides are dedicated to a debate based on facts and the peaceful transfer of power. But, that is not what’s happening this election year. Those bedrock tenets of our democracy are being tested in a way we haven’t seen since the Civil War. It’s a test for the candidates, for those of us in the media, and for all of us as citizens.”

People really do need to wake the fuck up. I’m afraid they won’t and that it may be too late.

I woke the (but not the fuck up, lol) this morning.  That's always a blessing and a curse.  I wake up and am thankful for having another day, but awaken with lower back pain and have to ice it right away.  But what really made my morning rough today was the first thing I did was read the above Heather letter.

What stood out with the notion that MAGAs actually want to have a dictator rather than a president and a balance of power.  And they apparently will take any dictator,  even one who acts irrationally, would start killing people left and right who don't bow to his every wish, who is obviously out of his friggin mind, who hates nature (and apparently hasn't a clue how nature works to sustain human life), and who would alienate us from our allies.

So yes, you're spot on my friend.  People need to wake the fuck up.  Shit's gettin' real and it's scary as hell.

mickeyrat

  April 29, 2024 (Monday)

In December 2020, when the pandemic illustrated the extraordinary disadvantage created by the inability of those in low-income households to communicate online with schools and medical professionals, then-president Trump signed into law an emergency program to provide funding to make internet access affordable. In 2021, Congress turned that idea into the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) and made it part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law).

The program has enabled 23 million American households to afford high-speed internet. Those benefiting from it are primarily military families, older Americans, and Black, Latino, and Indigenous households. In February, the Brookings Institution cited economics studies that said each dollar invested in the ACP increases the nation’s gross domestic product by $3.89 and that the program has led to increased employment and higher wages. It also cuts the costs of healthcare by replacing some in-person emergency room visits with telehealth.  

Slightly more of the money in the program goes to districts represented by Republicans than to those represented by Democrats, which might explain why 79% of voters want to continue the program: 96% of Democrats, 78% of Independents, and 62% of Republicans.

But the ACP is running out of money. Back in October 2023, President Joe Biden asked Congress to fund it until the end of 2024, and a bipartisan bill that would extend the program has been introduced in both chambers of Congress. Each remains in an appropriation committee. As of today, the House bill has 228 co-sponsors, the Senate bill has 5.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has said he supports the measure, but House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has not commented. Judd Legum pointed out in Popular Information today that the 2025 budget of the far-right Republican Study Committee (RSC) calls for allowing the ACP to expire, saying the RSC “stands against corporate welfare and government handouts that disincentivize prosperity.” More than four fifths of House Republicans belong to the RSC.

The differences between the parties’ apparent positions on the ACP illustrates the difference in their political ideology. Republicans object to government investment in society and believe market forces should be left to operate without interference in order to promote prosperity. Democrats believe that economic prosperity comes from the hard work of ordinary people and that government investment in society clears the way for those people to succeed.

Wealth growth for young Americans was stagnant for decades before the pandemic, but it has suddenly experienced a historic rise. In Axios, Emily Peck reported that household wealth for Americans under 40 has risen an astonishing 49% from where it was before the pandemic. Wealth doubled for those born between 1981 and 1996. This increase in household wealth comes in part from rising home prices and more financial assets, as well as less debt, which fell by $5,000 per household. Households of those under 35 have shown a 140% increase in median wealth in the same time period.
   
Brendan Duke and Christian E. Weller, the authors of the Center for American Progress study from which Peck’s information came, say this wealth growth is not tied to a few super-high earners, but rather reflects broad based improvement. “A simple reason for the strong wealth growth is that younger Americans are experiencing an especially low unemployment rate and especially strong wage growth,” Duke and Weller note, “making it easier for them to accumulate wealth.”

In honor of National Small Business Week, Vice President Kamala Harris today launched an “economic opportunity tour” in Atlanta, where she highlighted the federal government’s $158 million investment in “The Stitch,” a project to reconnect midtown to downtown Atlanta. This project is an initial attempt to reconnect the communities that were severed by the construction of highways, often cutting minority or poor neighborhoods off from jobs and driving away businesses while saddling the neighborhoods with pollution.

While some advocates wanted to use the $3.3 billion available from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act to take down highways altogether, the administration has shied away from such a dramatic revision and has instead focused on creating new public green spaces, bike paths, access to public transportation, safety features, and so on, to link and improve neighborhoods. More than 40 states so far have received funding under this program.

The administration says that projects like The Stitch will promote economic growth in neighborhoods that have borne the burden of past infrastructure projects. Today it touted the extraordinary growth of small businesses since Biden and Harris took office, noting that their economic agenda “has driven the first, second and third strongest years of new business application rates on record—and is on pace for the fourth—with Americans filing a record 17.2 million new business applications.”

Small businesses owned by historically underserved populations “are growing at near-historic rates, with Black business ownership growing at the fastest pace in 30 years and Latino business ownership growing at the fastest pace in more than a decade,” the White House said. The administration has invested in small businesses, working to level the playing field between them and their larger counterparts by making capital and information available, while working to reform the tax code so that corporations pay as much in taxes as small businesses do.  

“Small businesses are the engines of the economy,” the White House said today. “As President Biden says, every time someone starts a new small business, it’s an act of hope and confidence in our economy.”

In place of economic growth, Republicans have focused on whipping up supporters by insisting that Democrats are corrupt and are cheating to take over the government. Matt Gertz of Media Matters noted in February that “Fox News host Sean Hannity and his House Republican allies spent 2023 trying to manufacture an impeachable offense against President Joe Biden out of their fact-free obsession with the president’s son, Hunter.” At least 325 segments about Hunter Biden appeared on Hannity’s show in 2023; 220 had at least one false or misleading claim. The most frequent purveyor of that disinformation was Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, who went onto the show 43 times to talk about the president’s son.

The House impeachment inquiry was really designed to salt right-wing media channels with lies about the president and, in the end, turned up nothing other than witnesses who said President Biden was not involved in his son’s businesses. Then the Republicans’ key witness, Alexander Smirnov, was indicted for lying about the Bidens, and then he turned out to be in contact with Russian spies.

Comer has been quietly backing away from impeaching the president until today, when he popped back into the spotlight after news broke that Hunter Biden’s lawyer has threatened to sue the Fox News Channel (FNC) for “conspiracy and subsequent actions to defame Mr. Biden and paint him in a false light, the unlicensed commercial exploitation of his image, name, and likeness, and the unlawful publication of hacked intimate images of him.” His lawyer’s letter calls out FNC’s promotion of Smirnov’s false allegations.

Last year, FNC paid almost $800 million to settle defamation claims made by Dominion Voting Systems after FNC hosts pushed the lie that Dominion machines had changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Legal pressure on companies lying for profit has proved successful. Two weeks ago, the far-right media channel One America News Network (OAN) settled a defamation lawsuit with the voting technology company Smartmatic. Today, OAN retracted a false story about former Trump fixer Michael Cohen, apparently made to discredit the testimony of Stormy Daniels about her sexual encounters with Trump. OAN suggested that it was Cohen rather than Trump who had a relationship with Daniels, and that Cohen had extorted Trump over the story.  

“OAN apologizes to Mr. Cohen for any harm the publication may have caused him,” the network wrote in a statement. “To be clear, no evidence suggests that Mr. Cohen and Ms. Daniels were having an affair and no evidence suggests that Mr. Cohen ‘cooked up’ the scheme to extort the Trump Organization before the 2016 election.”