Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 17, 2022 (Tuesday)

On this day in 1954, the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision, which declared the segregation of public schools unconstitutional.

Today, President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden traveled to Buffalo, New York, where ten Americans were murdered and three wounded at a grocery store by a white supremacist on Saturday.

Biden named and described the victims, ten of whom were Black: a baker, a public school teacher, an election worker, a church deacon, a retired police officer, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers. “Individual lives of love, service, and community that speaks to the bigger story of who we are as Americans,” Biden said. We’re a “great nation because we’re a good people.”

Evil will not win in America, Biden promised. “Hate will not prevail. And white supremacy will not have the last word.”

“What happened here is simple and straightforward,” Biden said, “Domestic terrorism. Violence inflicted in the service of hate and a vicious thirst for power that defines one group of people being inherently inferior to any other group. A hate that through the media and politics, the Internet, has radicalized angry, alienated, lost, and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced—that’s the word, “replaced”—by the “other”—by people who don’t look like them and who are therefore, in a perverse ideology that they possess and [are] being fed, lesser beings.”

Biden called on “all Americans to reject [that] lie.” He condemned “those who spread the lie for power, political gain, and for profit.” “[T]he ideology of white supremacy has no place in America,” he said. “Silence is complicity.”

“We have to refuse to live in a country where fear and lies are packaged for power and for profit.

“We must all enlist in this great cause of America.

“This is work that requires all of us—presidents and politicians, commentators, citizens. None of us can stay in the sidelines. We have to resolve here in Buffalo that from…this tragedy…will come hope and light and life. It has to. And on our watch, the sacred cause of America will never bow, never break, never bend. And the America we love—the one we love—will endure.”

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who represents Buffalo, today wrote a letter to Rupert Murdoch, chair of the Fox Corporation, along with another three of the corporation’s leaders, to urge them to stop “the reckless amplification of the so-called ‘Great Replacement’ theory on your network’s broadcasts.” He noted that people who watch the Fox News Channel are nearly three times more likely to believe in the replacement myth than those who watch other networks. He pointed out “the central role these themes have played in your network’s programming in recent years,” especially on Tucker Carlson’s show. He wrote: “I implore you to immediately cease all dissemination of false white nationalist, far-right conspiracy theories on your network.”

New York representative Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives, who paid for ads pushing the replacement myth, today said: “It is not the time to politicize this tragedy. We mourn together as a nation.” Other Republicans insisted they did not know what the Great Replacement Theory is, although a number of them are on video articulating it.

Interviewed by Silvia Foster-Frau of the Washington Post, Buffalo resident James Baldwin dismissed the notion that it was the devil who inspired the Buffalo shooter. “That’s not the devil,” he said. “That’s America. They made him, they brought him up, they put him there.”

There was other big news today. Glenn Thrush and Luke Broadwater of the New York Times reported that on April 20, attorneys in the Department of Justice (DOJ) wrote to the lead investigator for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Timothy J. Heaphy, to ask if the committee would share transcripts from some of their interviews. Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Kenneth A. Polite Jr. and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew M. Graves told Heaphy that some of the transcripts might “contain information relevant to a criminal investigation we are conducting.”

The House committee is trying to figure out exactly what happened on January 6 and in the weeks around it. It is not conducting a criminal investigation. That ground is the turf of the Department of Justice, which has so far brought indictments against at least 828 people, more than 280 of whom have pleaded guilty. The four defendants who had a jury trial were each convicted on all counts. One defendant was acquitted by a Trump-appointed judge, who agreed with the defendant's statement that he had not seen a police line and had possibly been waved into the building. (Video shows the defendant was not screaming or attacking anyone inside the building).

The request indicates that the Department of Justice is looking broadly at the period around January 6. It also suggests that the committee has covered a lot of ground very quickly and that its information might be of use to the Justice Department.

The committee will not simply hand over their material. Congress is part of the legislative branch of government, and the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch, so there is the issue of the separation of powers to deal with. A source told Thrush and Broadwater that the committee and the Justice Department are negotiating. The Justice Department wants the transcripts; the committee wants any relevant evidence the Justice Department has.

Legal analyst Glenn Kirschner tweeted: “Whether this was always the DOJ plan (& whether the J6 committee knew it or not), important info has been developed by the J6 panel that would not have been developed had the witnesses been subpoenaed to the grand jury (as they would have pled the 5th).” He added: “If the J6 committee investigation HAD taken a back seat to a DOJ grand jury investigation, we would go years w/out knowing what any of the 1000+ witness[es] had said. But now, we’ll have a front row seat to it all beginning June 9 AND all of those transcripts can be used in the GJ!”

Hugo Lowell, who is a congressional reporter for The Guardian, tweeted tonight that Stephanie Grisham, a former Trump aide, will be back in front of the January 6th committee tomorrow. The committee is bringing former witnesses back in to confirm evidence and details.

The committee will begin to hold its public hearings on June 9.

There are other legal cases in the news today, too, having to do with foreign influence during the Trump administration. The Department of Justice filed a civil enforcement action to force Stephen A. Wynn to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as a foreign agent working for China. The Justice Department says that from at least June 2017 through at least August 2017, Wynn lobbied Trump and members of his administration to force out of the U.S. a Chinese national who was here for political asylum. Such a case is so exceedingly rare that the Department of Justice said it had not brought such a case in more than 30 years. Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said, “Where a foreign government uses an American as its agent to influence policy decisions in the United States, FARA gives the American people a right to know.”

During this period, Wynn was one of four Republican National Committee finance chairs; the other three were Elliott Broidy, Michael Cohen, and Louis DeJoy. In 2020, Broidy pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate foreign lobbying laws; he worked to win benefits for Chinese and Malaysian interests from the Trump administration. Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to eight counts of campaign finance violations, tax fraud, and bank fraud. Louis DeJoy was appointed in May 2020 to head the United States Postal Service, where he made changes that appeared to be attempts to influence the 2020 election. Broidy recruited Wynn to work for China, thinking that Wynn’s work with the RNC, his business experience in China, and his friendship with Trump “would be helpful in getting access to Trump Administration officials.”

FARA scholar Carrie Levine tweeted: “So, to recap, DOJ is alleging that Wynn was contacting Trump administration officials to advocate for China while serving as RNC finance chair.”

In another case, a superseding indictment filed today in New York federal court accuses Trump’s good friend Thomas Barrack of accepting a pledge of $374 million from the United Arab Emirates while he was also illegally lobbying the administration for the UAE.

Today, in the wake of the Buffalo shooting, Miles Taylor—a member of Trump’s administration who warned anonymously of how dangerous Trump was—announced he was leaving the Republican Party and called on others to do the same. “In the wake of the mass shooting in Buffalo on Saturday,” he wrote, “it’s become glaringly obvious that my party no longer represents conservative values but in fact poses a threat to them—and to America.”

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 18, 2022 (Wednesday)

Finland and Sweden have applied for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a defensive alliance originally formed in 1949 to resist the expansion of the Soviet Union and now standing against Russian expansion under president Vladimir Putin. Now the 30 member nations will consider the applications. They are expected to go through, although Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he does not view their applications positively, likely to gain concessions from the United States in ongoing negotiations. The timeline to membership will be shortened since the countries are at risk from Putin’s current policies.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan warned Russia that U.S. and European allies “will not tolerate any aggression against Finland or Sweden” while NATO applications are under consideration.

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine nears its twelfth week, the United States today reopened our embassy in Kyiv, and tonight, the Senate unanimously confirmed Bridget A. Brink as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. We have not had an official ambassador in Ukraine since Trump abruptly recalled Marie Yovanovich in 2019. Yovanovich was standing in the way of Trump’s attempt to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter before he would release the congressionally appropriated funds Ukraine badly needed to fight off Russia.

To address the baby formula shortage caused by the closing of Abbott Nutrition’s plant in Sturgis, MIchigan, and exacerbated by tariffs that keep foreign baby formula out of the U.S., President Joe Biden today invoked the Defense Production Act to prioritize the manufacture of formula, and is flying formula in from other countries.

This evening, the House of Representatives voted on a proposal to appropriate $28 million in emergency funds to address the baby formula shortage. Two Democrats did not vote, 219 Democrats voted yes. Twelve Republicans voted yes and 6 did not vote. The rest, 192 Republicans, opposed the bill. It now goes on to the Senate.

The House also voted today on the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, which steps up the sharing of information about domestic terrorism among government departments and creates an interagency task force to analyze and combat white supremacist and neo-Nazi infiltration of the uniformed services and federal law enforcement agencies. The House passed the bill by a vote of 222 to 203. All the no votes came from Republicans; all the Democrats voted in favor. It now goes on to the Senate.

There was big news today from a quarter that made it easily overlooked. In a decision about the power of the Securities and Exchange Commission to judge those accused of engaging in securities fraud, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that “Congress unconstitutionally delegated legislative power to the SEC by failing to provide an intelligible principle by which the SEC would exercise the delegated power, in violation of Article I’s vesting of ‘all’ legislative power in Congress….”

Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934, after the Great Crash of 1929 revealed illegal shenanigans on Wall Street. The SEC is supposed to enforce the law against manipulating financial markets. The Fifth Circuit covers Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, and its judges lean to the right. Today’s decision suggests that the leaked draft of the decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade has empowered other judges to challenge other established precedents.

What is at stake with this decision is something called the “nondelegation doctrine,” which says that Congress, which constitutes the legislative branch of the government, cannot delegate legislative authority to the executive branch. Most of the regulatory bodies in our government since the New Deal have been housed in the executive branch. So the nondelegation doctrine would hamstring the modern regulatory state.

According to an article in the Columbia Law Review by Julian Davis Mortenson and Nicholas Bagley, the idea of nondelegation was invented in 1935 to undercut the business regulation of the New Deal. In the first 100 days of his term, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt set out to regulate the economy to combat the Great Depression. Under his leadership, Congress established a number of new agencies to regulate everything from banking to agricultural production.

While the new rules were hugely popular among ordinary Americans, they infuriated business leaders. The Supreme Court stepped in and, in two decisions, said that Congress could not delegate its authority to administrative agencies. But FDR’s threat of increasing the size of the court and the justices’ recognition that they were on the wrong side of public opinion undercut their opposition to the New Deal. The nondelegation theory was ignored until the 1980s, when conservative lawyers began to look for ways to rein in the federal government.

In 2001, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the argument in a decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who said the court must trust Congress to take care of its own power. But after Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that he might be open to the argument, conservative scholars began to say that the framers of the Constitution did not want Congress to delegate authority. Mortenson and Bagley say that argument “can’t stand…. It’s just making stuff up and calling it constitutional law.” Nonetheless, Republican appointees on the court have come to embrace the doctrine.

In November 2019, Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with Justice Neil Gorsuch-—Trump appointees both—to say the Court should reexamine whether or not Congress can delegate authority to administrative agencies. Along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Thomas, they appear to believe that the Constitution forbids such delegation. If Justice Amy Coney Barrett sides with them, the resurrection of that doctrine will curtail the modern administrative state that since the 1930s has regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure.

As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, the nondelegation doctrine would mean that “most of Government is unconstitutional.”

In today’s decision, it is no accident that Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod's majority opinion recalls what President Ronald Reagan, at a press conference in 1986, called the “nine most terrifying words in the English language”: “I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.” Reagan began the process of dismantling the New Deal government, and its achievement seems now to be at hand.

The decision will almost certainly be appealed.

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 19, 2022 (Thursday)

Today, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol sent a letter to Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), asking for his voluntary cooperation in their investigation. The committee members believe he has “information regarding a tour you led through parts of the Capitol complex on January 5, 2021,” the day before the January 6 insurrection.

The letter goes on to say that there have been public reports of both individuals and groups gathering information about the layout of the U.S. Capitol before January 6. In response to those allegations, the committee’s letter says, “Republicans on the Committee on House Administration—of which you are a Member—claimed to have reviewed security footage from the days preceding January 6th and determined that ‘[t]here were no tours, no large groups, no one with MAGA hats on.’ However, the Select Committee’s review of evidence directly contradicts that denial.

Ouch.

Loudermilk and the ranking member (that is, the top Republican member) of the Committee on House Administration, Rodney Davis of Illinois, released an odd nondenial, saying, "A constituent family with young children meeting with their Member of Congress in the House Office Buildings is not a suspicious group or 'reconnaissance tour’…."

Notably, the committee did not use the words “reconnaissance tour.” As well, there is a rhetorical sleight of hand here: a hypothetical tour with a family and young children is presented here as innocuous…but the Republicans’ statement doesn’t say that’s actually what happened, although it seems clear that’s the conclusion the authors hope a reader will draw. It implies that Loudermilk simply gave a tour to a family with young children, without saying so. It’s a classic nondenial, a construction that makes Loudermilk look like a victim of an overzealous critic by deflecting attention from the central question.

The statement goes on to say that the committee is "pushing a verifiably false narrative that Republicans conducted reconnaissance tours on Jan[uary] 5th. The facts speak for themselves; no place that the family went on the 5th was breached on the 6th, the family did not enter the Capitol grounds on the 6th."

So…Loudermilk did, in fact, take people around on January 5, despite denials from the Republicans on the Committee on House Administration, who claimed to have reviewed security footage, saying there were no tours? And despite the fact the Capitol complex was closed to the public because of the pandemic?

Lots of questions here, and it seems likely the January 6 committee will have new information when public hearings begin next month.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), the influential right-wing PAC of the American Conservative Union, is holding its first European event, convening today in Budapest, Hungary. Its leaders have chosen Hungary apparently because they see that country as a model for the society they would like to see in the U.S. under a strongman leader like rising authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

Orbán is the architect of what he calls “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” This form of government holds nominal elections, although their outcome is preordained because the government controls all the media and has silenced opposition. Illiberal democracy rejects modern liberal democracy because the equality it champions means an acceptance of immigrants, LGBTQ rights, and women’s rights and an end to traditionally patriarchal society. Orbán’s model of minority rule promises a return to a white-dominated, religiously based society, and he has pushed his vision by eliminating the independent press, cracking down on political opposition, getting rid of the rule of law, and dominating the economy with a group of crony oligarchs.

Led by personalities like Tucker Carlson, the American right wing embraces the Hungarian model, despite the corruption, lack of legal accountability, and attacks on the press that make Hungary the only member of the European Union no longer rated as “free” by democracy watchdog Freedom House. As if in illustration of Orbán’s policies, U.S. journalists were not allowed into CPAC today.

Orbán gave the keynote speech at the CPAC convention. In it, he embraced the “great replacement theory” that says white people are being replaced by immigrants of color. This is the myth that motivated the shooter in Buffalo, New York, last weekend, when he murdered ten people and wounded three others. It is the myth from which most Republicans have tried to distance themselves since the Buffalo killings.

And yet, when CPAC leader Matt Schlapp met U.S. journalists outside, he said that ending abortion rights would address the great replacement myth: “If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved,” Schlapp said. “You have millions of people who can take many of these jobs. How come no one brings that up? If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.”

Orbán told the attendees that the right wing in Europe and the United States must fight together to “reconquer” institutions in Brussels and Washington, D.C., before the 2024 election because those “liberals” who currently control them are destroying western civilization.

It is surprising to see folks who talk about American greatness take their inspiration from the leader of a small central European country of fewer than 10 million people, about the size of Michigan. Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley commented: “Oh come on US conservatives, stop embarrassing yourselves. Have some dignity and national pride.”

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 20, 2022 (Friday)

As the hearings on the events of January 6th and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election approach, the extent of the operation is becoming clearer.

Last night, lawyers for John Eastman filed a brief arguing, once again, that Eastman should be able to hide documents associated with the attempt to overturn the 2020 election on the grounds that he was working for former president Trump and so their communications are protected by attorney-client privilege. Eastman was the author of the infamous Eastman memo that provided a blueprint for then–vice president Mike Pence to throw the election to Trump, and he has done his best to delay the release of documents despite court orders to turn them over.

The filing is a litany of grievances against the court, but it does offer some new information. Eastman’s team is seeking to protect communications between Eastman “and one or more of six conduits to or agents of the former President with whom Dr. Eastman dealt.” The filing goes on to specify that three of those people worked on Trump’s campaign and that the other three were “members of former President Trump’s immediate staff.” The filing says, “While Dr. Eastman could (and did) communicate directly with former President Trump at times…, many of his communications with the President were necessarily through these agents.”

Among the documents he wants to protect are “[t]wo…hand-written notes from former President Trump about information that he thought might be useful for the anticipated litigation,” as well as documents from state legislators, “a party committeewomen” [sic], and someone who was “coordinating information sessions for state legislators.”

The filing tries to assert that these documents are covered by the attorney-client privilege because Eastman was justified in believing the election was fraudulent, even though reams of evidence have proved it was not. But what it has revealed is that there is written evidence that Trump himself was directly involved in the plotting to overturn the election.

Today, Emma Brown of the Washington Post broke the story that Ginni Thomas, who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was even more deeply involved in the attack on the election than we knew. Ginni Thomas sent emails to two Arizona lawmakers on November 9, 2020, urging them to ignore the legitimately elected presidential electors for Democrat Joe Biden and replace them with “a clean slate.” Using a platform that provided prewritten emails, she urged the lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure,” and “to fight back against fraud.”

One of the people to whom she wrote, Shawnna Bolick, is married to Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick. The Bolicks are close to Clarence Thomas, who is godfather to one of the Bolicks’ children. Shawnna Bolick responded to Thomas: “I hope you and Clarence are doing great!” In 2021, Bolick introduced a bill to allow the Arizona legislature to choose its own electors, regardless of the will of the voters. She is now running for secretary of state, where she would oversee the state’s elections.

Justice Thomas was apparently talking about the leak of the draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade when on May 6 he told a group of judges and lawyers that our justice system is in danger if people are unwilling to “live with outcomes we don’t agree with.”

And then, this afternoon, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Shawn Boburg, also of the Washington Post, reported that the billionaire co-founder, chair, and chief technology officer of the computer technology corporation Oracle, Larry Ellison, also participated in a call about the 2020 election. Legal filings in a court case against True the Vote, an organization that has spread lies about widespread voter fraud, contained a note from True the Vote’s founder Catherine Engelbrecht that read: "Jim [Bopp, a lawyer for True the Vote] was on a call this evening with [Trump lawyer] Jay Sekulow, [South Carolina Senator] Lindsey O. Graham, [Fox News Channel personality] Sean Hannity, and Larry Ellison…. He explained the work we were doing and they asked for a preliminary report asap, to be used to rally their troops internally, so that's what I'm working on now."

Ellison, whom Stanley-Becker and Boburg identify as the 11th richest person in the world, gives significant money to right-wing causes and candidates, including Lindsey Graham, to whom he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2018. More recently, he pledged $1 billion of the $44 billion deal for Elon Musk to buy Twitter.

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to collect information. Today, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani met with its members for nine hours. Initially, he said he would not talk with them unless his testimony was videotaped.

And the conspirators are not faring well in court: today, U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols sanctioned Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who has thrown his lot in with Trump and fought hard to overturn the election. Nichols called at least some of Lindell’s claims against the Smartmatic Corporation, a voting systems company, “groundless” and “frivolous.” Nichols threw out Lindell’s lawsuits against Smartmatic and other voting systems companies, and ordered Lindell to pay some of the costs Smartmatic has run up defending itself.

Lindell told Bloomberg News: “Whatever the judge thinks, that’s his opinion. I’ve got lawyers doing more important things like removing these machines from every state.”

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 21, 2022 (Saturday)

On May 22, 1964, in a graduation speech at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson put a name to a new vision for the United States. He called it “the Great Society” and laid out the vision of a country that did not confine itself to making money, but rather used its post–World War II prosperity to “enrich and elevate our national life.” That Great Society would demand an end to poverty and racial injustice.

But it would do more than that, he promised: it would enable every child to learn and grow, and it would create a society where people would use their leisure time to build and reflect, where cities would not just answer physical needs and the demands of commerce, but would also serve “the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” It would protect the natural world and would be “a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.”

“But most of all,” he said, it would look forward. “[T]the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”

Johnson proposed rebuilding the cities, protecting the countryside, and investing in education to set “every young mind…free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination.” He admitted that the government did not have the answers to addressing the problems in the country, “[b]ut I do promise this,” he said. “We are going to assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America. I intend to establish working groups to prepare a series of White House conferences and meetings—on the cities, on natural beauty, on the quality of education, and on other emerging challenges. And from these meetings and from this inspiration and from these studies we will begin to set our course toward the Great Society.”

Johnson’s vision of a Great Society came from a very different place than the reworking of society launched by his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1930s. Roosevelt’s New Deal had used the federal government to address the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history, leveling the playing field between workers and employers to enable workingmen to support their families. Johnson, in contrast, was operating in a country that was enjoying record growth. Far from simply saving the country, he could afford to direct it toward greater things.

Immediately, the administration turned to addressing issues of civil rights and poverty. Under Johnson’s pressure, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting voting, employment, or educational discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin. Johnson also won passage of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity which would oversee a whole series of antipoverty programs, and of the Food Stamp Act, which helped people who didn’t make a lot of money buy food.

When Republicans ran Arizona senator Barry Goldwater for president in 1964, calling for rolling back business regulation and civil rights to the years before the New Deal, voters who quite liked the new system gave Democrats such a strong majority in Congress that Johnson and the Democrats were able to pass 84 new laws to put the Great Society into place.

They cemented civil rights with the 1965 Voting Rights Act protecting minority voting, created jobs in Appalachia, and established job-training and community development programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 gave federal aid to public schools and established the Head Start program to provide comprehensive early education for low-income children. The Higher Education Act of 1965 increased federal investment in universities and provided scholarships and low-interest loans to students.

The Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare, which provided health insurance for Americans over 65, and Medicaid, which helped cover healthcare costs for folks with limited incomes. Congress advanced the war on poverty by increasing welfare payments and subsidizing rent for low-income families.

Congress took on the rights of consumers with new protective legislation that required cigarettes and other dangerous products to carry warning labels, required products to carry labels identifying the manufacturer, and required lenders to disclose the full cost of finance charges in loans. Congress also passed legislation protecting the environment, including the Water Quality Act of 1965 that established federal standards for water quality.

But the government did not simply address poverty. Congress also spoke to Johnson’s aspirations for beauty and purpose when it created the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. This law created both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities. In 1967 it would also establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, followed in 1969 by National Public Radio.

Opponents of this sweeping program picked up 47 seats in the House and three seats in the Senate in the 1966 midterm elections, and U.S. News and World Report wrote that “the big bash” was over.

And yet, much of the Great Society still lives on, although it is now under more significant challenges every day from those who reject the idea that the federal government has a role to play in the shaping of our society.

“For better or worse,” Johnson told the University of Michigan graduates in 1964, “your generation has been appointed by history to deal with those problems and to lead America toward a new age. You have the chance never before afforded to any people in any age. You can help build a society where the demands of morality, and the needs of the spirit, can be realized in the life of the Nation.

“So, will you join in the battle to give every citizen the full equality which God enjoins and the law requires, whatever his belief, or race, or the color of his skin?” he asked.

“Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?...”

“There are those timid souls who say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, your labor, your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.”

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 22, 2022 (Sunday)

I am in Boston, trying to get my ducks in a row to finish a new book and to pick up threads abandoned when the pandemic hit, and I have gone a little too hard for the past several days.

Turning things over to my friend Peter tonight, so I can get to bed before midnight. I always love his images of our home, but they are especially sweet when I've been way for awhile.

Lots of news today, but it will have to wait until tomorrow, when I can write about it coherently.

I'll see you then.

[Photo "Off the Bar," by Peter Ralston]

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 23, 2022 (Monday)

Scandals today, and be forewarned: the first deals with sexual assault. If you want to skip over it, the next one starts about nine paragraphs down, with the word TODAY in all caps.

Yesterday, a nearly 300-page report from a third-party investigation revealed that the leadership of the Southern Baptists buried sex abuse claims for more than 20 years. They ignored accusations or attacked sex abuse survivors to protect the church from legal liability, describing survivors as “‘opportunistic,’ having a ‘hidden agenda of lawsuits,’ wanting to ‘burn things to the ground,’ and acting as a ‘professional victim.’”

The modern Southern Baptist Convention story begins in 1967, when Paige Patterson, a seminary student, and Paul Pressler, a Texas judge, met in New Orleans to take over the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. and rid it of liberals, purging those who believed in abortion rights, women’s rights, and gay rights. By 1979 their candidate was elected head of the organization, and in the 1980s, Southern Baptists, who then numbered about 15 million people, were active in politics and were staunch supporters of the Republican Party.

Between 2003 and 2018 the church lost a million members. Both Pressler and Patterson were accused of sexual misconduct and by 2018 had been forced out of leadership roles, and a new leader called for “a new culture and a new posture in the Southern Baptist Convention.” While he set up new systems for responding to abuse, other leaders continued to blame the victims. In one internal email, senior staff member D. August “Augie” Boto, who drove much of the church’s response to abuse allegations, wrote: “This whole thing should be seen for what it is. It is a satanic scheme to completely distract us from evangelism.”

In 2019 the Houston Chronicle ran a series calling attention to the 380 pastors affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention who had been accused of sexual abuse, blowing the lid off the scandal. In March 2021 the hugely popular leader Beth Moore, herself a survivor of sexual assault, left the church. In May, Russell Moore (no relation to Ms. Moore) left the church leadership and then, the following month, left the church itself over its handling of sexual abuse allegations and racism.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting in 2021 was the largest one since 1995. Members rejected a hard-right leader and chose as president Ed Litton, senior pastor of Redemption Church in Saraland, Alabama, who since at least 2014 had focused on racial reconciliation. Members also called for an investigation of the escalating sex scandals, which had become so toxic after Trump’s election that In setting up an investigation, church members were leery enough of the leaders investigating themselves that they set up a task force to manage a third-party investigation. The task force hired the investigating team, Guidepost Solutions, on September 9, 2021.

Its report is so damning that Russell Moore’s first reaction was to say: “I was wrong to call sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention…a crisis. Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse.” The investigation, he says, “uncovers a reality far more evil and systematic than I imagined it could be.” “How many children were raped, how many people were assaulted, how many screams were silenced,” he asked, “while we boasted that no one could reach the world for Jesus like we could.”

“That’s more than a crisis,” he said. “It’s even more than just a crime. It’s blasphemy. And anyone who cares about heaven ought to be mad as hell.”

The 13 million or more Southern Baptists have provided strong support for Republicans since the 1980s, molding to their patriarchal model that president Ronald Reagan sold with the image of the cowboy. This report has ripped the cover off the abuse that model concealed. Whether that will affect voting patterns remains to be seen, but it does seriously undermine the image of the patriarchal leader as a protector of women and children, an image on which Republicans relied. Beth Moore reacted to the report by saying: “You have betrayed your women.”

TODAY, Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine sued Mark Zuckerberg, saying he was personally responsible for failing to protect Facebook users’ data, instead allowing it to be sold to political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica before the 2016 election. Racine says that Zuckerberg violated the Consumer Protection Procedures Act by permitting third parties to harvest information about users without their knowledge.

The filing recounts the story, which was important to the 2016 election. In November 2013, researcher Aleksandr Kogan designed an app on the Facebook platform that identified itself as a personality test. To use it, a consumer had to give permission for the app to collect some personal data: name, gender, birthdate, likes, and friends list. What they did not know, though, was that the app also accessed the data of those folks on the friends list. “The vast majority of these Facebook friends never installed the App, never affirmatively consented to supplying the App with their data, and never knew the App had collected their data.”

About 290,000 users installed the app, but the app collected the data of about 87 million users, more than 70 million of whom were in the U.S. More than 340,000 were in Washington, D.C.

In 2014, Kogan sold the data the app had collected for about $800,000 to the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which used the information to target ads to users to promote Republican candidates in the 2014 midterm elections. By December 22, 2015, Facebook knew that Kogan had sold the data; selling data violated its terms of service. It got rid of the app but simply requested that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica delete the information. Instead, Cambridge Analytica used it during the 2016 election, targeting political ads to help first Texas senator Ted Cruz, and then Trump.

The extent of the story burst into public view in 2018, when Christopher Wylie, who had helped to start Cambridge Analytica, talked to reporters. He left the company in late 2014, apparently in disgust over its hard-right turn after a $15 million investment from Robert Mercer, who was being advised by Steve Bannon. “They want to start a culture war in America,” he told Matthew Rosenberg, Nicholas Confessore, and Carole Cadwalladr of the New York Times. “Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”

In 2019 the Republican-controlled Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Facebook $5 billion for deceiving its users about their privacy but did not require Facebook to admit guilt or regulate how Facebook would use information in the future. (Facebook’s revenue that year was $56 billion.) It also indemnified the company for “any and all claims prior to June 12, 2019,” a provision that the FTC’s former chief technologist Ashkan Soltani told Soo Youn of ABC News was “a $5 billion get out of jail card.”

Racine has an ongoing lawsuit against Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and now will try to bring Zuckerberg himself to account for the data breach.

In Michigan, the Bureau of Elections has ruled that five of the ten Republican candidates for governor in this fall’s elections are ineligible to run in the primaries. It appears that canvassers paid to collect signatures on the candidates’ nomination petitions forged signatures—68,000 of them on the paperwork of 10 candidates. All of the candidates have railed against election fraud. The board’s report says it does not believe that the candidates were aware of the scheme. Still, they should have had systems in place to catch this massive number of fraudulent signatures (some pages were apparently all in the same handwriting). The Board of State Canvassers will vote on the issue Thursday.

“We have never seen anything like this before, as it is an epic implosion that will likely be a cautionary tale in campaign textbooks moving forward,” wrote Mara MacDonald of Detroit’s WDIV.

Sure feels like there’s a lot of that going around.

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 24, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today, a gunman murdered at least 19 children and 2 adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

For years now, after one massacre or another, I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of the takeover of our nation by a radical extremist minority. The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others, is new, and it is about politics, not our history.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution, on which modern-day arguments for widespread gun ownership rest, is one simple sentence: “A well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” There’s not a lot to go on about what the Framers meant, although in their day, to “bear arms” meant to be part of an organized militia.

As the Tennessee Supreme Court wrote in 1840, “A man in the pursuit of deer, elk, and buffaloes might carry his rifle every day for forty years, and yet it would never be said of him that he had borne arms; much less could it be said that a private citizen bears arms because he has a dirk or pistol concealed under his clothes, or a spear in a cane.”

Today’s insistence that the Second Amendment gives individuals a broad right to own guns comes from two places.

One is the establishment of the National Rifle Association in New York in 1871, in part to improve the marksmanship skills of American citizens who might be called on to fight in another war, and in part to promote in America the British sport of elite shooting, complete with hefty cash prizes in newly organized tournaments. Just a decade after the Civil War, veterans jumped at the chance to hone their former skills. Rifle clubs sprang up across the nation.

By the 1920s, rifle shooting was a popular American sport. “Riflemen” competed in the Olympics, in colleges, and in local, state, and national tournaments organized by the NRA. Being a good marksman was a source of pride, mentioned in public biographies, like being a good golfer. In 1925, when the secretary of the NRA apparently took money from ammunition and arms manufacturers, the organization tossed him out and sued him.

NRA officers insisted on the right of citizens to own rifles and handguns but worked hard to distinguish between law-abiding citizens who should have access to guns for hunting and target shooting and protection, and criminals and mentally ill people, who should not. In 1931, amid fears of bootlegger gangs, the NRA backed federal legislation to limit concealed weapons; prevent possession by criminals, the mentally ill and children; to require all dealers to be licensed; and to require background checks before delivery. It backed the 1934 National Firearms Act, and parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act, designed to stop what seemed to be America’s hurtle toward violence in that turbulent decade.

But in the mid-1970s, a faction in the NRA forced the organization away from sports and toward opposing “gun control.” It formed a political action committee (PAC) in 1975, and two years later it elected an organization president who abandoned sporting culture and focused instead on “gun rights.”

This was the second thing that led us to where we are today: leaders of the NRA embraced the politics of Movement Conservatism, the political movement that rose to combat the business regulations and social welfare programs that both Democrats and Republicans embraced after World War II. Movement Conservatives embraced the myth of the American cowboy as a white man standing against the “socialism” of the federal government as it sought to level the economic playing field between Black Americans and their white neighbors.

Leaders like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater personified the American cowboy, with his cowboy hat and opposition to government regulation, while television Westerns showed good guys putting down bad guys without the interference of the government.

In 1972, the Republican platform had called for gun control to restrict the sale of “cheap handguns,” but in 1975, as he geared up to challenge President Gerald R. Ford for the 1976 presidential nomination, Movement Conservative hero Ronald Reagan took a stand against gun control. In 1980, the Republican platform opposed the federal registration of firearms, and the NRA endorsed a presidential candidate—Reagan—for the first time.
When President Reagan took office, a new American era, dominated by Movement Conservatives, began. And the power of the NRA over American politics grew.

In 1981 a gunman trying to kill Reagan shot and paralyzed his press secretary, James Brady, and wounded Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy and police officer Thomas Delahanty. After the shooting, then-representative Charles Schumer (D-NY) introduced legislation that became known as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, or the Brady Bill, to require background checks before gun purchases. Reagan, who was a member of the NRA, endorsed the bill, but the NRA spent millions of dollars to defeat it.

After the Brady Bill passed in 1993, the NRA paid for lawsuits in nine states to strike it down. Until 1959, every single legal article on the Second Amendment concluded that it was not intended to guarantee individuals the right to own a gun. But in the 1970s, legal scholars funded by the NRA had begun to argue that the Second Amendment did exactly that.

In 1997, when the Brady Bill cases came before the Supreme Court as Printz v. United States, the Supreme Court declared parts of the measure unconstitutional.

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

Increasingly, NRA money backed Republican candidates. In 2012 the NRA spent $9 million in the presidential election, and in 2014 it spent $13 million. Then, in 2016, it spent over $50 million on Republican candidates, including more than $30 million on Trump’s effort to win the White House. This money was vital to Trump, since many other Republican super PACs refused to back him. The NRA spent more money on Trump than any other outside group, including the leading Trump super PAC, which spent $20.3 million.

The unfettered right to own and carry weapons has come to symbolize the Republican Party’s ideology of individual liberty. Lawmakers and activists have not been able to overcome Republican insistence on gun rights despite the mass shootings that have risen since their new emphasis on guns. Even though 90% of Americans—including nearly 74% of NRA members—support background checks, Republicans have killed such legislation by filibustering it.

The NRA will hold its 2022 annual meeting this Friday in Houston. Former president Trump will speak, along with Texas governor Greg Abbott, senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, and representative Dan Crenshaw; North Carolina lieutenant governor Mark Robinson; and South Dakota governor Kristi Noem—all Republicans. NRA executive vice president and chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre expressed his enthusiasm for the lineup by saying: “President Trump delivered on his promises by appointing judges who respect and value the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and in doing so helped ensure the freedom of generations of Americans.”

Tonight, President Joe Biden spoke to the nation: “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?... It’s time to turn this pain into action. For every parent, for every citizen in this country, we have to make it clear to every elected official in this country, it’s time to act.” In the Senate, Chris Murphy (D-CT) said, "I am here on this floor, to beg, to literally get down on my hands and knees and beg my colleagues....find a way to pass laws that make this less likely."

But it was Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State Warriors basketball team, whose father was murdered by gunmen in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1984, who best expressed the outrage of the nation. At a press conference tonight, shaking, he said, “I’m not going to talk about basketball…. Any basketball questions don’t matter…. Fourteen children were killed 400 miles from here, and a teacher, and in the last ten days we’ve had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo, we’ve had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California, and now we have children murdered at school. WHEN ARE WE GONNA DO SOMETHING? I’m tired, I’m so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families…. I’m tired of the moments of silence. Enough. There’s 50 senators…who refuse to vote on HR 8, which is a background check rule that the House passed a couple years ago…. [N]inety percent of Americans, regardless of political party, want…universal background checks…. We are being held hostage by 50 senators in Washington who refuse to even put it to a vote despite what we the American people want…because they want to hold onto their own power. It’s pathetic,” he said, walking out of the press conference.

“I’ve had enough.”

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 25, 2022 (Wednesday)

All day, I have been coming back to this: How have we arrived at a place where 90% of Americans want to protect our children from gun violence, and yet those who are supposed to represent us in government are unable, or unwilling, to do so?

This is a central problem not just for the issue of gun control, but for our democracy itself.

It seems that during the Cold War, American leaders came to treat democracy and capitalism as if they were interchangeable. So long as the United States embraced capitalism, by which they meant an economic system in which individuals, rather than the state, owned the means of production, liberal democracy would automatically follow.

That theory seemed justified by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The crumbling of that communist system convinced democratic nations that they had won, they had defeated communism, their system of government would dominate the future. Famously, in 1992, political philosopher Francis Fukuyama wrote that humanity had reached “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” In the 1990s, America’s leaders believed that the spread of capitalism would turn the world democratic as it delivered to them global dominance, but they talked a lot less about democracy than they did about so-called free markets.

In fact, the apparent success of capitalism actually undercut democracy in the U.S. The end of the Cold War was a gift to those determined to destroy the popular liberal state that had regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and invested in infrastructure since the New Deal. They turned their animosity from the Soviet Union to the majority at home, those they claimed were bringing communism to America. “For 40 years conservatives fought a two-front battle against statism, against the Soviet empire abroad and the American left at home,” right-wing operative Grover Norquist said in 1994. “Now the Soviet Union is gone and conservatives can redeploy. And this time, the other team doesn't have nuclear weapons.”

Republicans cracked down on Democrats trying to preserve the active government that had been in place since the 1930s. Aided by talk radio hosts, they increasingly demonized their domestic political opponents. In the 1990 midterm elections, a political action committee associated with House Republican whip Newt Gingrich gave to Republican candidates a document called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” It urged candidates to label Democrats with words like “decay,” “failure,” “crisis,” “pathetic,” “liberal,” “radical,” “corrupt,” and “taxes,” while defining Republicans with words like “opportunity,” “moral,” “courage,” “flag,” “children,” “common sense,” “hard work,” and “freedom.” Gingrich later told the New York Times his goal was “reshaping the entire nation through the news media.”

Their focus on capitalism undermined American democracy. They objected when the Democrats in 1993 made it easier to register to vote by passing the so-called Motor-Voter Act, permitting voters to register at certain state offices. The next year, losing Republican candidates argued that Democrats had won their elections with “voter fraud.” In 1996, House and Senate Republicans each launched yearlong investigations into what they insisted were problematic elections, one in Louisiana and one in California. Ultimately, they turned up nothing, but keeping the cases in front of the media for a year helped to convince Americans that voter fraud was a serious issue and that Democrats were winning elections thanks to illegal, usually immigrant, voters.

In 2010 the Supreme Court green-lit the flood of corporate money into our political system with the Citizens’ United decision; in 2013 it gutted the provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act requiring the Department of Justice to sign off on changes to election laws in some states, prompting a slew of discriminatory voter ID laws. In 2010, REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project) enabled Republicans to take over state legislatures and gerrymander the states dramatically in their own favor.

At the same time, the rise of a market-based economy in the former Soviet republics made it clear that capitalism and democracy were not interchangeable. An oligarchy rose from the ashes of the USSR, and U.S. leaders embraced the leaders of that new system as allies. That allyship has gone so far that this week, the Conservative Political Action Conference held a conference in Hungary, where leader Viktor Orbán, who was a keynote speaker at the event, has openly rejected democracy. At the conference, he called for the right in the U.S. to join forces with those like him; yesterday, he declared martial law in his country.

At home, where our focus on free markets has stacked our political system in favor of the Republicans, the vast majority of Americans want reasonable gun laws, reproductive rights, action on climate change, equality before the law, infrastructure funding, and so on, and their representatives are unable to get those things.

Capitalism, it seems, is also trumping democracy at home.

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 26, 2022 (Thursday)

One of the key things that drove the rise of the current Republican Party was the celebration of a certain model of an ideal man, patterned on the image of the American cowboy. Republicans claimed to be defending individual men who could protect their families if only the federal government would stop interfering with them. Beginning in the 1950s, those opposed to government regulation and civil rights decisions pushed the imagery of the cowboy, who ran cattle on the Great Plains from 1866 to about 1886 and who, in legend, was a white man who worked hard, fought hard against Indigenous Americans, and wanted only for the government to leave him alone.

That image was not true to the real cowboys, at least a third of whom were Black or men of color, or to the reality of government intervention in the Great Plains, which was more extensive there than in any other region of the country. It was a reaction to federal laws after the Civil War defending Black rights in the post–Civil War South, laws white racists said were federal overreach that could only lead to what they insisted was “socialism.”

In the 1950s, the idea of an individual hardworking man taking care of his family and beholden to no one was an attractive image to those who disliked government protection of civil rights, and politicians who wanted to dissolve business regulation pulled them into the Republican Party by playing to the mythology of movie heroes like John Wayne. Part of that mythology, of course, was the idea that men with guns could defend their families, religion, and freedom against a government trying to crush them. By the 1980s, the National Rifle Association had abandoned its traditional stance promoting gun safety and was defending “gun rights” and the Republican Party; in the 1990s, talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh fed the militia movement with inflammatory warnings that the government was coming for a man’s guns, destroying his ability to protect his family.

That cowboy image has stoked an obsession with guns and with military hardware and war training in police departments. It feeds a conviction that true men dominate situations, both at home and abroad, with violence. That dominance, in turn, is supposed to protect society’s vulnerable women and children.

In 2008, in the District of Columbia v. Heller decision, the Supreme Court said that individuals have a right to own firearms outside of membership in a militia or for traditional purposes such as hunting or self-defense, and dramatically limited federal regulation of them. Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority decision, was a leading “originalist” on the court, eager to erase the decisions of the post-WWII courts that upheld business regulation and civil rights.

In 2004, a ten-year federal ban on assault weapons expired, and since then. mass shootings have tripled. Zusha Elinson, who is writing a history of the bestselling AR-15 military style weapon used in many mass shootings, notes that there were about 400,000 AR-15 style rifles in America before the assault weapons ban went into effect in 1994. Today, there are 20 million.

For years now, Republicans have stood firmly against measures to guard Americans against gun violence, even as a majority of Americans support commonsense measures like background checks. Notably, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, when a gunman murdered 20 six- and seven-year-old students and 6 staff members, Republicans in the Senate filibustered a bipartisan bill sponsored by Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Pat Toomey (R-PA) that would have expanded background checks, killing it despite the 55 votes in favor of it.

Since Sandy Hook, the nation has suffered more than 3500 mass shootings, and Republicans have excused them by claiming they didn’t actually happen, or by insisting we need more guns so there will be “a good guy with a gun” to take out a shooter, or that we need to “harden targets,” or that we need more police in the schools (which has simply led to more student arrests), or as Senator Ted Cruz said today, to limit the number of doors in schools, or, as a guest on Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show said, to put “mantraps” and trip wires in the schools.

The initial story of what happened on Tuesday in Uvalde fit the Republican myth. Police spokespeople told reporters that a school district police officer confronted the shooter outside the building before he barricaded himself in a classroom, killing 19 and wounding 22 others in his rampage.

But as more details are emerging today, they are undermining the myth itself.

Robb Elementary School, where the murders took place, had already been “hardened” with the town investing more than $650,000 in security enhancements, but the shooter apparently entered through an unlocked door. The Uvalde police department consumes 40% of the town’s budget and has its own Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) unit. And yet, the stories that are emerging from Uvalde suggest that the shooter fired shots outside the school for 12 minutes before entering it and that he was not, in fact, confronted outside. Police officers arrived at the same time he entered the school, but they did not go in until after he had been in the building for four minutes. Seven officers then entered, but the lone gunman apparently drove them out with gunfire, and they stayed outside, holding back frantic parents, until Border Patrol tactical officers arrived a full hour later.

Parents tried to get the police to go in but instead found themselves under attack for interfering with an investigation. One man was thrown to the ground and pepper sprayed. U.S. Marshals arrested and handcuffed Angeli Rose Gomez, whose children were in the school and who had had time to drive 40 miles to get to them, for interfering as she demanded they do something. Gomez got local officers she knew to talk the Marshals into releasing her. Then she jumped the school fence, ran in, grabbed her two kids, and ran out.

A Texas Department of Safety official told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer tonight that the law enforcement officers at the school were reluctant to engage the gunman because “they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed.”

There are still many, many questions about what happened in Uvalde, but it seems clear that the heroes protecting the children were not the guys with guns, but the moms and the dads and the two female teachers who died trying to protect their students: Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia. News reports today say that Garcia’s husband, Joseph, died this morning of a heart attack, leaving four children.

Last week, in the aftermath of the deadly attack on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, Democrats in the House of Representatives quickly passed a a domestic terrorism bill. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) tried to get the Senate to take it up today. It would have sparked a debate on gun safety. Republicans blocked it. In the aftermath of Tuesday’s massacre, only five Republicans have said they are willing to consider background checks for gun purchases. That is not enough to break a filibuster.

Last night, Texas candidate for governor Beto O’Rourke confronted Texas governor Greg Abbott at a press conference. Last year, Abbott signed at least seven new laws to make it easier to obtain guns, and after the Uvalde murders, he said tougher gun laws are not “a real solution.” O’Rourke offered a different vision for defending our children than stocking up on guns. "The time to stop the next shooting is right now, and you are doing nothing," O'Rourke said, standing in front of a dais at which Abbott sat. "You said this is not predictable…. This is totally predictable…. This is on you, until you choose to do something different…. This will continue to happen. Somebody needs to stand up for the children of this state or they will continue to be killed, just like they were killed in Uvalde yesterday.”

Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin shouted profanities at O'Rourke; Texas Republican lieutenant governorDan Patrick told the former congressman, "You're out of line and an embarrassment”; and Senator Ted Cruz told him, “Sit down.”

But this evening the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays announced they would use their social media channels not to cover tonight’s game but to share facts about gun violence. “The devastating events that have taken place in Uvalde, Buffalo and countless other communities across our nation are tragedies that are intolerable.”

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 27, 2022 (Friday)

The timeline for the Uvalde massacre is becoming clearer.

After shooting his grandmother in the face and taking her truck, the gunman got to Robb Elementary School at 11:28 Tuesday morning and started firing into the school windows. A police officer responded to a call about the shooter but drove by him, instead mistaking a teacher for the suspect. The gunman got into the school through a door that had been propped open, and began his rampage down a hallway, ending up at about 11:30 in two joined fourth-grade classrooms, 111 and 112, with students and two teachers.

He apparently closed and locked the door. He shot the teachers first, and then students.

Local police responded, and several ran into the school. Two were wounded slightly at the doorway when bullets came through it. By noon, there were 19 police officers in the school and many others outside. Parents were gathering, urging the officers to charge the shooter. Officers warned them not to interfere with an ongoing investigation, arresting at least one and pinning another to the ground. By 12:15, a tactical team from the U.S. Border Patrol arrived at the school.

But there appears to have been confusion about who was in charge. Uvalde is a town of about 16,000 people, and it has a six-officer department to oversee eight schools, as well as a city police force with a SWAT team. The first people on the scene were city officers, but Pedro Arredondo, the chief of police for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, took charge.

Arredondo apparently ordered the officers not to rush the classroom despite the sporadic gunfire coming from it. The head of the Texas state police, Steven C.McCraw, said today that, despite decades of active shooter trainings that call for rushing a gunman, Arredondo decided that the gunman had barricaded himself in the classroom and was no longer an active shooter, and thus there were no children at risk. He decided to wait for more equipment and more officers to arrive before attempting to break into the room.

At least two children trapped in the classroom with the shooter called 911 at least eight times during the siege to beg for help. “Please send the police now,” one girl whispered on one of her several calls.

At about 12:50, the Border Patrol officers got a key from a janitor, unlocked the door, stormed the room and killed the gunman.

The gunman was in the school for 78 minutes before law enforcement officers went in after him. He killed 21 people and wounded 17 more.

In a press conference today, McCraw called the delay in rushing the gunman “the wrong decision.” Asked what he would say to the parents, he responded: “I don’t have anything to say to the parents, other than what happened. We are not here to defend what happened, we are here to report the facts…. If I thought it would help, I would apologize.”

The events in Uvalde have dealt a devastating blow to the theory that a good guy with a gun will prevent gun violence.

A Politico/Morning consult poll out Wednesday showed “huge support” for gun regulations. It showed that 88% of voters strongly or somewhat support background checks on all gun sales, while only 8% strongly or somewhat oppose such checks. That’s a net approval of +80.

Preventing gun sales to people who have been reported to police as dangerous by a mental health provider is supported by 84% of voters while only 9% oppose it, a net approval of +75.

Seventy-seven percent of voters support requiring guns to be stored in a safe storage unit, while only 15% oppose such a requirement, a net approval of +62.

A national database for gun sales gets 75% approval and 18% disapproval, a net approval rate of +57.

Banning assault style weapons like the AR-15 has an approval rate of 67% of voters while only 25% disapprove. That’s a net approval of +42.

And fifty-four percent of voters approve of arming teachers with concealed weapons, while only 34% oppose it, a net approval of +20.

And yet, their opposition to regulation and their embrace of cowboy individualism means Republicans have made it clear they will not entertain any measures to regulate gun ownership, except perhaps the last one, which teachers, parents, students, and the two largest teachers’ unions all overwhelmingly oppose.

The party appears to be doubling down on their support for expanded gun rights, trying to convince gun owners that the regulations under which we lived until 2004 will somehow end gun ownership altogether. Today, Texas Senator Ted Cruz seemed to be trying to distract the popular fury over the massacre with an argument that schools need fewer doors, a nonsensical argument that seemed designed to derail the public conversation as people go down rabbit holes talking about fire safety and extended school campuses, gym class, and recess, and murderers who simply pull fire alarms.

When the National Rifle Association opened its annual conference today in Houston, Texas, former president Trump attended, although others had begged off because of the massacre. “You are the backbone of our movement,” he told the crowd, which was not allowed to have guns—or knives, or laser pointers—in the General Assembly Hall to protect Trump’s safety. “He’s always with us, always supporting us, when a lot of people are running in the other direction,” a man from Houston told Glenn Thrush of the New York Times. “I think him coming here, at this time, is huge.”

But there is something else huge at work in the country right now, too. Protests against the weaponry that makes gun violence the leading cause of death for those between the ages of 1 and 24 are spreading. Today, more than 4000 protesters, including Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate for Texas governor, gathered in the 93 degree heat outside the NRA convention to share their stories of gun violence and their contempt for leaders who refuse to stand against it. Children stood with pictures of the children murdered in Uvalde with signs that said: “Am I next?” O’Rourke told the crowd: “The time for us to stop mass shootings in this country is right now, right here, today."

Tonight, Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state who stood up to Trump when he accused her of preparing to rig the vote in 2020, tweeted: “The only thing that can stop a bad politician with a vote is a good citizen with a vote.”

brianlux · May 2022

mickeyrat said:

May 27, 2022 (Friday)

The timeline for the Uvalde massacre is becoming clearer.

After shooting his grandmother in the face and taking her truck, the gunman got to Robb Elementary School at 11:28 Tuesday morning and started firing into the school windows. A police officer responded to a call about the shooter but drove by him, instead mistaking a teacher for the suspect. The gunman got into the school through a door that had been propped open, and began his rampage down a hallway, ending up at about 11:30 in two joined fourth-grade classrooms, 111 and 112, with students and two teachers.

He apparently closed and locked the door. He shot the teachers first, and then students.

Local police responded, and several ran into the school. Two were wounded slightly at the doorway when bullets came through it. By noon, there were 19 police officers in the school and many others outside. Parents were gathering, urging the officers to charge the shooter. Officers warned them not to interfere with an ongoing investigation, arresting at least one and pinning another to the ground. By 12:15, a tactical team from the U.S. Border Patrol arrived at the school.

But there appears to have been confusion about who was in charge. Uvalde is a town of about 16,000 people, and it has a six-officer department to oversee eight schools, as well as a city police force with a SWAT team. The first people on the scene were city officers, but Pedro Arredondo, the chief of police for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, took charge.

Arredondo apparently ordered the officers not to rush the classroom despite the sporadic gunfire coming from it. The head of the Texas state police, Steven C.McCraw, said today that, despite decades of active shooter trainings that call for rushing a gunman, Arredondo decided that the gunman had barricaded himself in the classroom and was no longer an active shooter, and thus there were no children at risk. He decided to wait for more equipment and more officers to arrive before attempting to break into the room.

At least two children trapped in the classroom with the shooter called 911 at least eight times during the siege to beg for help. “Please send the police now,” one girl whispered on one of her several calls.

At about 12:50, the Border Patrol officers got a key from a janitor, unlocked the door, stormed the room and killed the gunman.

The gunman was in the school for 78 minutes before law enforcement officers went in after him. He killed 21 people and wounded 17 more.

In a press conference today, McCraw called the delay in rushing the gunman “the wrong decision.” Asked what he would say to the parents, he responded: “I don’t have anything to say to the parents, other than what happened. We are not here to defend what happened, we are here to report the facts…. If I thought it would help, I would apologize.”

The events in Uvalde have dealt a devastating blow to the theory that a good guy with a gun will prevent gun violence.

A Politico/Morning consult poll out Wednesday showed “huge support” for gun regulations. It showed that 88% of voters strongly or somewhat support background checks on all gun sales, while only 8% strongly or somewhat oppose such checks. That’s a net approval of +80.

Preventing gun sales to people who have been reported to police as dangerous by a mental health provider is supported by 84% of voters while only 9% oppose it, a net approval of +75.

Seventy-seven percent of voters support requiring guns to be stored in a safe storage unit, while only 15% oppose such a requirement, a net approval of +62.

A national database for gun sales gets 75% approval and 18% disapproval, a net approval rate of +57.

Banning assault style weapons like the AR-15 has an approval rate of 67% of voters while only 25% disapprove. That’s a net approval of +42.

And fifty-four percent of voters approve of arming teachers with concealed weapons, while only 34% oppose it, a net approval of +20.

And yet, their opposition to regulation and their embrace of cowboy individualism means Republicans have made it clear they will not entertain any measures to regulate gun ownership, except perhaps the last one, which teachers, parents, students, and the two largest teachers’ unions all overwhelmingly oppose.

The party appears to be doubling down on their support for expanded gun rights, trying to convince gun owners that the regulations under which we lived until 2004 will somehow end gun ownership altogether. Today, Texas Senator Ted Cruz seemed to be trying to distract the popular fury over the massacre with an argument that schools need fewer doors, a nonsensical argument that seemed designed to derail the public conversation as people go down rabbit holes talking about fire safety and extended school campuses, gym class, and recess, and murderers who simply pull fire alarms.

When the National Rifle Association opened its annual conference today in Houston, Texas, former president Trump attended, although others had begged off because of the massacre. “You are the backbone of our movement,” he told the crowd, which was not allowed to have guns—or knives, or laser pointers—in the General Assembly Hall to protect Trump’s safety. “He’s always with us, always supporting us, when a lot of people are running in the other direction,” a man from Houston told Glenn Thrush of the New York Times. “I think him coming here, at this time, is huge.”

But there is something else huge at work in the country right now, too. Protests against the weaponry that makes gun violence the leading cause of death for those between the ages of 1 and 24 are spreading. Today, more than 4000 protesters, including Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic candidate for Texas governor, gathered in the 93 degree heat outside the NRA convention to share their stories of gun violence and their contempt for leaders who refuse to stand against it. Children stood with pictures of the children murdered in Uvalde with signs that said: “Am I next?” O’Rourke told the crowd: “The time for us to stop mass shootings in this country is right now, right here, today."

Tonight, Jocelyn Benson, the Michigan secretary of state who stood up to Trump when he accused her of preparing to rig the vote in 2020, tweeted: “The only thing that can stop a bad politician with a vote is a good citizen with a vote.”

We have the stats highlighted above and yet the minority party is able to negate what the majority (in some cases, the vast majority) are calling for. What madness.

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 28, 2022 (Saturday)

It's been a long, hard week. Going to call an early night.

Before I do, though.... Thank you all for being here. I have heard people this week despair of this country, but I look around at you all and I have faith.

And so... I'll be back at it tomorrow.

[Photo, "Good Morning," by Buddy Poland.]

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 29, 2022 (Sunday)

While there is a lot going on in the country and the world today, it seems as important as ever to honor Memorial Day, the day we have honored since 1868, when we mourn those military personnel who have died in the service of the country—that is, for the rest of us.

For me, one of those people is Beau Bryant. I have written about him before, but this time, there is a new ending.

When we were growing up, we hung out at one particular house where a friend’s mom provided unlimited peanut butter and fluff sandwiches, Uno games, iced tea and lemonade, sympathetic ears, and stories. She talked about Beau, her older brother, in the same way we talked about all our people, and her stories made him part of our world even though he had been killed in World War II 19 years before we were born.

Beau’s real name was Floyston, and he had always stepped in as a father to his three younger sisters when their own father fell short.

When World War II came, Beau was working as a plumber and was helping his mother make ends meet, but in September 1942 he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He became a staff sergeant in the 322nd Bomber Squadron, 91st Bomb Group, nicknamed "Wray's Ragged Irregulars" after their commander Col. Stanley T. Wray. By the time Beau joined, the squadron was training with new B-17s at Dow Army Airfield near Bangor, Maine, and before deploying to England he hitchhiked three hours home so he could see his family once more.

It would be the last time. The 91st Bomb Group was a pioneer bomb group, figuring out tactics for air cover. By May 1943, it was experienced enough to lead the Eighth Air Force as it sought to establish air superiority over Europe. But the 91st did not have adequate fighter support until 1944. It had the greatest casualty rate of any of the heavy bomb squadrons.

Beau was one of the casualties. On August 12, 1943, just a week before his sister turned 18, while he was on a mission, enemy flak cut his oxygen line and he died before the plane could make it back to base. He was buried in Cambridge, England, at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, the military cemetery for Americans killed in action during WWII. He was twenty years old.

I grew up with Beau’s nephews and nieces, and we made decades of havoc and memories. But Beau's children weren't there, and neither he nor they are part of the memories.

Thinking about our untimely dead is hard enough, but I am haunted by the holes those deaths rip forever in the social fabric: the discoveries not made, the problems not solved, the marriages not celebrated, the babies not born.

I know of this man only what his sister told me: that he was a decent fellow who did what he could to support his mother and his sisters. Before he entered the service, he once spent a week’s paycheck on a dress for my friend’s mother so she could go to a dance.

And he gave up not only his life but also his future to protect American democracy against the spread of fascism.

I first wrote about Beau when his sister passed, for it felt to me like another kind of death that, with his sisters now all gone, along with almost all of their friends, soon there would be no one left who even remembered his name.

But something amazing happened after I wrote about him. People started visiting Beau’s grave in England, leaving flowers, and sending me pictures of the cross that bears his name.

So he, and perhaps all he stood for, will not be forgotten after all.

May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.

[Photo by Carole Green.]

mickeyrat · May 2022

May 30, 2022 (Monday)

Outrage continues over the Uvalde massacre of last Tuesday, May 24, in which 21 people were killed and 17 wounded. The assault on this elementary school stands out for many reasons: the youth of the victims, the apparent mishandling of the situation by law enforcement officers, and the heroism of the parents, for example. After all, there have been at least 14 mass shootings in the U.S. since the Uvalde murders, killing at least 10 people and wounding another 61, and they have gotten much less attention.

But the response to the Uvalde massacre reminds me of the response to the murder of George Floyd under the knee of then-officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020, almost exactly two years before the crisis at Uvalde.

Caught on video by then-17-year-old Darnella Frazier, Mr. Floyd’s murder represented more than the killing of one man: it illustrated the abuse of power by the government.

After almost four years of an administration in which the president and his advisors had openly uprooted governmental guardrails and claimed the right to impose their will on the country unchecked, the message that the government was abusing its power was one that lots of Americans were ready to hear. That new awareness included those who might not have paid particular attention to the longstanding abuse of power by police officers toward Black people, or to the dramatic militarization of our police forces since the government began transferring unneeded or outdated military equipment from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to police departments. Mr. Floyd’s murder seemed to personify that societal anger.

The fury of the response to the Uvalde murders, after many years in which many in the country seemed to move on from dramatic mass murders seems to me a reflection not only of the unspeakable carnage in this country, but also of the political corruption that permits it to take place.

That the modern-day Republican Party has managed repeatedly to stop the commonsense gun regulations that the vast majority of us want, even when their stubbornness means our children die at school, seems finally to have sparked a reaction against the party’s skewing of the political system across the board.

Texas governor Greg Abbott boasted last year of signing at least 7 new laws to make it easier to get guns, including a law allowing people to carry handguns without permits. When Abbott visited Uvalde on Sunday, people booed him. Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, both Republicans, pulled out of personal appearances at the National Rifle Association conference meeting in Houston on Friday.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) seems to fear the power of this fury. He told CNN on Thursday that he has encouraged Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) to meet with Democrats to try to hash out a bipartisan solution in response to the Uvalde school shooting. If I had to guess, I’d say McConnell is simply trying to buy time until the furor calms a bit, just as he did with Trump’s second impeachment. As Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer detailed on Saturday in the Washington Post, McConnell “has spent his career working to delay, obstruct or prevent most major firearms restrictions from being approved by Congress.” His approach has consistently been to suggest vague support for a solution, then to undercut any action. And Cornyn boasts an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association, suggesting his enthusiasm for gun safety reform might be well under control.

But regardless of what happens with gun safety regulation in the next few weeks, Americans unhappy with Republican manipulation of our political system are unlikely to be reassured. On June 9, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol will begin six televised hearings to explain to the American people what happened on and around that day.

That story is unlikely to reflect well on Republican leadership, who are trying to discredit the committee itself by claiming it is illegitimate. Their wiggling doesn’t look great for those who are supposed to be responsible for writing our laws.

The story is that the House tried to set up a bipartisan commission, and Senate Republicans used the filibuster to kill it (almost exactly a year ago today, actually). Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi used precisely the same model Republicans had used to set up their 2014 Benghazi probe. Pelosi had the power to name the chair and 13 members, five of them in consultation with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). McCarthy’s picks included Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Jim Banks (R-IN), both of whom were closely linked to Trump and had already expressed opposition to the committee. When Pelosi refused to add Jordan and Banks to the roster, McCarthy withdrew all the Republicans he had chosen. Pelosi then added Republicans Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), and kept the committee at 9 people.

When asked to cooperate with the committee or respond to subpoenas, Republicans have since tried to argue that it is illegitimate. But early this month, U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly—appointed by former president Trump—dismissed all those claims.

That decision came in a case about a committee subpoena for the Republican National Committee’s email marketing data from Salesforce, Inc., the company that handled fundraising emails in the weeks after Trump lost the election. The committee asked for the emails in February, wanting to determine to what degree they asked for donations by claiming that the election results were fraudulent. It could have seen who coordinated the emails, how many people opened the emails that spread false information, and whether any of those folks were eventually among those who stormed the Capitol. The RNC sued Salesforce, its own email vendor, in March to stop the production of those documents. Yesterday, though, the committee said that the case has been held up so long that it recognizes it no longer has time to analyze the information before the hearings, even if it were to get that data.

There are other subpoenas also being stonewalled. The committee subpoenaed Representatives McCarthy, Jordan, Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Scott Perry (R-PA), and Mo Brooks (R-AL) earlier this month. Their responses are coming in now, and they indicate that these members of Congress continue to reject the legitimacy of the committee.

On Wednesday, May 25, Biggs’s lawyers said his subpoena had not been properly served, the committee is not valid, and anything Biggs did is protected because it was part of his legislative duties. Jordan told the committee the same day that he would not comply with a subpoena until it told him all the evidence—documents, videos, or anything else—it has about him beforehand.

On Friday, McCarthy’s lawyer sent an 11-page letter to the committee denying its legitimacy and attacking the ability of Congress to investigate a potential crime because its mandate is only to make laws. And on Sunday, Brooks claimed to Fox News Sunday guest host Sandra Smith that he had not been served with a subpoena, and he said he wanted to talk with his subpoenaed colleagues before responding.

Meanwhile, Perry has simply said the whole committee effort is a charade, but on Thursday, May 26, he was in the news when someone told Politico reporters Betsy Woodruff Swan and Kyle Cheney what Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked under then–White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, had told the committee. Hutchinson apparently testified that Meadows burned papers in his office following a meeting there with Perry after Election Day 2020.

The New York Times had previously reported that Meadows had burned papers in his office fireplace.

If Americans are concerned that the Republicans have gamed the system, the January 6 committee hearings seem unlikely to provide much reassurance.

mickeyrat · June 2022

May 31, 2022 (Tuesday)

The story presented by the police about the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, was that a teacher propped open the door the murderer used to enter the building. In fact, the teacher slammed the door shut and called the police because the shooter was firing a weapon outside. The door did not lock as it should have.

Today, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief in charge during the massacre, was sworn in as a Uvalde city council member. The Uvalde mayor said in a statement: “Out of respect for the families who buried their children today, and who are planning to bury their children in the next few days, no ceremony was held.”

News reports today said that the Uvalde police stopped cooperating with the Texas Department of Public Safety investigation after TxDPS director Colonel Steven McCraw on Friday told reporters that the police made “the wrong decision” and had not acted in accord with protocol, suggesting they had already come to a conclusion, but TxDPS later said that it was only Arredondo who was not responding to their requests. The Department of Justice is also reviewing the police response to the mass shooting.

After six hours of deliberation, a federal jury today acquitted Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussman of making a false statement to the FBI. This is the outcome of the Trump administration’s attempt to discredit the investigation into the ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.

In May 2019, then–attorney general William Barr appointed John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation to see if it was “lawful and appropriate.” This was a pretty transparent attempt to salt the media with stories about how Trump was being persecuted by Democrats and how the connections between his campaign and Russian operatives were, as he said, a “hoax.”

Using “investigations” to sway public opinion has been a Republican tactic since House Speaker Newt Gingrich ran investigations about "voter fraud" in the 1990s. Those investigations never turned up any evidence, but the constant news coverage convinced many voters that voter fraud was a huge problem. Ditto with Benghazi, and Hillary's emails. Trump tried to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to say he was investigating Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine.

Durham’s investigation seemed to be in this vein. Although a Department of Justice inspector concluded that the investigation had been begun properly and the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee endorsed that conclusion, in summer 2020, Barr publicly disagreed, saying that the Russia probe was “one of the greatest travesties in American history” and that Durham’s job was not to “prepare a report” but to establish criminal violations that would lead to prosecutions. Trump supporters expected that Durham’s report would help Trump in 2020, and although DOJ policy is to avoid roiling the country in the 60 days before an election, Barr said that he would feel free within that period to release the results of Durham’s investigation.

In September 2020, then–White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that he had seen “additional” documents from Durham’s investigation that spell “trouble” for former FBI officials who began the inquiry into the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia. "Additional documents that I’ve been able to review say that a number of the players, the Peter Strzoks, the Andy McCabes, the James Comeys, and even others in the administration previously are in real trouble because of their willingness to participate in an unlawful act and I use the word unlawful at best, it broke all kinds of protocols and at worst people should go to jail as I mentioned previously," Meadows said.

That month, a top aide to Durham resigned from the investigation, allegedly out of concerns about political pressure. A Republican congressional aide told Axios: “This is the nightmare scenario. Essentially, the year and a half of arguably the number one issue for the Republican base is virtually meaningless if this doesn't happen before the election.”

But it was not until September 2021, days before the statute of limitations ran out, that Durham announced a grand jury indictment of Michael Sussman, a lawyer working for the Clinton campaign, for lying to the FBI. Sussman worked for the same law firm that represented the campaign, and he took to the FBI the information that cybersecurity security experts had uncovered a possible computer link between Russia’s Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank and Trump Tower.

Durham said Sussman had lied to the FBI by saying he was not working for a client when he alerted them to the issue. Sussman denies he said he did not have a client, and identified himself as working for the cybersecurity experts. In his indictment, Durham said the cybersecurity experts did not believe their own suggestion of connections between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower and were trying to hurt candidate Trump. They responded by accusing Durham of editing their emails misleadingly and stood behind their earlier conclusions. In any case, the DOJ inspector general concluded that the FBI investigation started over something completely different: a boast from a member of the Trump campaign to an informant that the campaign had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

In a court filing in February 2022, Durham chummed the waters by vaguely suggesting that one of the cybersecurity experts, who was working for the White House as part of a cybersecurity contract, “exploited” his access there to find “derogatory information” about Trump. This was false, and Durham quickly walked it back, but Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) told the Fox News Channel: “They were spying on the sitting president of the United States…. And it goes right to the Clinton campaign,” and the former president claimed that Durham had provided “indisputable evidence that my campaign and presidency were spied on by operatives paid by the Hillary Clinton Campaign in an effort to develop a completely fabricated connection to Russia.… In a stronger period of time in our country, this crime would have been punishable by death.”

And today, a jury found Sussman not guilty. Asked if the prosecution was a good idea, the foreperson of the jury said: “Personally, I don’t think it should have been prosecuted because I think we have better time or resources to use or spend [on] other things that affect the nation as a whole than a possible lie to the FBI. We could spend that time more wisely.”

But the Durham investigation did accomplish what it set out to. It lasted a year longer than the Mueller probe, and in that time, it manufactured an alternative narrative for right-wing media that undermined the reality Mueller’s report set out: that the Trump campaign worked in tandem with Russian operatives.

Today, former president Trump hammered on another myth when he sent to his followers an email linking to an article that claims the Georgia Republican primary was rigged. In that primary, the candidate Trump endorsed lost by a huge margin. Trump appears to believe that neither he nor anyone he endorses can lose an election fair and square, which bodes ill for the 2022 midterms.

But Trump has another reason to push the narrative that Georgia’s elections are suspect. Tomorrow, a special grand jury in Fulton County will begin to hear testimony and examine evidence to determine whether Trump or his team committed crimes when they tried to get Georgia officials to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia in 2020.

Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis has already subpoenaed six officials from the Georgia secretary of state’s office, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was the recipient of Trump’s January 2, 2021, phone call demanding that Raffensperger “find 11,780 votes” to give him victory in Georgia. Raffensperger recorded the call.

After it is done collecting information, the special grand jury will issue a report to Willis recommending whether she should issue criminal indictments.

mickeyrat · June 2022

June 1, 2022 (Wednesday)

Today, with the radical right the most loyal voting bloc in the party, Republican leaders refuse to call out even the most extreme statements from their followers. But once upon a time, Republican politicians were the champions of reason and compromise. Famously, on June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, stood up against Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin and his supporters, who were running roughshod over American democracy.

Born in Skowhegan in 1897, the oldest child of a barber and a waitress, Smith was a teacher and a reporter who got into politics through her husband, Clyde Smith, who was a state legislator and newspaperman. Soon after they married in 1930, she was elected to the Maine Republican State Committee and served until 1936, when Maine voters elected Clyde to Congress.

Once in Washington, Margaret worked as her husband’s researcher, speechwriter, and press secretary. When Clyde died of a heart attack in April 1940, voters elected Margaret to finish his term, then reelected her to Congress in her own right. They did so three more times, always with more than sixty percent of the vote. In 1948, they elected her to the Senate with a 71% majority.

When she was elected to Congress, the U.S. was still getting used to the New Deal government that Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt had ushered in first to combat the Great Depression and then to fight for victory in World War II. Smith’s party was divided between those who thought the new system was a proper adjustment to the modern world and those determined to destroy that new government.

Those who wanted to slash the government back to the form it had in the 1920s, when businessmen ran it, had a problem. American voters liked the business regulation, basic social safety net, and infrastructure construction of the new system. To combat that popularity, the anti–New Deal Republicans insisted that the U.S. government was sliding toward communism. With the success of the People’s Liberation Army and the declaration of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, Americans were willing to entertain the idea that communism was spreading across the globe and would soon take over the U.S.

Republican politicians eager to reclaim control of the government for the first time since 1933 fanned the flames of that fear. On February 9, 1950, during a speech to a group gathered in Wheeling, West Virginia, to celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, an undistinguished senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy claimed that he had a list of 205 communists working for the State Department and that the Democrats refused to investigate these “traitors in the government.”

The anti–New Deal faction of the party jumped on board. Sympathetic newspapers trumpeted McCarthy’s charges—which kept changing, and for which he never offered proof—and his colleagues cheered him on while congress members from the Republican faction that had signed onto the liberal consensus kept their heads down to avoid becoming the target of his attacks.

All but one of them did, that is. Senator Smith recognized the damage McCarthy and his ilk were doing to the nation.
On June 1, 1950, only four months after McCarthy made his infamous speech in Wheeling, Smith stood up in the Senate to make a short speech.

She began: “I would like to speak briefly and simply about a serious national condition. It is a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and the end of everything that we Americans hold dear…. I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American.”

Referring to Senator McCarthy, who was sitting two rows behind her, Senator Smith condemned the leaders in her party who were destroying lives with wild accusations. “Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America,” Senator Smith said. “It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”

Senator Smith wanted a Republican victory in the upcoming elections, she explained, but to replace President Harry Truman’s Democratic administration—for which she had plenty of harsh words—with a Republican regime “that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation.”

“I do not want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.”

“I doubt if the Republican Party could do so,” she added, “simply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans are not that desperate for victory.”

“I do not want to see the Republican Party win that way,” she said. “While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican [P]arty, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be suicide for the Republican [P]arty and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system.”

“As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist,” she said. “They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”

Smith presented a “Declaration of Conscience,” listing five principles she hoped her party would adopt. It ended with a warning: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”

Six other Republican senators signed onto Senator Smith’s declaration.

There were two reactions to the speech within the party. McCarthy sneered at “Snow White and the Six Dwarves.” Other Republicans quietly applauded Smith’s courage but refused to show similar courage themselves with public support. In the short term, Senator Smith’s voice was largely ignored in the public arena and then, when the Korean War broke out, forgotten.

But she was, of course, right. Four years later, the Senate condemned McCarthy. And while Senator Smith was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, McCarthy has gone down in history as a disgrace to the Senate and to the United States of America.

[Photo U.S. Senate Historical Office.]

brianlux · June 2022

We need a Margaret Chase Smith TODAY!

static111 · June 2022

brianlux said:

We need a Margaret Chase Smith TODAY!

Someone that speaks up and gets largely ignored by her own party? Liz Cheney...

mickeyrat · June 2022

June 2, 2022 (Thursday)

Yesterday, Kyle Cheney at Politico flagged a new document released last week by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. John Eastman, the lawyer informally advising Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, has tried repeatedly to slow down or stop producing the documents the courts have told him he must. As part of that process, U.S. District Court Judge David Carter reviewed a number of documents. In March, he concluded that one particular memo must be released under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege, a rule that shields communications between lawyers and their clients.

That memo was perhaps “the first time members of President Trump’s team transformed a legal interpretation of the Electoral Count Act into a day-by-day plan of action,” Carter wrote. He said that the memo “knowingly violated the Electoral Count Act,” the 1887 law that establishes clear procedures for states to certify their electoral votes and assigns to the Vice President the role of opening the certified electoral votes. Carter continued that the memo “likely furthered the crimes of obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States.” Last week, the January 6 committee made the memo public in its ongoing legal fight with Eastman.

The memo is a several-page document from Kenneth Chesebro to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, then sent to Eastman, outlining precisely how then–vice president Mike Pence could refuse to count the electors for Democrat Joe Biden. It is the detailed version of the story we now know all too well: Trump activists in the states would claim their own electors, and even though they would not be legally certified, Pence would say he couldn’t count in either slate until the election was more closely examined. Chesebro hammered hard on the idea that the Constitution gave the vice president alone the authority to determine the outcome of a presidential election. This, he wrote, was the “strict textual, originalist basis” rather than the rules set out in the Electoral Count Act.

His plan was for Pence to refuse to preside over the counting of electors, as specified in the ECA, and instead to have Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) or another Republican in the chair. That officer would refuse to count the ballots where there were two slates, thus insulating Trump and Pence from the election steal.

Chesebro’s goal was not necessarily to install Trump back in the White House, which he was not entirely convinced the Supreme Court would accept “even though a majority might well agree…that the Constitution is correctly construed, from an originalist perspective.” Instead, he hoped that, even “if Biden were to win in the Court, much will still have been accomplished, in riveting public attention on election abuses, and building momentum to prevent similar abuses in the future.”

There’s plenty here to unpack, but what jumps out to me is that last line. The conspirators planned to break a federal law in place since 1887 in order to convince Americans that Democrats stole a presidential election—the “big lie”—all with the larger goal of making sure that there could be no “similar abuses in the future.”

We have reached a place where Republican leaders no longer believe in the principle the nation’s Founders articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The idea that a government’s legitimacy comes from the fact its people choose it was the huge leap the Founders made to create a nation based not on monarchy but on democracy, and it is one of the two foundational principles of our government. Republicans appear to have rejected this principle and moved to the position that the election of Democrats is illegitimate and stopping such a victory—even if it is fairly won—is important enough to break long-standing laws in order to do it.

And so, even after the January 6 plan failed, they have spent a year insisting that Democrat Joe Biden couldn’t possibly have won the presidency legitimately, despite the overwhelming popular vote and winning electoral vote, the many recounts and legal challenges confirming his victory, and the admission by Trump’s own attorney general that the vote was fair and Trump lost.

Their propaganda has worked. On May 31, Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times noted after the recent Republican primaries that candidates, even those candidates who insisted there was voter fraud in 2020, brushed off the idea that there might have been anything fishy about the Republican primaries. Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL), who worked hard to undermine the 2020 election with false claims that it was fraudulent and who spoke at the January 6 rally at the Ellipse in body armor urging Trump supporters to march on the Capitol, told Epstein and Corasaniti that he wasn’t worried about election fraud in Republican primaries because there wasn’t any.

“I’m in a Republican primary, and noncitizens don’t normally vote in Republican primaries,” Mr. Brooks said. In another interview, he said that in Alabama, fraud happens “in predominantly Democrat parts of the state.” Republicans, it seems, believe that Democrats cheat but they do not, although an investigation by the Associated Press after the 2020 election found only 475 potential cases of voter fraud in the six states Republicans insisted had been stolen for Biden, most of which were not counted because they were caught, and which, collectively, would not have changed the outcome. These fraudulent votes were not identified by party, and the high-profile cases that have hit the news have involved Republicans, not Democrats.

Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer who worked with Trump to overturn the Georgia count and introduced lawyer John Eastman to the White House effort to come up with a constitutional argument for throwing out Biden’s electors, recently told a conservative radio host: “The only way they win is to cheat.”

This lie has fed the fury of those Republicans increasingly convinced that Democrats will destroy the country, and they are now, as the conspirators planned, taking steps to make sure that Democrats cannot win another election. One of their key projects is what former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon calls the “precinct strategy”: he is urging Trump’s followers to take over Republican precincts so that they can choose poll workers and have a say in who sits on the boards that oversee elections.

A recent piece by Alexandra Berzon in the New York Times explains how Cleta Mitchell has taken this idea on the road, working with right-wing organizations from the Republican National Committee down to fringe groups to create an “army” of poll workers and election monitors. “We’re going to be watching,” she told that radio host. “We're going to take back our elections.” Mitchell claims she is simply promoting “citizen engagement,” but participants are primed to believe that elections are being stolen and to approach election officials as enemies. The RNC has already recruited nearly 12,000 poll workers and more than 5,000 poll watchers.

On June 1, Heidi Przybyla of Politico reviewed a number of videos that revealed the Republican National Committee’s plan to hamstring the Democrats in future elections by installing partisan Republicans in Democratic-majority precincts as election workers. They can then challenge Democratic voters with the help of “an army” of party lawyers on call. An RNC spokesperson said the party is simply trying to restore balance in election workers in heavily Democratic urban areas, especially Detroit. But challenging ballots has the potential not only to intimidate voters, but also to create enough disruption to sow doubt about an election and justify intervention by Republican-controlled state legislatures.

Nick Penniman, who founded the nonpartisan election watchdog group Issue One and now is its chief executive officer, told Przybyla, “This is completely unprecedented in the history of American elections that a political party would be working at this granular level to put a network together…. It looks like now the Trump forces are going directly after the legal system itself and that should concern everyone.”

Halifax2TheMax · June 2022

And some said, “it can’t happen here.” Too late.

mickeyrat · June 2022

June 3, 2022 (Friday)

In 1981, Reagan Republicans took power with the plan of cutting the government back to the form it took in the 1920s. But Americans like a basic social safety net and protection for consumers and workers, so to win votes for tax cuts and deregulation, Republican leaders warned that white Christian men who just wanted to work hard for their own success were under attack by a government in thrall to minorities, women, lazy organized workers, and secularists who were destroying traditional values and turning the country over to socialism.

As wealth concentrated upward and it became harder and harder for ordinary Americans to rise, Republican leaders demonized Democrats and, when voters kept electing them, delegitimized elections themselves. Increasingly, they talked of the need for violence to protect individualism from an overreaching government.

Finally, as of January 6, 2021, they have rejected the idea of democracy and have convinced their followers—and perhaps themselves—that the only way to save America is to destroy it.

Today, Maggie Haberman reported in the New York Times that on January 5, Marc Short, then–vice president Mike Pence’s chief of staff, told Pence’s lead Secret Service agent that Trump was about to turn against Pence publicly and that the vice president could be in danger. Clearly, members of the administration anticipated violence on January 6 and, astonishingly, expected it because of the actions of the U.S. president.

President Joe Biden took office with what appeared to be the idea that he could wean Republicans away from their growing fascination with authoritarianism by creating a government that rebuilt the economy to work for ordinary people.

His American Rescue Plan enabled the U.S. to come out of the pandemic with the strongest economy among any of the liberal democracies that make up the Group of Seven (G7)—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States—and the nation’s economy is on track to grow faster this year than China’s for the first time since 1976.

Today’s jobs report shows that employers are still adding jobs: there were 329,000 new non-farm jobs in May. Unemployment held steady at 3.6%, with Black Americans showing the highest gains in labor force participation. With almost two job openings available for every unemployed person, wages continue to rise, up .4% since April. Wage growth for the year is over 5%. The stock market responded by dropping, likely a reflection of an expectation that the strong jobs report will mean the Fed will raise interest rates again soon.

Biden celebrated the numbers but said, “There’s no denying that high prices, particularly around gasoline and food, are a real problem for people. But there’s every reason for the American people to feel confident that we’ll meet these challenges.”

That inflation has been driven by a number of factors: increased demand, increased savings, supply chain snarls, and even the rising wages that are putting money into the pockets of those unaccustomed to economic gains. And since February, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine has further disrupted oil markets, supply chains, and, increasingly, food.

Inflation has also been driven by the concentration of industry in the past several decades, which provided economies of scale but now sees us hamstrung as vital industries are controlled by a few operators. Notably, the pandemic shifted consumer preferences to online shopping, and the recovering economy kept that buying active. Shipping containers piled up on wharves with goods undelivered, and since just nine carriers control 80% of the global shipping market, they have been able to raise prices to triple their profits in 2021. The price for moving a container to the U.S. from China is now 12 times higher than it was before the pandemic.

Global oil production is also still out of whack with the rebounding global economy. Production dropped dramatically during the pandemic, with oil-producing nations cutting production by about 10% globally. Producers have been slow to increase production to keep up with the global recovery, not least because they are making record profits. Last month, Shell, which is Europe’s largest energy company, reported its largest quarterly profit ever, at $9.1 billion. It said it would use the windfall to buy back shares of the company, increasing the value of its stock.

The baby formula crisis has also been exacerbated by this concentration of industry. In the U.S, 90% of infant formula is produced by four firms, and they are protected from foreign competition by high tariffs. When one of the four, Abbott Nutrition, closed its Sturgis, Michigan, plant to deal with contamination, it sparked a true crisis.

Biden has tried to deal with these issues with the power he wields in the executive branch. He negotiated deals with U.S. carriers to clear out the pileup of containers in vital ports and asked Congress to pass legislation to increase competition in the carrying trade. (Both the House and the Senate have passed such bills, but they have not yet reconciled them to make one bill Biden can sign.) He released oil from the strategic reserve and asked Saudi Arabia to increase production, a request its leaders refused, but yesterday OPEC+ (the 13 members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries plus 10 oil-producing countries not in OPEC) agreed to begin ramping up their output back to where it was before the U.S. got them to reduce production in April 2020.

The administration has tried to increase the supply of infant formula by easing the way for more imports, worked with Abbott Nutrition to reopen their Sturgis plant safely, flown in two planeloads of formula from Europe, and arranged for a third planeload donated by United Airlines to arrive on June 9. On May 18, President Biden delegated authority to U.S. Health and Human Services secretary Xavier Becerra to address the shortage of infant formula. Becerra has invoked the Defense Production Act for the third time to increase infant formula supplies. It is not clear how bad the shortage remains. While store shelves are empty, buying is up 13% since April, suggesting that people may be stocking up.

Biden has emphasized that he wants to move more manufacturing back to the U.S. to stop the sorts of disruptions that have caused inflation. On Wednesday, he pointed out that the U.S. has added 545,000 manufacturing jobs since he took office and that the U.S. created more manufacturing jobs in 2021 than in almost any year in 30 years. “This didn’t happen by accident,” he said. “This is a direct result of my economic plan to grow the economy from the bottom up and middle out.” He called on Congress to pass the Bipartisan Innovation Act to support domestic manufacturing.

On Tuesday, Biden published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal touting his economic successes and explaining how he plans to transition from the red hot economy of the past year to stable, steady growth. He promised to work with anyone “willing to have an open and honest discussion that delivers real solutions for the American people.”

Will any Republicans take him up on it? Something else Biden wrote makes me doubt it: “I ran for president because I was tired of the so-called trickle-down economy. We now have a chance to build on a historic recovery with an economy that works for working families.”

The big news today is that former Trump aide Peter Navarro was arrested on two counts of contempt of Congress. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol had subpoenaed Navarro to hear testimony and read documents about his participation in the attack on our government. Although he has talked openly about the plan to overturn the election, he refused to comply with the subpoena.

Navarro was livid at being arrested and handcuffed and put in a cell, saying that if they had just called him and said they needed him down at court, he’d have shown up. (He appeared to miss the point that the subpoena he ignored is basically a call that says, “Hey, we need you down at the court….”) He claims that authorities have violated the Constitution.

Reacting to the arrest, Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) told Newsmax, “If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you.” He claimed that the grand jury acquitted lawyer Michael Sussman of lying to the FBI about his contact with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign with the argument that “[o]f course you’re gonna lie. Everybody lies!” but that is, of course, not true. The jury said that the Department of Justice, which brought the suit against Sussman, did not prove its case. It is against the law to lie to Congress or to the FBI. Navarro has not been tried yet; he has simply been indicted.

And on Wednesday, as the horrific murders of schoolchildren and teachers in Uvalde, Texas, have been followed by several more mass killings, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson claimed that Democratic efforts to promote gun safety are not about public health. Instead, he said, Democrats want to disarm the people because they’re afraid of a popular uprising against them because “they know they rule illegitimately.”

mickeyrat · June 2022

June 4, 2022 (Saturday)

The Gettysburg Address it wasn’t.

Seventy-five years ago, on June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who had been a five-star general in World War II, gave a commencement speech at Harvard University.

Rather than stirring, the speech was bland. Its long sentences were hard to follow. It was vague. And yet, in just under eleven minutes on a sunny afternoon, Marshall laid out a plan that would shape the modern world.

“The truth of the matter is that Europe's requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character,” he said. “It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”

In his short speech, Marshall outlined the principles of what came to be known as the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe in the wake of the devastation of World War II. The speech challenged European governments to work together to make a plan for recovery and suggested that the U.S. would provide the money. European countries did so, forming the Organization for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC) in 1948. From 1948 to 1952, the U.S. would donate about $17 billion to European countries to rebuild, promote economic cooperation, and modernize economies. By the end of the four-year program, economic output in each of the countries participating in the Marshall Plan had increased by at least 35%.

This investment helped to avoid another depression like the one that had hit the world in the 1930s, enabling Europe to afford goods from the U.S. and keeping low the tariff walls that had helped to choke trade in the crisis years of the 1930s. Marshall later recalled that his primary motivation was economic recovery, that he had been shocked by the devastation he saw in Europe and felt that “[i]f Europe was to be salvaged, economic aid was essential.”

But there was more to the Marshall Plan than money.

The economic rubble after the war had sparked political chaos that fed the communist movement. No one wanted to go back to the prewar years of the depression, and in the wake of fascism, communism looked attractive to many Europeans.

“Marshall was acutely aware that this was a plan to stabilize Western Europe politically because the administration was worried about the impact of communism, especially on labor unions,” historian Charles Maier told Colleen Walsh of the Harvard Gazette in 2017. “In effect, it was a plan designed to keep Western Europe safely in the liberal Western camp.”

It worked. American investment in Europe helped to turn European nations away from communism as well as the nationalism that had fed World War II, creating a cooperative and stable Europe.

The Marshall Plan also helped Europe and the U.S. to articulate a powerful set of shared values. The U.S. invited not just Europe but also the Soviet Union to participate in the plan, but Soviet leaders refused, recognizing that accepting such aid would weaken the idea that communism was a superior form of government and give the U.S. influence. They blocked satellite countries from participating, as well. Forcing the USSR either to join Europe or to divide the allies of World War II put Soviet leaders in a difficult position and at a psychological disadvantage.

With a clear ideological line dividing the USSR and Europe, Europeans, Americans, and their allies coalesced around a concept of government based on equality before the law, secularism, civil rights, economic and political freedom, and a market economy: the tenets of liberal democracy. As Otto Zausmer, who had worked for the U.S. Office of War Information to swing Americans behind the war, put it in 1955: “America’s gift to the world is not money, but the Democratic idea, democracy.”

In the years after the Marshall Plan, European countries expanded their cooperative organizations. The OEEC became the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1961 and still operates with 37 member countries that account for three fifths of world trade. And the U.S. abandoned its prewar isolationism to engage with the rest of the world. The Marshall Plan helped to create a liberal international order, based on the rule of law, that lasted for decades.

In his commencement speech on June 5, 1947, Marshall apologized that “I’ve been forced by the necessities of the case to enter into rather technical discussions.” But on the ten-year anniversary of the speech, the Norwegian foreign minister had a longer perspective, saying: “this initiative taken by Marshall and by the American Government marked the beginning of a new epoch in western Europe, an epoch of wider, and above all more binding, cooperation between the countries than ever before.”

Not bad for an eleven-minute speech.

mickeyrat · June 2022

June 5, 2022 (Sunday)

Calm and quiet... for this one night.

Sleep well, everyone. I'll see you tomorrow.

[Photo "Guardians" by Peter Ralston.]

mickeyrat · June 2022

June 6, 2022 (Monday)

Today the Justice Department filed a superseding indictment charging Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and four colleagues with up to ten criminal counts, including seditious conspiracy and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, in relation to the January 6 insurrection. Sedition is the crime of inciting a revolt against the government, and conspiracy means there was an organized group of people with a plan.

A grand jury indicted Tarrio and Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola, all of whom had already been charged with crimes; this filing adds to those charges. The indictment says that the five men “did knowingly conspire, confederate, and agree, with other persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to oppose by force the authority of the Government of the United States and by force to prevent, hinder, and delay the execution of any law of the United States…. The purpose of the conspiracy was to oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force.”

Wow.

The DOJ is acknowledging that the insurrectionists were trying to overthrow the government. As retired Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe tweeted, “Seditious conspiracy is huge. No more serious federal crime short of treason.”

The indictment alleges these Proud Boys members used their social media platform as leaders of the gang to stir up anger about the election. “It’s time for f**king War if they steal this s**t,” Biggs wrote, referring to the presidential election. Nordean posted on social media: “We tried playing nice and by the rules, now you will deal with the monster you created. The spirit of 1776 has resurfaced and has created groups like the Proudboys and we will not be extinguished. We will grow like the flame that fuels us and spread like love that guides us. We are unstoppable, unrelenting and now…unforgiving. Good luck to all you traitors of this country we so deeply love…you’re going to need it.” Rehl posted: “Hopefully the firing squads are for the traitors that are trying to steal the election from the American people.”

They urged others to join the insurrection, raised money for their trip to Washington, D.C., bought paramilitary equipment, met secretly and used encrypted communications, hid their gang colors to appear incognito, led the crowd to the Capitol, stormed the barricades, destroyed property, and assaulted law enforcement officers, all to prevent Joe Biden from becoming president.

This indictment mirrors that of January 13, 2022, when the Department of Justice indicted the leader of the Oath Keepers, Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, and 10 other members of the group, a far-right antigovernment militia that specializes in recruiting veterans, for a number of crimes including seditious conspiracy in relation to the January 6 insurrection.

Today’s indictment says that Tarrio and his gang coordinated with the Oath Keepers.

But there are pretty broad hints here that they coordinated with others, too. There is still hanging out there that at the presidential debate on September 29, 2020, about a month before the election, Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” Then, on December 12, 2020, Tarrio published on the right-wing social media site Parler a photo of himself at the White House, saying that he had received a “last minute invite to an undisclosed location.” White House spokesperson Judd Deere later said: “He did not have a meeting with the president, nor did the White House invite him.”

But the Tarrio indictments have always indicated there was something big afoot, and now that seditious conspiracy charges are on the table, they are worth revisiting. Both an earlier indictment and this one have this paragraph: “Between December 30 and December 31, 2020, TARRIO communicated multiple times with an individual whose identity is known to the grand jury. On December 30, 2020, this individual sent Tarrio a nine-page document titled, ‘1776 Returns.’ The document set forth a plan to occupy a few ‘crucial buildings’ in Washington, D.C., on January 6, including House and Senate office buildings around the Capitol, with as ‘many people as possible’ to ‘show our politicians We the People are in charge.’ After sending the document, the individual stated, ‘The revolution is [more] important than anything.’ TARRIO responded, ‘That’s what every waking moment consists of…I’m not playing games.’”

There is also this: As these five Proud Boys were near an entrance to the Capitol, “[s]econds before 12:53 p.m [on January 6], BIGGS was approached by an individual whose identity is known to the grand jury. The individual put one arm around BIGGS’s shoulder and spoke to him. Approximately one minute later, this individual crossed the barrier that restricted access to the Capitol grounds. This was the first barrier protecting the Capitol grounds to be breached on January 6, 2021, and the point of entry” for the Proud Boys.

Both the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers storming the Capitol appeared to fancy themselves as heroic revolutionaries defending America. Clearly egged on by someone talking about “revolution,” they took up a great deal of space in social media and on private chats thumping their chests about “revolution” and “1776.” Charles Donohoe, who was not charged here because he is cooperating with the Department of Justice, wrote that Washington, D.C., officials were limiting access to the city “so that they can deny Trump has the People’s support. We can’t let them succeed. This government is run FOR the People, BY the People…. Congress needs a reintroduction to that fact.”

The Proud Boys—and the Oath Keepers, too—also talked about civil war. When president-elect Biden called for unity after he won the election, Tarrio posted a message on social media saying: “F**k Unity. No quarter. Raise the black flag.” On November 25, 2020, when Biden said, “We need to remember: We’re at war with a virus—not with each other,” Tarrio reposted the statement and added, “No, YOU need to remember the American people are at war with YOU. No Trump…No peace. No quarter.” And January 20, the day of Biden’s inauguration, one Oath Keeper messaged another: “After this…if nothing happens…its [sic] war…Civil War 2.0.”

For all their heroic talk, these men were not the good guys. They were plotting “to oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power by force.” That is, this ragtag crew plotted to take away from the majority of Americans their right, one of the four rights our Founders called “unalienable,” to consent to the government under which we live. That freedom to choose our own leaders was what 1776 meant, not the imposition of the will of a tyrannical minority on the rest of us.

Seventy-eight years ago today, on June 6, 1944, Americans and their leaders stood not for but against those determined to replace democratic government with tyranny. One hundred and fifty-six thousand U.S. and Allied troops and 195,000 sailors and at least 23,000 airmen with 5000 ships and 11,000 planes stormed five beaches along a heavily fortified five-mile stretch in the Normandy region of France to defend the concept of democracy against the tyranny of fascism.

The assault was known as Operation Overlord and more popularly known as D-Day. The day before, knowing that many of the men would not survive the assault, General Dwight Eisenhower reminded the men that they were fighting for the right of individuals to determine their own futures. “The eyes of the world are upon you,” he wrote. “The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.”

“Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely. But this is the year 1944!... The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!”

mickeyrat · June 2022

June 7, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today, President Biden signed nine bipartisan bills designed to improve veterans’ health care and to honor those who have served in our nation’s military. It was an upbeat hour in the midst of a storm gathering as the nation takes on both gun safety legislation and the events of January 6.

Today, Good Morning America ran an 8-minute segment with teacher Arnulfo Reyes, who was wounded in the massacre at Uvalde, Texas, where on May 24 a gunman murdered 19 schoolchildren and 2 teachers and wounded 17 others. The gunman badly wounded Reyes before murdering all 11 of the children in his classroom. In a powerful interview, Reyes vowed, “I will not let these children and my coworkers die in vain. I will not. I will go to the end of the world to not let my students die in vain.”

Then, actor Matthew McConaughey, who is from Uvalde, gave a passionate speech to reporters from the press podium at the White House. A gun owner himself, McConaughey called for strengthening our gun safety laws with background checks, raising the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 rifle to 21, instituting a waiting period for those rifles, and establishing red-flag laws. “These are reasonable, practical, tactical regulations to our nation, states, communities, schools, and homes,” he said.

McConaughey described the children and teachers who lost their lives at the Robb Elementary School, and explained just how the killer's AR-15 so destroyed their bodies that they had to be identified by DNA…or by their signature sneakers. He warned that “Responsible gun owners are fed up with the Second Amendment being abused and hijacked by some deranged individuals. These regulations are not a step back; they’re a step forward for a civil society and—and the Second Amendment,” he said.

He urged lawmakers—and Americans—to come together to pass legislation to protect our children. “Because I promise you, America—you and me, who—we are not as divided as we’re being told we are…. How about we get inspired? Give ourselves just cause to revere our future again. Maybe set an example for our children, give us reason to tell them, ‘Hey, listen and watch these men and women. These are great American leaders right here. Hope you grow up to be like them.’ And let’s admit it: We can’t truly be leaders if we’re only living for reelection…. We’ve got to make choices, make stands, embrace new ideas, and preserve the traditions that can create true—true progress for the next generation.”

As McConaughey finished and left the podium, James Rosen from Newsmax called out: “Were you grandstanding just now, sir?”

That response reflects the continuing dislike of Republicans for gun safety regulations. While the House will begin tomorrow to discuss passing a federal red-flag law, a minimum age requirement that a buyer has to be 21 to purchase a semiautomatic rifle, and a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines, these measures will not get through the Senate, where the filibuster enables Republicans to stop legislation unless Democrats can muster a supermajority of 60 votes.

Senate Republicans have already said that they will not consider the regulations experts think are central to stopping mass shootings: an assault weapons ban such as we had until 2004, limits on ammunition magazines, and expansions of background checks to cover private gun sales are all off the table. They also say an age limit of 21 to purchase an assault-type rifle like that AR-15 is unlikely.

Republicans seem to be feeling the pressure of constituents angry at more and more frequent mass shootings. “This moment is different,” McConaughey said, in an echo of gun safety activist and Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg. “We are in a window of opportunity right now that we have not been in before, a window where it seems like real change—real change can happen.”

And yet, Republicans who have embraced an ideology that rejects federal regulations and celebrates the idea of gun-carrying men cannot accept the gun safety rules most people want. So they are turning to extremist rhetoric. Jennifer Bendery reported in the Huffington Post that the extremist American Firearms Association warned of “tens of thousands of Bloomberg-funded, red shirt radical, commie mommies all over the Capitol complex.” Its leaders told members to prepare for “battle” at the U.S. Capitol. “They’re coming after us right now,” a fundraising email warned.

Republicans are also under pressure from the upcoming hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. They have announced that they will launch counterprogramming to the committee hearings, and those Republicans most likely to carry water for Trump are already on social media trying to undercut the committee and to stir up new scandals of one sort or another.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH), Jim Banks (R-IN) and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) will lead the way in arguing that the committee is illegitimate and out of touch. According to a document obtained by Vox, Trump has asked his chief supporters to shape the media coverage of the hearings and to “control and drive messaging using the channels we control.”

Republican leaders appear eager to attack the committee without explicitly defending Trump, for it’s not clear yet just how bad he will appear in the story the committee tells. Tonight, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter ordered lawyer John Eastman to turn over another file of emails…by tomorrow. Some of them, he said, fall under the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege, and he outlined how “Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan to disrupt the Joint Session was fully formed and actionable as early as December 7, 2020.”

The Fox News Channel says it will not carry the January 6 committee hearings live, although CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, and CNN will. As Sawyer Hackett, a co-host of the Our America podcast, noted, the Fox News Channel “ran 1,098 primetime segments on Benghazi from the day of the attack until the committee hearings, which they carried live for more than 7 hours.”

The Department of Homeland Security today issued a new bulletin in the National Terrorism Advisory System, stating that the U.S. “remains in a heightened threat environment.” It noted that “[t]he continued proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding current events could reinforce existing personal grievances or ideologies, and in combination with other factors, could inspire individuals to mobilize to violence.” Stories that the government is unwilling or unable to secure the southern border and the upcoming Supreme Court decision about abortion rights might lead to violence, it said.

Also, it noted: “As the United States enters mid-term election season this year, we assess that calls for violence by domestic violent extremists directed at democratic institutions, political candidates, party offices, election events, and election workers will likely increase.”

mickeyrat · June 2022

June 8, 2022 (Wednesday)

Today, the Washington Commanders defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio complained to reporters that there have been “two standards” in the way we have seen the vandalism at some of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and the January 6 insurrection. “We have a dust-up at the Capitol, nothing burned down, and we’re going to make that a major deal.”

This is a common charge on the right, but it is a myth. An AP study showed that more than 120 defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted at trial for rioting, arson, and conspiracy for the 2020 protests, and that they are from all over the political spectrum, with many of them far-right extremists who traveled across state lines to the protests. And the January 6 attack was hardly victimless: 5 people died at the Capitol riot or just after it, more than 100 law enforcement officers were injured, and the rioters did more than $1.5 million in damage to the Capitol.

What happened on January 6th was not a “dust-up.” It was an attempt to overturn our democracy and install as president someone who had lost the popular vote and the Electoral College, upending the Constitution that is the law of our land.

As a report from the Brookings Institution put it: “President Joe Biden legitimately won a fair and secure 2020 presidential election—and Donald Trump lost. This historical fact has been uncontroverted by any evidence since at least November 7, 2020, when major news outlets projected Biden’s victory. But Trump never conceded. Instead, both before and after Election Day, he tried to delegitimize the election results by disseminating a series of far-fetched and evidence-free claims of fraud. Meanwhile, with a ring of close confidants, Trump conceived and implemented unprecedented schemes to—in his own words—“overturn” the election outcome. Among the results of this “Big Lie” campaign were the terrible events of January 6, 2021—an inflection point in what we now understand was nothing less than an attempted coup.”

Part of the crisis in which we find ourselves today is that many people don’t understand what is at stake in the hearings, in part because commentators have turned the attempt of Trump and his supporters to overturn our democracy into a mud-wrestling fight between Democrats and Republicans rather than showing it as an existential fight for rule of law. Today in his Presswatchers publication, Dan Froomkin explored how U.S. news organizations have failed to communicate to readers that we are on a knife edge between democracy and authoritarianism.

Froomkin notes that journalists have framed the January 6 hearings as a test for the Democrats or as a waste of time because they will not change anyone’s mind or perhaps because no one cares. He begged journalists not to downplay the hearings and present them as a horse race, but to frame the events of January 6 in the larger context of Republican attempts to overturn our democracy.

Tomorrow night, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold its first hearing to explain to the American people what happened at the end of the Trump administration. The hearings will be broadcast on C-SPAN, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, PBS, and the Fox Business Channel and streamed on the YouTube channel of the House Select Committee on June 9, 13, 15, 16, 21, and 23.

We have some idea of what the hearings will entail.

According to committee member Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the hearings will establish that the attack was the result of “concerted planning and premeditated activity.” The hearings will show who was behind the January 6th attack on the Capitol, ultimately connecting the attack to Trump and his closest aides. Raskin told the Washington Post that “we are going to tell the story of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power.”

As the Brookings report put it: “Trump attempted to retain power by any means necessary.” He prepared to argue that the election was stolen long before it took place on November 3, 2020. Trump’s stories about voter fraud shifted and were inconsistent, and he “was repeatedly told by trusted advisors, experts, and courts that there was no fraud.”

Committee members have said there will be new evidence produced at the hearings, and new information has been dropping all week.

We learned that Trump expressed great interest in the Insurrection Act, which enables the president to call out the military to put down an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Court filings say that members of the Oath Keepers expected Trump to invoke the act to enable them to fight against those counting the electoral votes for Joe Biden.

We also learned that Trump badgered his Secret Service detail to permit him to walk with his supporters to the Capitol building after his speech at the Ellipse on January 6.

We have learned that Republican officials in at least 11 places in Michigan breached local election systems to try to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, and that the citizen initiative petition to limit voting rights in order to combat “fraud” had about 20,000 fraudulent signatures on it. In addition, there were allegations that petition circulators had lied to voters to get them to sign the petition, a practice that is legal in Michigan despite the attempts of Democratic lawmakers to prohibit it.

And, crucially, we learned that the Trump campaign told the fake electors in Georgia to operate in “complete secrecy.” The apparent plan of the Trump plotters was to get fake electors to present an uncertified slate of electoral votes that gave their state to Trump, rather than to Biden as voters had chosen. But, as a Trump official wrote in an email: "I must ask for your complete discretion in this process. Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result—a win in Georgia for President Trump—but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion." The official asked the electors to avoid the media and to lie to security guards about why they were at the statehouse. This email suggests the plotters knew they were acting illegally.

But perhaps the biggest sign that the hearings will turn heads is how hard Trump Republicans are trying to distance themselves from it, or to create a distraction.

Significantly, a piece in the New York Times by Peter Baker, published today, distanced Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump from the debacle of the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 election. “No matter how vociferously Mr. Trump claimed otherwise, neither Mr. Kushner nor Ivanka Trump believed then or later that the election had been stolen…. While the president spent the hours and days after the polls closed complaining about imagined fraud in battleground states and plotting a strategy to hold on to power, his daughter and son-in-law were already washing their hands of the Trump presidency,” the story reads.

If the former president’s daughter and son-in-law, both key White House advisors, are now trying to distance themselves from the events of January 6, perhaps the panic in the party more generally was best demonstrated today when the Republican National Committee responded to news of a man looking to harm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It sent out an email with the subject heading: “The Democrat SCOTUS Assassin.”

In his comment today about January 6, for which he later apologized, Del Rio claimed he just wanted to “apply the same standard,” and “to be reasonable with each other” and to “have a discussion.” The open-mindedness he calls for is a perfect approach to this month’s hearings.

Merkin Baller · June 2022

I would bet a paycheck Jack Del Rio fancies himself a yuge "Back the Blue" guy, like every other MAGA rube.

mickeyrat · June 2022

June 9, 2022 (Thursday)

“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

So Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, damned her Republican colleagues at tonight's first hearing on the January 6 insurrection.

And that was only a piece of what we heard tonight.

Calmly, carefully, convincingly, and in plain, easy to understand language, committee leaders Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Cheney placed former president Donald Trump at the center of an attempt to overturn our democracy. They were very clear that what happened on January 6 was an attempted coup, an “attempt to undermine the will of the people.” All Americans should remember, they reminded us, that on the morning of January 6, Donald Trump intended to remain president, despite his loss in the 2020 election and his constitutional obligation to step down in favor of President-elect Joseph R. Biden, as every president before him had done.

The committee established that there was no fraud in the 2020 election that would have changed the results of the election, showing testimony from Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr that the argument that Trump had won was “bullsh*t.” The committee presented testimony from other administration figures, including Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows and his daughter Ivanka, that Trump had been told repeatedly that he had lost. And yet, even with his inner circle telling him he had lost, and even with more than 60 failed lawsuits over the election, Trump continued to lie that he had been cheated of victory.

It was Trump who “summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame” for January 6, the committee says. Unable to accept his loss and determined to remain in power, Trump organized and deployed an attack on our democracy.

The committee established that the attack on the Capitol was not a random, spontaneous uprising. The rioters came at Trump’s invitation. While they had been muttering about the results since immediately after the election, it was Trump’s tweet of December 19, 2020, that lit the fuse. That night, the former president met with lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and others at the White House. Shortly after the meeting, Trump tweeted that it was “[s]tatistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Members of the extremist organizations the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers took Trump’s December 19th tweet as a call to arms. On December 20, they began to organize to go to Washington. These radical white supremacists had taken great pride in Trump’s shout-out in a presidential debate on September 29 that the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by.” After that comment, membership in the Proud Boys had tripled.

Members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers testified that they went to Washington because Trump personally asked them to. “Trump has only asked me for two things,” one man testified: “my vote, and he asked me to come on January 6.”

The committee provided evidence that 250 to 300 Proud Boys arrived in Washington to stop the counting of the electoral votes. Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker working to film the gang, testified that the riot was not spontaneous: the Proud Boys, who were allegedly in Washington to hear Trump speak, walked away from the rally at the Ellipse even before then-president Trump spoke, walking to the Capitol and checking out the police presence there. The Oath Keepers, too, were in Washington to stop the count and were expecting Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, enabling them to fight for him to remain president.

The groups quite deliberately fought their way into the Capitol in a planned and coordinated attack. Meanwhile, Trump continued to stoke the crowd’s fury at then–vice president Mike Pence for refusing to overturn the election in his role as the person in charge of counting the certified electoral votes. The rioters stormed the Capitol and went in search of Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), their calls for “Oh, Nancy,” echoing like the singsong chant from a horror movie. When he learned that the rioters were chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” the president said: “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.” He said that Pence “deserves it.”

Videos of the violence outside the Capitol further undercut the attempt of Republicans to downplay the rioters as “tourists.” Asked by Thompson if any one memory from January 6 stood out to her, Officer Caroline Edwards, who fought to protect the Capitol, said yes: the scene of “carnage” and “chaos.” It was like a war scene from the movies, she said, with officers bleeding on the ground, vomiting. She was slipping in people’s blood, catching people as they fell. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think… I would find myself in the middle of a battle,” she said. More than 100 police officers were wounded in the fighting, attacked with cudgels and bear spray, and at least nine people died then and immediately after.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was only one of many people caught up in the violence to contact Trump and beg him to call off the rioters. Clearly, Republicans as well as Democrats knew the mob were his people and that they would respond to his instructions. And yet, he refused. He did nothing to call out the military or the National Guard to defend the Capitol.

Ultimately, those requests came from Vice President Pence, in what appears so far to be an unexplained breakdown in the usual chain of command. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley testified that Pence was very clear that the military needed to turn up and fast to “put down this situation.” In contrast, Meadows talked to Milley not about protecting the Capitol, but to say “we have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions.” Milley said he saw this as “politics, politics, politics.”

After the attempt to overturn the election and keep Trump in power had failed, according to Cheney, Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) and "multiple other Republican congressmen" tried to get Trump to pardon them for their participation. While they are now insisting they did nothing wrong, the requests for a presidential pardon show that they were aware that they were in trouble.

After the hearing, CNN congressional correspondent Ryan Nobles talked to Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is on the committee. “It’s actually a pretty simple story of a president who lost, who couldn’t stand losing, who cared nothing about the constitution and was determined to hold on to power and who incited a mob when everything else failed,” Schiff said.

The hearing provided some new information about the January 6 coup attempt that had not previously been publicly available. It also put what we already knew into a clear and compelling narrative using the words of Trump’s own advisors, including his daughter, and video previously unseen by the public. That story singled Trump out as the author of an attack on our democracy and isolated him even from those in his inner circle in a way that could weaken his influence in his party.

At the same time, the committee’s presentation was horrifying, reviving the pain of January 6 and clarifying it by bringing together the many different storylines that we have previously seen only in isolation. The timeline juxtaposed the mob violence with Trump’s own statements about how Pence was letting them down, for example. It showed Officer Edwards being knocked unconscious while Trump claimed the mob was made up of “peaceful people… great people,” and described “the love in the air, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Pundits had speculated before tonight’s televised hearing that it would not make compelling television, but they could not have been more wrong. The Fox News Channel, some of whose personalities were involved in the events surrounding January 6, refused to air the proceedings. Nonetheless, that channel inadvertently proved just how powerful the hearing was when it ran Tucker Carlson’s show without commercial breaks, apparently afraid that if anyone began to channel surf they might be drawn in by the hearing on other channels.

Veteran reporter Bob Woodward called the evening “historic.” Looking back at the 1954 hearings that destroyed the career of Senator Joe McCarthy by revealing that he was lying to the American public, Woodward said that tonight’s event “was the equivalent of the Army-McCarthy hearings."

mickeyrat · June 2022

June 10, 2022 (Friday)

Preliminary reports say that about 20 million people watched last night’s compelling hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. That number, which does not include streaming or later views, is fewer than tune in for a normal State of the Union address, but more than for the World Series. In contrast, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 11-hour testimony in a 2015 Benghazi hearing drew only about 4 million viewers.

Reviews of the hearing have generally concluded that it was a powerful presentation that effectively put former president Trump at the center of a conspiracy to overturn our democracy. And there has been little convincing pushback from Trump loyalists. Conservative commentator Bill Kristol noted: “Tons of counter-programming from the Right. But no counter-evidence.”

Although Donald Trump Jr. claimed he didn’t even know the hearing was happening and urged followers not to watch, it was clear that the Trump camp could not look away and that the program’s high ratings—a metric former president Trump cares about deeply—have stung. He snarled at the presentation on his “Truth Social” platform, complaining that the committee refused “to play any of the many positive witnesses and statements,” although he did not specify which those might be.

In fact, a great deal of the power of the committee’s presentation last night came from the fact that many of its key witnesses were themselves members of Trump’s inner circle. Those witnesses included his attorney general, William Barr; Trump campaign spokesperson Jason Miller; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley; and Trump’s own daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. They established that Trump indeed knew he had lost the election, that he nonetheless stoked a movement to keep him in power, and that when the insurrectionists attacked the Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, he refused to intervene to protect lawmakers, law enforcement officers, or the law.

Both Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump appeared to turn against her father, and today he responded. Ivanka said she believed Barr when he told her that the 2020 election had not been stolen. Her testimony apparently infuriated her father, who said today that “Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!).”

As Trump’s attack on his daughter indicates, last night’s hearing appears to have exacerbated the chaos in the Republican Party as Trump and his supporters struggle to cling to power in the face of damning evidence that they tried to destroy our democracy.

The state of Michigan has embodied that chaos lately. Election machinery there has been compromised as pro-Trump activists got access to the system to try to prove voter fraud. Five right-wing candidates for governor got tossed off the primary ballot because the signatures on their nomination papers were fraudulent. The remaining front-runner, Ryan Kelley, is a staunch Trump supporter who was at the Capitol on January 6; yesterday, the FBI arrested him for his participation in the attack.

Someone on Twitter described the Michigan Republican Party as a “hot mess.”

Pro-Trump activism is in the news in another way today, too. In 2020, Ginni Thomas, who is married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote to 29 members of the Arizona legislature to urge them to ignore Biden’s victory in the state and instead to choose their own electors who would back Trump’s reelection. We knew she had written to two legislators, but it turns out that number was off by a lot. While Ginni Thomas maintains that her work is separate from her husband’s, it is at the very least a problem that he has refused to recuse himself from cases in which her activism might have caused a conflict of interest.

And yet, despite the increasing mess around Trump, other Republicans won’t risk angering him or his voters. Yesterday, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) refused four times to answer whether President Biden was legitimately elected. Asked the question by ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl, McCarthy avoided antagonizing pro-Trump forces by saying that Biden is president without saying he was elected legitimately or that Trump is wrong to say the election was fraudulent.

And Trump is making it clear he will tolerate no sliding away among his loyalists. Earlier, Trump threw Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL), who spoke at the rally on January 6, overboard, only to discover that Brooks’s numbers rose. After considering endorsing Brooks again, Trump today instead backed his challenger in the upcoming election. Trump claimed that he has given up on Brooks because he told a crowd to put the 2020 election behind them and to move forward, but New York Times reporter Blake Hounshell wrote that Trump backed Brooks’s challenger because her husband, a former NFL player, wooed him.

There are increasing rumblings about new coalitions to ditch the radical extremists in the Republican Party who are trying to destroy democracy and replace them with candidates who still care about our democratic system. In the New Yorker yesterday, Sue Halpern outlined the effort in Utah to replace Senator Mike Lee, who participated in the effort to overturn the election, with Evan McMullin, a former Republican running as an independent. Democrats did not field their own candidate in that race and are instead backing McMullin. McMullin has made Lee’s support for Trump’s coup attempt central to his campaign, and he is now running close to Lee in the polls.

A number of bipartisan groups made up of anti-Trump Republicans and moderate Democrats are backing pro-democracy candidates for office, including Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), whose party turned against her after she supported the investigation into the attack on the Capitol.

But a Twitter thread by New York Times reporter Ben Collins today made it clear that the right wing in America has grown beyond Trump. In the right-wing spaces Collins reports on, he says that participants are aware of the hearing but unconcerned about it. Instead, they “have moved onto full-time anti-trans panic. It has consumed them.” They now care far more about fighting to control the nation’s LGBTQ population than about Trump. “They simply want a fight,” Collins wrote, “and are looking for whoever will start it fastest.”

Collins noted that on a website named for Trump that was a key site for organizing the insurrection, the lead quotation today came not from Trump, but rather from Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

At the beginning of last night’s hearing, Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) called out the link between political extremism in the U.S. and social control, both of which are about a small group of people dominating others, a minority imposing their worldview on a majority. "I'm from a part of the country where people justified the actions of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynching,” Thompson said. “I'm reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try to justify the actions of the insurrectionists on January 6, 2021."

Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

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