Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

 August 16, 2022 (Tuesday)

This afternoon, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Almost immediately, it will produce results. A 30% tax credit for energy-efficient windows, heat pumps, or newer models of appliances will lower people’s energy costs; the cost of drugs will be capped at $2,000 per year for people on Medicare; and health care premiums will fall for certain Americans. In the longer term, it will be easier for the country to switch to renewable energy, and wealthy Americans and corporations will bear more of the tax burden than they have paid since the 2017 Trump tax cuts.  

“The Inflation Reduction Act is now law,” Biden tweeted, “Giving Medicare the power to negotiate lower prescription drug prices. Ensuring wealthy corporations pay their fair share in taxes. And taking the biggest step forward on climate in our history.”

“This is a BFD,” former President Barack Obama tweeted.

“Thanks, Obama,” Biden responded.

They can be forgiven their irreverence because this act is indeed a big deal. It is an astonishing cap to the legislation the Democrats have passed with their squeaky thin majority in Congress. They have passed the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and now this, the Inflation Reduction Act.

Since President Ronald Reagan told Americans, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Republicans have focused on proving that private enterprise is more efficient than government at providing the things Americans need. That argument has depended on preventing the government from legislating or addressing the things that people care about.

In his year and a half in office, Biden has demonstrated the opposite: that government can work. The measures that Democrats, and those Republicans who are willing to work across the aisle, have passed are enormously popular: lower medical costs, including a provision finalized today for over-the-counter hearing aids; bridge repair; broadband access; and investment in science.

“I feel like the media is having a hard time metabolizing the fact that this congress has been historically productive,” Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) mused. “And acknowledging the size of these accomplishments, and the degree of difficulty,—it’s just hard to do accurately without sounding a bit left leaning.”

Democrats are demonstrating that the government is working, but for their ideology to make sense, the current-day Republican Party needs chaos. Chaos is what it is currently delivering.

Trump has continued to throw out more excuses for his theft of classified documents, recently suggesting his former chief of staff Mark Meadows is at fault for failing to organize a system to send documents to the National Archives and Records Administration and then suggesting that he had withheld the documents because he didn’t trust the “partisan Democrat appointees” who were “releasing thousands of his White House documents to the January 6 Committee in spite of his lawyers’ claims of executive privilege.”

Maggie Haberman at the New York Times broke the news today that Trump’s White House counsel and deputy White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone and Patrick F. Philbin, have talked to the FBI in the last few months about the stolen documents. According to two witnesses, when Philbin tried to get him to return documents to the National Archives and Records Administration, Trump said, “It’s not theirs, it’s mine.”

Josh Campbell, CNN’s national security and law enforcement correspondent, said that Trump loyalists’ attacks on the FBI for its role in searching Mar-a-Lago for the classified documents Trump stole have taken a toll. “The head of the FBI Agents Association tells me threats against the bureau are ‘real’ and ‘imminent,’” Campbell tweeted. “The organization is demanding political leaders unequivocally denounce these attacks, insisting: ‘There is NO justification for targeting law enforcement in the United States.’"

In the search to figure out how and why the text messages from Secret Service members from the time around January 6, 2021, were purged, Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, who hid the destruction from Congress for more than a year, today refused to step down from the investigation. He also said that he would not provide the documents lawmakers wanted to see, or permit House committees to interview his colleagues.

And yet, Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is strong enough that his chosen candidate defeated Representative Liz Cheney in today’s Wyoming primary by about 34 points. Cheney voted with Trump more than 90% of the time during his term, but she took a stand against him after his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In a concession speech tonight, she told her supporters that two years ago she won the primary with 73% of the vote, and “could easily have done the same again. The path was clear. But it would have required that I go along with President Trump's lie about the 2020 election. It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel a democratic system and attack the foundations of our Republic. That was a path I could not and would not take.”

She vowed to “do whatever it takes to ensure Donald Trump is never again anywhere near the Oval Office.”

Observers noted that the defeat of Cheney marks the passage of another establishment name from the ranks of Republican Party lawmakers. The Lincoln Project tweeted, "Tonight, the nation marks the end of the Republican Party. What remains shares the name and branding of the traditional GOP, but is in fact an authoritarian nationalist cult dedicated only to Donald Trump."

 August 18, 2022 (Thursday)

On this day in 1920, the Tennessee legislature ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by the narrow vote of 50 to 49. A mirror of the Fifteenth Amendment protecting the right of Black men to vote, the new amendment read:

“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

“Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Like the momentum for the Fifteenth Amendment, the push for rights for women had taken root during the Civil War, as women backed the United States armies with their money, buying bonds and paying taxes; with their loved ones, sending sons and husbands and fathers to the war front; with their labor, working in factories and fields, and taking over from men in the nursing and teaching professions; and even with their lives, spying and fighting for the Union. In the aftermath of the war, as the divided nation was rebuilt, many of them expected they would have a say in how it was reconstructed.

But to their dismay, the Fourteenth Amendment explicitly tied the right to vote to “males,” inserting that word into the Constitution for the first time.

Boston abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, was outraged. The laws of the age gave control of her property and her children to her abusive husband, and while far from a rabble-rouser, she wanted the right to adjust those laws so they were fair. In this moment, it seemed the right the Founders had articulated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to consent to the government under which one lived—was to be denied to the very women who had helped preserve the country, while white male Confederates and now Black men both enjoyed that right.

“The Civil War came to an end, leaving the slave not only emancipated, but endowed with the full dignity of citizenship. The women of the North had greatly helped to open the door which admitted him to freedom and its safeguard, the ballot. Was this door to be shut in their face?” Howe wondered.

The next year, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, and six months later, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe founded the American Woman Suffrage Association.

The National Woman Suffrage Association wanted a larger reworking of gender roles in American society, drawing from the Seneca Falls Convention that Stanton had organized in 1848.

That convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, patterned explicitly on the Declaration of Independence, asserted that “all men and women are created equal” and that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” listing the many ways in which men had “fraudulently deprived [women] of their most sacred rights” and insisting that women receive “immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”

While the National Woman Suffrage Association excluded men from its membership, the American Woman Suffrage Association made a point of including men equally, as well as Black woman suffragists, to indicate that they were interested in the universal right to vote, and only in that right, believing the rest of the rights their rivals demanded would come through voting.

The women’s suffrage movement had initial success in the western territories, both because lawmakers there were hoping to attract women for their male-heavy communities and because the same lawmakers were furious at the growing noise about Black voting. Wyoming Territory granted women the vote in 1869, and lawmakers in Utah Territory followed suit in 1870, expecting that women would vote against polygamy there. When women in fact supported polygamy, Utah lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to take their vote away, and the movement for women’s suffrage in the West slowed dramatically.

Suffragists had hopes of being included in the Fifteenth Amendment, but when they were not, they decided to test their right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1872 election. According to its statement that anyone born in the U.S. was a citizen, they were certainly citizens and thus should be able to vote. In New York state, Susan B. Anthony voted successfully but was later tried and convicted—in an all-male courtroom in which she did not have the right to testify—for the crime of voting.

In Missouri, a voting registrar named Reese Happersett refused to permit suffragist Virginia Minor to register. Minor sued Happersett, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The justices handed down a unanimous decision in 1875, deciding that women were indeed citizens but that citizenship did not necessarily convey the right to vote.

This decision meant the fat was in the fire for Black Americans in the South, as it paved the way for white supremacists to keep them from the polls in 1876. But it was also a blow to suffragists, who recast their claims to voting by moving away from the idea that they had a human right to consent to their government, and toward the idea that they would be better and more principled voters than the Black men and immigrants who, under the law anyway, had the right to vote.

For the next two decades, the women’s suffrage movement drew its power from the many women’s organizations put together across the country by women of all races and backgrounds who came together to stop excessive drinking, clean up the sewage in city streets, protect children, stop lynching, and promote civil rights.

Black women like educator Mary Church Terrell and journalist Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, publisher of the Woman's Era, brought a broad lens to the movement from their work for civil rights, but they could not miss that Black women stood in between the movements for Black rights and women’s rights, a position scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw would identify In the twentieth century as “intersectionality.”

In 1890 the two major suffrage associations merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association and worked to change voting laws at the state level. Gradually, western states and territories permitted women to vote in certain elections, until by 1920, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona, Kansas, Alaska Territory, Montana, and Nevada, recognized women’s right to vote in at least some elections.

Suffragists recognized that action at the federal level would be more effective than a state-by-state strategy. The day before Democratic president Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in 1913, they organized a suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., that grabbed media attention. They continued civil disobedience to pressure Wilson into supporting their movement.

Still, it took another war effort, that of World War I, which the U.S. entered in 1917, to light a fire under the lawmakers whose votes would be necessary to get a suffrage amendment through Congress and send it off to the states for ratification. Wilson, finally on board as he faced a difficult midterm election in 1918, backed a constitutional amendment, asking congressmen: "Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?"

Congress passed the measure in a special session on June 4, 1919, and Tennessee’s ratification on this day in 1920 made it the law of the land. Twenty-six million American women had the right to vote in the 1920 presidential election.

Crucially, as the Black suffragists had known all too well when they found themselves caught between the drives for Black male voting and women’s suffrage, Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws meant that most Black women and women of color would remain unable to vote for another 45 years.

Yesterday the Department of Justice filed a friend of the court brief in the case of League of Women Voters v. Secretary of State of Florida alleging that “in the face of surging turnout in the 2020 election, the Florida Legislature responded by enacting provisions that impose disparate burdens on Black voters” when it imposed new voting restrictions.

A hundred years later, we are still fighting the same fights.

 August 20, 2022 (Saturday)

Earlier this month, on August 2, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a Democratic delegation commanded headlines when they traveled to Taiwan, an independently governed East Asian country made up of 168 islands on which about 24 million people live, and which China claims. Since 1979 the U.S. has helped to maintain the defensive capabilities of the democratically governed area, although it has been vague about whether it would intervene if China attacks Taiwan.

Pelosi’s visit made her the highest-ranking U.S. politician to visit Taiwan since 1997, when Republican speaker Newt Gingrich visited the self-ruled island. Pelosi and a delegation of House Democrats who lead committees relevant to U.S. foreign relations—Gregory Meeks (NY), Mark Takano (CA), Suzan DelBene (WA), Raja Krishnamoorthi (IL), and Andy Kim (NJ)—visited Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, and Japan. Taiwan was added quietly.

Since then, another, bipartisan, congressional delegation has visited Taiwan. Senator Ed Markey (D-MA); Representatives John Garamendi (D-CA), Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), and Don Beyer (D-VA); and Delegate Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen (R–American Samoa) visited Taiwan earlier this week. Markey chairs the Senate Foreign Relations East Asia, Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Subcommittee, and Beyer is chair of the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (JEC); the rest of the delegation represents people in or near the Pacific Ocean.

Before visiting Taiwan, Markey was in South Korea to talk about trade and technology, including the green technologies the U.S. is now funding through the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as “shared values and interests.”

There is a larger story behind these visits to Taiwan. Early this year, the Biden administration launched a new, comprehensive initiative in the Indo-Pacific. Beginning with the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004, the U.S. began to work informally with the “Quad,” the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, consisting of the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan. In 2016, Japan introduced the concept of a free and open Indo-Pacific.  

When former president Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he left the participants to continue without the U.S., which they did as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). He also left open the way for a free trade deal in the region dominated by China, called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, or RCEP, which went into effect on January 1, 2022.

This left the Biden administration with two politically poor choices: try to reestablish U.S. participation in the region through the CPTPP, which would have been hotly contested at home and thus unlikely to get through Congress, or let China dominate the region, with damaging long-term effects. So the administration found a third way.

After some complaints that the administration had focused its attention too closely on the Middle East and Europe, in February the Biden administration released a document outlining its “Indo-Pacific Strategy,” claiming that the U.S. is part of the Indo-Pacific region, which stretches from our Pacific coastline to the Indian Ocean. The area, the report says, “is home to more than half of the world’s people, nearly two-thirds of the world’s economy, and seven of the world’s largest militaries. More members of the U.S. military are based in the region than in any other outside the United States. It supports more than three million American jobs and is the source of nearly $900 billion in foreign direct investment in the United States. In the years ahead, as the region drives as much as two-thirds of global economic growth, its influence will only grow—as will its importance to the United States.”

The document notes the long history of the U.S. and the countries in the region, and it warns against the rising power of the People’s Republic of China there. The document promises to compete responsibly with China by balancing influence in the world, creating an environment in the region “that is maximally favorable to the United States, our allies and partners, and the interests and values we share.”

Crucially, the document focuses not on the trade deals that made the TPP so unpopular, but on ideological ones, promoting “a free and open Indo-Pacific,” where countries “can make independent political choices free from coercion.” The U.S. will contribute to that atmosphere, the document says, “through investments in democratic institutions, a free press, and a vibrant civil society,” by strengthening partnerships within the region and outside it, such as the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The plan promises that the U.S. will invest in the region through diplomacy, education, and security.

In May, President Joe Biden hosted the U.S.–Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Special Summit in the U.S. for the first time “to re-affirm the United States’ enduring commitment to Southeast Asia and underscore the importance of U.S.-ASEAN cooperation in ensuring security, prosperity, and respect for human rights.” And the State Department announced that “[t]he United States has provided over $12.1 billion in development, economic, health, and security assistance to Southeast Asian allies and partners since 2002, as well as over $1.4 billion in humanitarian assistance.”

Also in May, in Japan, Biden and a dozen Indo-Pacific nations announced a new, loose economic bloc, one that Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo has called “by any account the most significant international economic engagement that the United States has ever had in this region.” The bloc includes the U.S., India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, but not Taiwan. These countries represent about 40% of the global economy.

The new plan promised to streamline supply chains, back clean energy, fight corruption, and expand technology transfers. But with no guaranteed access to U.S. markets, there was uncertainty about how effective the administration’s calls for better labor and environmental standards would be.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Antony Blinken also traveled to the region in early August, making stops in Cambodia, where he attended the U.S.-ASEAN ministerial meeting, the East Asia Summit Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, and the ASEAN Regional Forum, and in the Philippines. Before leaving, he promised to “emphasize the United States’ commitment to ASEAN centrality and successful implementation of the ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific” and to “address the COVID-19 pandemic, economic cooperation, the fight against climate change, the crisis in Burma, and Russia’s war in Ukraine.”

Chinese leaders warned the U.S. there would be “serious consequences” if Pelosi visited, and pundits suggested that she was reckless for going. But both Biden and Blinken made it clear that any potential visit would not mean any change in U.S. policy toward Taiwan, and 26 Republican lawmakers made a public statement praising the visit and noting that it has precedent.

Pelosi’s visit seemed to echo Biden and Blinken’s focus on world democracy. She championed Taiwan as a leading democracy, “a leader in peace, security and economic dynamism: with an entrepreneurial spirit, culture of innovation and technological prowess that are envies of the world.” She explicitly said her visit was intended to reaffirm “our shared interests [in]...advancing a free and open Indo-Pacific region.” “By traveling to Taiwan, we honor our commitment to democracy: reaffirming that the freedoms of Taiwan—and all democracies—must be respected.”

When Pelosi’s plane landed, China immediately announced live fire operations nearby and cut certain diplomatic communications with the U.S. But Director of the Centre for Russia Europe Asia Studies Theresa Fallon noted that the Chinese blockade/live fire exercise “is likely to boomerang on Xi. This will…scare just about every other country in Asia,” she wrote on Twitter.

Yesterday, U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, six months into the job, did his first television interview. Emphasizing that Pelosi’s visit was in keeping with longstanding history, he said, "We do not believe there should be a crisis in US-China relations over the visit—the peaceful visit—of the Speaker of the House of Representatives to Taiwan...it was a manufactured crisis by the government in Beijing. It was an overreaction.” Burns added that it is now "incumbent upon the government here in Beijing to convince the rest of the world that it will act peacefully in the future” and observed that “there's a lot of concern around the world that China has now become an agent of instability in the Taiwan Strait and that's not in anyone's interest."

As drought, coronavirus lockdowns, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine hamstring the Chinese economy, China’s domination of the region seems wobbly. Apple is currently talking to Vietnam about making Apple Watches and MacBooks, moving production away from China. Vietnam already builds Apple products, but these new contracts would upgrade the Vietnamese technical sector in advance of what are expected to be more contracts.

This week, the EU and Indonesia launched their first ever joint naval exercise in the Arabian Sea, with an announcement that “[t]he EU and Indonesia are committed to a free, open, inclusive and rules-based order in the Indo-Pacific region, underpinned by respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, democracy, rule of law, transparency, freedom of navigation and overflight, unimpeded lawful commerce, and peaceful resolution of disputes. They reaffirm the primacy of international law, including the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).”

The U.S. and Taiwan, which was not included in the earlier economic organization, will start formal trade talks in the fall.

 August 22, 2022 (Monday)

Today’s big news is an eye-popping $1.6 billion donation to a right-wing nonprofit organized in May 2020. This is the largest known single donation made to a political influence organization.

The money came from Barre Seid, a 90-year-old electronics company executive, and the new organization, Marble Freedom Trust, is controlled by Leonard A. Leo, the co-chair of the Federalist Society, who has been behind the right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court. Leo has also been prominent in challenges to abortion rights, voting rights, climate change action, and so on. He announced in early 2020 that he was stepping back from the Federalist Society to remake politics at every level, but information about the massive grant and the new organization was broken today by Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times.

Marble is organized as a nonprofit, so when Seid gave it 100% of the stock in Tripp Lite, a privately held company that makes surge protectors and other electronic equipment, it could sell the stock without paying taxes. The arrangement also likely enabled Seid to avoid paying as much as $400 million in capital gains taxes on the stock. Law professor Ray Madoff of Boston College Law School, who specializes in philanthropic policy, told the New York Times: “These actions by the super wealthy are actually costing the American taxpayers to support the political spending of the wealthiest Americans.”

This massive donation is an example of so-called “dark money”: funds donated for political advocacy to nonprofits that do not have to disclose their donors. In the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision, the Supreme Court said that limiting the ability of corporations and other entities to advertise their political preferences violates their First Amendment right to free speech. This was a new interpretation: until the 1970s, the Supreme Court did not agree that companies had free speech protections.

Now, nonprofit organizations can receive unlimited donations from people, corporations, or other entities for political speech. They cannot collaborate directly with candidates or campaigns, but they can promote a candidate’s policies and attack opponents, all without identifying their donors.

"I've never seen a group of this magnitude before," Robert Maguire of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) told Casey Tolan, Curt Devine, and Drew Griffin of CNN. "This is the kind of money that can help these political operatives and their allies start to move the needle on issues like reshaping the federal judiciary, making it more difficult to vote, a state-by-state campaign to remake election laws and lay the groundwork for undermining future elections." Our campaign finance system, he said, gives "wealthy donors, whether they be corporations or individuals, access and influence over the system far greater than any regular American can ever imagine."

It’s an interesting revelation at this particular juncture, when the Republican Party is splitting over former president Donald Trump. Today, a Colorado state senator switched from the Republican to the Democratic Party because he refuses to support the lie that Trump won the 2020 election. "I cannot continue to be a part of a political party that is okay with a violent attempt to overturn a free and fair election and continues to peddle claims that the 2020 election was stolen," Kevin Priola wrote. “We need Democrats in charge because our planet and our democracy depend on it.” Priola has thrown in his lot with those Republicans like Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).

Priola has voted with Democrats in the past, although he voted with the Republicans 90% of the time. His switch will make it more difficult for Republicans to retake control of the Colorado Senate. Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, tweeted that he was proud to welcome Priola to the Democratic Party. “We are a broad tent party, always seeking good ideas from the left and right to move CO forward. Senator Priola is a strong leader on climate issues & will hopefully be even more effective on the Democratic side of the aisle.”

In contrast, Sean Paige, former spokesperson for the Colorado Republican Party, tweeted: “Kevin Priola a Democrat? Who knew, LOL? That's been an open 'secret' at the Statehouse since I worked there. He's beyond just a big phony; he's a squirrely and calculating opportunist. But I'm glad, for his conscience, that he finally came out of the closet.”

The new extremist Republican Party is driving away voters in part by this very sort of chaos. This afternoon, Trump’s lawyers asked a federal judge to stop the FBI from looking at the documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago until a special master reviews them. But the filing appeared to have been less about the law than about asserting power over the Republican Party. While legal analyst Bradley Moss called it “just garbage” legally, it stated its political principle at the start: “President Donald J. Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary and in the 2024 General Election, should he decide to run.”

The motion reiterated the arguments he has made since the search warrant was carried out; Moss mused, “[t]he more I read Trump’s motion, the more I am completely confused and shocked he got three lawyers to risk their law licenses by filing this thing.”

Then, this evening, it turned out that the motion was likely intended to distract attention from a new story dropping from Maggie Haberman, Jodi Kantor, Adam Goldman and Ben Protess of the New York Times, who reported that Trump took more than 300 classified documents with him to Mar-a-Lago and that he went through the boxes himself in late 2021, meaning he was aware that he had taken classified documents out of the White House.

The National Archives and Records Administration recovered more than 150 classified documents in January 2022, including intelligence from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the FBI. Worried by the sheer number of those documents, the Department of Justice moved to get the rest. In June, Trump’s aides turned over a few dozen more, and Trump lawyer Christina Bobb signed a document asserting that, to the best of her knowledge, all the classified materials had been returned. They had not, of course, and on June 22 the Justice Department subpoenaed the security video tapes from the area, which showed people moving the documents. Hence the search warrant, which the FBI executed two weeks ago, finding yet more documents, including some in a closet in Trump’s office. Some had the highest possible level of classification. It remains unclear whether any U.S. documents remain at Mar-a-Lago.

Meanwhile, according to Andrew Desiderio of Politico, members of the Gang of Eight—the leaders of the House and Senate from each party, and the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees from both houses—want to know what was in those recovered files.

Finally, today, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that he will be retiring from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he has led since 1984, in December. Fauci has served seven presidents, and after his work on HIV/AIDS, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Nonetheless, today’s Republicans have tried to deflect blame for the nation’s poor response to the coronavirus pandemic from Trump to Fauci. After the announcement of the 81-year-old’s retirement, Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) said: “It’s good to know that with his retirement, Dr. Fauci will have ample time to appear before Congress and share under oath what he knew about the Wuhan lab, as well as the ever-changing guidance under his watch that resulted in wrongful mandates being imposed on Americans.”

  August 23, 2022 (Tuesday)

Early this morning, right-wing journalist John Solomon posted on his website a letter dated May 10 from Debra Steidel Wall, the acting archivist of the United States, to Evan Corcoran, a lawyer for former president Trump. Just why the Trump camp leaked the letter is unclear because it is a damning revelation of the extent of the stolen documents and Trump’s refusal to return them.

Wall was responding to Trump’s request that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) continue to withhold from the FBI the records NARA had recovered at that point from Mar-a-Lago. She noted that NARA had worked to recover those records throughout 2021 and, when they finally got them, “identified items marked as classified national security information, up to the level of Top Secret and including Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Program materials.”

These are highly secret and sensitive materials, and Trump wanted to delay review of them while he decided if he was going to assert executive privilege over them. Wall rejected that argument, pointing out that he could hardly keep them out of the hands of the current president.

“The question in this case is not a close one,” she wrote. “The Executive Branch here is seeking access to records belonging to, and in the custody of, the Federal Government itself, not only in order to investigate whether those records were handled in an unlawful manner but also, as the National Security Division explained, to ‘conduct an assessment of the potential damage resulting from the apparent manner in which these materials were stored and transported and take any necessary remedial steps.’ These reviews will be conducted by current government personnel who…are sensitive to executive concerns.”

This was no small cache of documents. In the boxes then at issue were more than 100 classified documents. They made up more than 700 pages of classified material. Since then, of course, the FBI has recovered yet more classified documents.

The New York Times reported last night that Trump resisted returning the documents, calling them “mine.”

Also in today’s news, a federal jury found Barry Croft and Adam Fox guilty of several crimes in the summer 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. The jury found Croft guilty of kidnapping conspiracy, conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, and possession of an unregistered destructive device. It found Fox guilty of kidnapping conspiracy and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.

The men were part of a plot to kidnap Whitmer at her summer home and to blow up a bridge that would stop rescuers from reaching her. They hoped to spark a second American Revolution.

In a federal court in Louisville, Kentucky, former detective Kelly Goodlett pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy. She admitted that she knew another officer’s statement that Breonna Taylor’s former boyfriend was receiving packages at Taylor's house was false, and yet did not object when the officer put it in an application for a search warrant. That warrant sparked the March 2020 raid that left Ms. Taylor dead.

And in Tennessee a federal grand jury has indicted Republican former house speaker Glen Casada and his aide Cade Cothren on 20 counts of federal bribery, kickback, theft, wire fraud, and money laundering for a scheme that began in 2019.

The Biden administration is reasserting the rule of law in the United States.

  August 25, 2022 (Thursday)

Today, legal news about the former president and members of his team revealed a group of people who appear to have ignored the law.  

The stories began with the release of the Department of Justice (DOJ) memo written for Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr arguing that Trump should not be charged with obstruction of justice over his attempts to shut down the Russia investigation despite his firing of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey, urging of witnesses not to “flip,” hints of pardons to those who stayed quiet, and so on. The memo seems clearly to have been a whitewash to justify Barr’s predetermined decision not to prosecute, illustrating the dangerous politicization of the DOJ.  

The memo argued that because special counsel Robert Mueller did not find enough evidence to charge Trump with conspiring with Russia, there was no crime committed, and thus Trump could not be charged with obstruction. In fact, Mueller noted in the report that the investigation was hampered by the president’s allies who refused to cooperate. Andrew Weissman, a 20-year veteran of the Department of Justice who worked on the Mueller investigation, concluded: “Key ‘reasoning’ of…memo: if you successfully obstruct an investigation, you cannot be charged with obstruction as you were not charged with the crime under investigation. Future defendants will have a field day with this memo unless DOJ repudiates it soon.”

Harry Litman, former U.S. attorney and now legal affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times, noted that the principal author of the memo, Steven Engel, “is too good a lawyer not to have known what was going on. In a way, the most important words in the memo are the first 3: ‘at your request.’ This was a political mission.”

And then there is the attempt of Republican operatives to smear their opponents. Today, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York announced that two people have pleaded guilty to stealing the diary and other personal property of then-candidate Joe Biden’s daughter and selling it for $40,000 to James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. In the process, they transported the material across state lines and then, at the request of the person to whom they sold it, went back to get more. They pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property, and will cooperate with authorities.

The attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results is also in legal news.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is arguing in court that the judge should not let a grand jury question the senator “on all the topics” covered by its recent subpoena of his testimony in the investigation of the Trump campaign’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. Graham argues that the Speech or Debate Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says that congress members “shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place,” means he cannot be questioned about his two phone calls to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger about throwing out mail-in ballots in that state.

For Graham’s argument to prevail, he will have to convince the court that his calls to Raffensperger were part of his legitimate congressional work, rather than part of the efforts of Trump’s campaign to overturn the election, actions outside the scope of Graham’s congressional duties.

Lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who helped to invent the false electors plan to overturn the results of the 2020 election, is refusing to talk to the grand jury, arguing that he has an attorney-client relationship with the Trump campaign and saying the campaign had “instructed” him to maintain confidentiality. But Chesebro never received any payment, and it is unclear whether he was officially working for the campaign.

Meanwhile, Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis filed petitions today to require Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, Meadows ally James “Phil” Waldron, and Trump campaign advisor Boris Epshteyn to testify before the special grand jury next month.

Finally, the top secret documents Trump stole from the government: Today the DOJ submitted to the court a redacted version of the affidavit it used to obtain a search warrant for Trump’s Florida property Mar-a-Lago earlier this month. The judge has ordered the release of the document by noon tomorrow. Trump had publicly demanded the release of the affidavit but had not actually asked the court to release it. Instead, he has whipped up his followers against the FBI.

With these headlines from the Republican Party, and coming on the heels of a spectacular few months for the Democrats, the Biden administration came out today swinging against MAGA Republicans.

First, after a day of Republican congress members railing against yesterday’s educational loan forgiveness of up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for others, the White House tweeted a thread of those members alongside the amount of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) money those individuals were forgiven.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said: “For our government just to say ok your debt is completely forgiven.. it’s completely unfair.” Greene had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Vern Buchanan (R-FL) said: “Biden’s reckless, unilateral student loan giveaway is unfair to the 87 percent of Americans without student loan debt and those who played by the rules.” Buchanan had more than $2.3 million in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) said: “We do not need farmers and ranchers, small business owners, and teachers in Oklahoma paying the debts of Ivy League lawyers and doctors across the U.S.” Mullin had more than $1.4 million in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Kevin Hern (R-OK) said: “To recap, in the last two weeks, the ‘Party of the People’ has supercharged the IRS to go after working-class Americans, raised their taxes, and forced them to pay for other people's college degrees.” Hern had more than $1 million in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA) said: “Asking plumbers and carpenters to pay off the loans of Wall Street advisors and lawyers isn’t just unfair. It’s also bad policy.” Kelly had $987,237 in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said: Everyone knows that in a $60 Billion+ European land war, it's always the last $3 Billion that kicks in the door….” Gaetz had $482,321 in PPP loans forgiven.

Then Biden gave a barn-burning speech to the Democratic National Committee in Rockville, Maryland, clearly dividing the Republican Party between the MAGAs and mainstream Republicans. The MAGA philosophy is “semi-fascism,” he said, and we are seeing either its beginning or death knell.

“I want to be crystal clear about what’s on the ballot this year. Your right to choose is on the ballot this year. The Social Security you paid for from the time you had a job is on the ballot. The safety of our kids from gun violence is on the ballot…. The very survival of our planet is on the ballot. Your right to vote is on the ballot. Even…democracy.”

“The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security,” he said. “They’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace…political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.”

“This is why in this moment, those of you who love this country—Democrats, Independents, mainstream Republicans—we must be stronger,” he said.

  August 28, 2022 (Sunday)

As we turn toward the autumn, a picture that captures the passing summer.

I’m sending my very best wishes to everyone starting the school year.

Guessing– heck, pretty sure we know– that it’s going to be a busy week, so let’s take a deep breath and take the night off.

[Photo “Red Chairs” by Nadia Povalinska]

  August 30, 2022 (Tuesday)

The big news until shortly before midnight tonight was that businesses do indeed seem to be coming home after the pandemic illustrated the dangers of stretched supply lines, the global minimum tax reduced the incentives to flee to other countries with lower taxes, and the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act spurred investment in technology.

Yesterday, Honda and LG Energy Solution announced they would spend $4.4 billion to construct a new battery plant in the U.S. to join the plants General Motors is building in Ohio, Michigan, and Tennessee; the ones Ford is building in Kentucky and Tennessee; the one Toyota is building in North Carolina; and the one Stellantis is building in Indiana. The plants are part of the switch to electric vehicles.  According to auto industry reporter Neal E. Boudette of the New York Times, they represent “one of the most profound shifts the auto industry has experienced in its century-long history.”

Today, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear (D) announced that Kentucky has secured more than $8.5 billion for investment in the production of electric vehicle batteries, which should produce more than 8,000 jobs in the EV sector. “Kentuckians will literally be powering the future,” he said.

Also today, First Solar, the largest solar panel maker in the U.S., announced that it would construct a new solar panel plant in the Southeast, investing up to $1 billion. It credited the Inflation Reduction Act with making solar construction attractive enough in the U.S. to build here rather than elsewhere. First Solar has also said it will upgrade and expand an existing plant in Ohio, spending $185 million.

Corning has announced a new manufacturing plant outside Phoenix, Arizona, to build fiber-optic cable to help supply the $42.5 billion high-speed internet infrastructure investment made possible by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. AT&T will also build a new fiber internet network in Arizona.

The CHIPS and Science Act is spurring investment in the manufacturing of chips in the U.S. Earlier this month, Micron announced a $40 billion investment in the next eight years, producing up to 40,000 new jobs. Qualcomm has also committed to investing $4.2 billion in chips from the New York facility of GlobalFoundries. Qualcomm says it intends to increase chip production in the U.S. by 50% over the next five years. In January, Intel announced it would invest $20 billion, and possibly as much as $100 billion, in a chip plant in Ohio.

This investment is part of a larger trend in which U.S. companies are bringing their operations back to the U.S. Last week, a report by the Reshoring Initiative noted that nearly 350,000 U.S. jobs have come home this year. The coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and China’s instability were the push to bring jobs home, while the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act were the pull. Dion Rabouin notes in the Wall Street Journal that this reshoring will not necessarily translate to blue-collar jobs, as companies will likely increase automation to avoid higher labor costs.

President Joe Biden’s record is unexpectedly strong going into the midterms, and he is directly challenging Republicans on the issues they formerly considered their own. Today, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he challenged the Republicans on their claim to be the party of law and order, calling out their recent demands to “defund” the FBI and saying he wants to increase funding for law enforcement to enable it to have more social workers, mental health care specialists, and so on.

He noted that law enforcement officers want a ban on assault weapons and that he would work to pass one like that of 1994. When that law expired in 2004, mass shootings in the U.S. tripled.  

Then the president took on MAGA Republicans: “A safer America requires all of us to uphold the rule of law, not the rule of any one party or any one person.” He addressed Senator Lindsey Graham’s comment yesterday about how there would be violence if the Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted Trump. “Let’s be clear,” Biden said, “You hear some of my friends in the other team talking about political violence and how it’s necessary.” But violence is never appropriate, he said. “Never. Period. Never, never, never. No one should be encouraged to use political violence. None whatsoever.”

To audience applause, he called out those who supported the January 6 attack on the Capitol: “Don’t tell me you support law enforcement if you won’t condemn what happened on the 6th…. For God’s sake, whose side are you on?... You can’t be pro-law enforcement and pro-insurrection. You can’t be a party of law and order and call the people who attacked the police on January 6th ‘patriots.’ You can’t do it.”

While Biden is consolidating and pushing the Democrats’ worldview, the Republicans are in disarray. The revelation that former president Trump moved classified intelligence to the Trump Organization’s property at Mar-a-Lago has kept some of them sidelined, as they didn’t want to talk about the issue, and has forced others to try to justify an unprecedented breach of national security. Republican candidates for elected office who are not in deep red districts have been taking references to Trump (and to abortion restrictions) off their websites.

The deadly seriousness of what he has done is clear in part from the former president’s own behavior over it. Yesterday, he demanded to be made president or to have a do-over of the 2020 election; today, after constant reposting of conspiracy theories and defenses on his ailing Truth Social, he wrote: “Why are people so mean?”

The reason for his fear turned up tonight in a Department of Justice filing in response to his demand for the appointment of a special master to review the documents, and for the return of several of them to him. His requests gave the DOJ an opening to correct the record that he and his allies have been muddying.

This document replaced the economic news as today’s big story. The DOJ laid out the timeline behind the attempt of the U.S. government to recover the materials Trump took. First, officials from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recognized that materials were missing and tried to get Trump to return them voluntarily. When he finally handed over 15 boxes, the officials recognized that some of the materials were “highly classified” and told the Department of Justice.

Trump delayed the FBI examination of the boxes, but when officials got into them, they recognized their haphazard storage threatened national security. They got evidence of more records at Mar-a-Lago, for which they obtained a grand jury subpoena. Trump’s representatives handed over a few more documents, and a lawyer certified that that was it—they had done a diligent search and now could confirm that there were no more documents left. They said there were no materials stored anywhere but a storeroom, but they refused to let agents look inside the boxes there.

It was a lie both that there were no more documents, and that materials were contained in the storeroom. The FBI learned there were still more documents, got a search warrant, and on August 8 seized from at least two locations 33 more boxes with more than 100 classified records—twice as many classified documents as Trump and his representatives had handed over under the subpoena.

The U.S. government spelled out that “those records do not belong to him”; they belong to the United States. It said that Trump never asserted that the records had been declassified or asserted any claim of executive privilege, and Trump’s representatives indicated they thought the documents were classified. It made a strong case that the former president and his lawyer obstructed the search for the documents.

Even more chilling than the words of the filing was the exhibit attached: a photo of SECRET, TOP SECRET, and SECRET/SCI files recovered from a container, spread out on a carpeted floor next to a banker’s box containing framed TIME magazine covers.

Trump has added Chris Kise, the former solicitor general of Florida, to his legal team. Although the Republican National Committee has been paying the former president’s legal bills since he left office, it will not pay the legal fees he racks up over this issue.

 August 31, 2022 (Wednesday)

Not saying that Trump supporters are desperately trying to find a way to spin his theft, and subsequent hiding, of classified documents from the U.S. government, but there was actually an op-ed today in a major paper suggesting that the documents described by the Department of Justice and shown in last night’s explosive photo were just props because stacks of paper make Trump feel important.

I’m going to do the author of that piece a favor and not link to it in the notes.

Shortly afterward, Trump tore the ground out from under that argument—and most of the others his supporters were trying to make—by posting a complaint on his Truth Social network about the FBI photo documenting the stolen classified documents. “There seems to be confusion as to the ‘picture’ where documents were sloppily thrown on the floor and then released photographically for the world to see, as if that’s what the FBI found when they broke into my home. Wrong! They took them out of cartons and spread them around on the carpet….”

Lawyers point out that this is an admission that he had the documents and knew it.

His lawyer Alina Habba then went onto the Fox News Channel to complain about the photo and said, “I’m somebody who has been in his office…. I do have firsthand knowledge…. I have never, ever, seen that…. That is not the way his office looks…. He has guests frequently there.” His office had classified information in it, and his lawyer just said he entertains guests there. This is an intelligence nightmare.

Tonight, just before the deadline of 8:00, Trump’s lawyers filed a response to yesterday’s filing by the Department of Justice about the classified intelligence he hid at Mar-a-Lago. His lawyers argued that the FBI’s struggle to recover stolen classified documents was “the standard give-and-take between former Presidents and NARA regarding Presidential library contents.”

In Alaska tonight, Mary Peltola, who is Yup’ik, won a special election for the House seat left vacant after the death of Republican Don Young. A tribal fisheries manager and close family friend of the Youngs, Peltola defeated former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who was endorsed by former president Trump, to become the first Democrat in 50 years and the first woman ever to hold the seat and, while she was at it, the first Native Alaskan ever elected to Congress. After winning Alaska’s House seat through ranked-choice voting, Peltola will again compete for it with Palin and her other challenger, Nick Begich III, in the regular election in November.

Executive Director of Voters of Tomorrow Santiago Mayer pointed out that the last time a Democrat sat in Alaska’s House seat was the same year the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. “If that’s not a…sign,” he tweeted, “I don’t know what is.”