Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

brianlux · September 2022

mickeyrat said:

September 11, 2022 (Sunday)

I was playing around in yesterday's post, because my "crazy rare find at Buddy's wharf" was, of course, Buddy himself.

Took yesterday off and am going to take tonight, too. First time since September 15, 2019, I've taken more than a single day off, but our wedding seems like a worthy occasion, no?

[Photo by Leonie Glen.]

How cool is that! :-D

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 12, 2022 (Monday)

Many thanks for all your good wishes on our marriage. Someone saw the picture and wrote, “Heather is betting on the future.”

I am indeed.

And there are reasons to be hopeful about that future.

When I last wrote about the news, on Friday, Ukraine was launching a counteroffensive against the Russian troops occupying their territory, but it was still too early to be sure of what was happening. Now it is clear: over the weekend, Ukrainian forces drove Russian troops back, retaking more than 1000 square miles of Ukrainian territory and handing Russia a humiliating operational defeat.

Ukraine had been indicating it would launch its offensive in the south, prompting Russia to move 15,000 to 25,000 troops to that front. Instead, it pushed forward farther north, moving with lightning speed as the Russian occupiers, already suffering from low morale, crumbled. Ukrainian plans reflected cooperation with U.S. intelligence, as well as support from weapons systems provided by allies, including HIMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) from the U.S.

While this will not end the crisis, it has put Russia on the defensive and turned the war in Ukraine’s favor. Noting that Russian soldiers abandoned their equipment and fled, Europe specialist Anne Applebaum noted that “[t]he fundamental difference between Ukrainian soldiers, who are fighting for their country’s existence, and Russian soldiers, who are fighting for their salary, has finally begun to matter.”

This shift in the war continues the process of undermining the argument right-wing politicians have made for ending liberal democracy. They claim that it is inefficient, making democratically led countries unable to react as quickly to the modern world as countries with a strong leader, and that the secular values of democracy that emphasize equality weaken a country’s morals and ultimately weaken the country itself.

As recently as May 2021, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) shared a Russian propaganda video about its troops and suggested they were superior to the American military, which was trying to demonstrate that it includes all Americans equally. He tweeted: “Holy crap. Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea….”

But Russia’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, thwarted by Ukraine and its democratic allies, has undermined the myth of an invincible Russian army, while the invaders’ commission of war crimes has made it clear they have no moral ground to stand on. Meanwhile, internal arguments in Russia as the economy has tanked and the war gone badly have created a rash of “accidental” deaths of senior officials, suggesting that autocratic governments are anything but stable. Further, Applebaum suggests, since Putin tied his legitimacy to the success of the Ukraine invasion, its failure might turn out to be his own as well.

Former president Trump openly admired Russian president Vladimir Putin, and Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson followed suit, backing Putin’s characterization of his invasion of Ukraine. Carlson has also celebrated Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who has called for the replacement of liberal democracy with “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy,” claiming to defend patriarchal and Christian systems. That process has involved a takeover of the country’s media, crackdowns on opposition, rampant corruption, and restrictions on voting.

Carlson and right-wing leaders have praised the antiabortion and anti-immigration policies of Orbán’s political party. In September 2021, former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest at a forum denouncing immigration and urging traditional social values, where he told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump put on the court. In 2022, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was held in Budapest, and months later, at CPAC’s convention in Texas, Orbán was a keynote speaker.

In July the European Parliament (EP), which passes European legislation, took a strong stand against Hungary’s anti-LGBTQ laws and Orbán’s attack on “democracy, the rule of law, and fundamental rights,” and withheld billions of dollars from the country. In response, Orbán’s Fidesz party passed a resolution to weaken the European Parliament, saying European democracy was at a “dead end.” It also called for members of the EP to be chosen not by the voters of their countries, but by the parliaments of those countries.

This week, members of the European Parliament will debate whether the values of the European Union are under systemic threat in Hungary. The EP is expected to declare that Hungary can no longer be considered a full democracy and consider suspending its rights within the European Union.

And there are other signs that right-wing extremism is facing resistance. Today, more than 150 prominent Michigan Republicans—including a former head of the Michigan Republican Party—backed Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer for reelection. The current Michigan Republican Party has backed far-right candidates for governor, secretary of state, and attorney general and has lined up behind Trump, who made attacking Whitmer a feature of his 2020 campaign. Those Republicans jumping behind the Democratic governor note that she has signed more than 900 bipartisan bills into law and has focused on issues that are good for everyone, regardless of party.

"During her time as governor, she has focused on growing our economy with major investments, strengthening our skilled workforce, investing in the education of our children, and making government work for us,” said former Republican representative Joe Schwarz. “I know she will continue to advocate on behalf of hardworking Michiganders and that's why I'm proud to support her for re-election this fall."

Others pointed to her protection of reproductive rights as key to their support. Whitmer is currently polling 13 points higher than her opponent, Tudor Dixon, who opposes abortion without exception.

In the last week, federal grand juries have issued subpoenas to about 40 people associated with Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, including the money raised over the lie that the election was stolen. Legal affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times Harry Litman noted that many of the recipients were junior staffers who can testify to Trump’s behavior around January 6 and who have no legal reason not to cooperate.

Last week, excerpts from a forthcoming book by former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey S. Berman revealed that Trump tried to use the Department of Justice against those he considered his enemies and to protect those he considered his friends. The Justice Department is supposed to enforce the law impartially, but “[t]hroughout my tenure as U.S. attorney,” Berman says in the book, “Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining—in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee told Attorney General Merrick Garland it would investigate the allegations.

Finally, last night Trump arrived unexpectedly at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., and today photographers recorded him meeting with a group of men on the grounds of his Virginia golf course, although they did not appear to be playing or even to have clubs.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 13, 2022 (Tuesday)

In an event at the White House today, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and the First Lady and Second Gentleman, along with lawmakers and those who worked for the causes the law embraces, celebrated the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the new law that lowers prescription drug costs, invests in new technologies to combat climate change, and raises taxes on billion-dollar corporations both to fund the new investments and to reduce the federal deficit.

In contrast, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) today announced he will introduce a national abortion ban. This is a pretty transparent attempt by the Republicans to deal with the political toxicity of the Republican-dominated Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade, a toxicity unlikely to go away while news breaks, as it did today, that the state of Texas will not publish data on maternal death until after the midterm elections, suggesting the data will be bad indeed.

When the court ended the recognition of the constitutional right to reproductive rights in June, Republicans tried to manage the backlash by saying that the decision would simply return to the states the right to decide the status of abortion within their boundaries. The idea was actually that of enslavers in the 1830s: that true democracy operated at the state level because lawmakers there were closer to their constituents and would represent them better than those at the national level, thus enabling them to dismiss national pressure against enslavement as interference in state rights.

Graham himself echoed this line. As recently as August 7, 2022, according to White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, he said, “I've been consistent. I think states should decide the issue of marriage and states should decide the issue of abortion.”

Now, as those opposing the end of the national protection of abortion rights warned, Graham is calling for a national abortion ban. He tried to explain away the change by saying that after the Democrats had announced what they stood for—presumably, President Joe Biden’s recent warning that Trump and the MAGA Republicans endanger our rights and our democracy, while the Democrats have rebuilt the economy for everyone—he wanted to make sure the Republicans did, too.

But the Republicans can read the polls as well as anyone and are facing the reality that their base might well not turn out without Trump on the ballot, while opponents of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision overturning Roe v. Wade are showing up in big numbers to vote against Republicans. Graham’s offer to impose a national ban on abortion seeks to bring the Republican base to the polls. “If we take back the House and the Senate, I can assure you we’ll have a vote on our bill,” he said today. “If the Democrats are in charge, I don’t know if we’ll ever have a vote on our bill.”

But while Graham courted the Republicans’ extremist base, he also tried to make his proposal palatable for those who support reproductive rights by framing it as a moderate one that would simply bring the U.S. in line with European countries by banning abortion after 15 weeks, ignoring that European countries have much better access to contraception, early abortion, exceptions to the laws, and maternity care.

The proposal is neither moderate nor in line with European countries. But it is also a giant red flag for our democracy, showing that the argument that the federal government should turn issues back to the states was the lie opponents said it was. Graham is calling for the federal government to impose a law backed only by an extremist minority on the entire country. It is the same principle that so-called “originalists” pretended to reject in the Dobbs decision, now reimposed to reflect not the will of the majority, but the tyranny of the minority.

Some Republican Senators are distancing themselves from Graham’s proposal, but that distancing reflects the attempt to muddy the waters so voters can believe what they want. The proposal reflects both concern on the part of Republican leaders going into the midterms, and a determination to hide what they are really calling for. CNN Capitol Hill reporter Melanie Zanona reported this afternoon that at least 80 House Republicans are introducing their own bill, similar to Graham’s.

Over on his Truth Social network, where he has been amplifying extremist QAnon accounts, Trump has been making it harder to deny the party’s growing radicalism. Today, he “retruthed” an image of himself wearing a QAnon pin with Q slogans, apparently going all-in on the conspiracy theory base. Ben Collins of NBC News noted the importance of the words on the image—“The Storm is Coming”—which refer to the “big end date for QAnon, when Trump is supposed to round up all of his political enemies and hang them in public after a brief military tribunal.”

Trump’s legal troubles continue to mount. The new subpoenas from the Department of Justice appear to be focusing on the money Trump’s Save America PAC raised for an “Official Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist. The money went to Trump’s associates. This scam is not unlike the one for which Trump associate Stephen K. Bannon is now indicted: he and others allegedly raised at least $15 million to build a wall on the U.S. southern border, only to pocket the money.

Trump pardoned him from federal charges, but Bannon is now facing state charges in New York. “The simple truth is that it is a crime to profit off the backs of donors by making false pretenses,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg told reporters.

Today the affidavit for the search warrant that FBI agents fulfilled at Mar-a-Lago on August 8 was released with fewer redactions. The new material reveals that after handing over documents produced for a subpoena, Trump’s lawyer told the Department of Justice that “he was advised” that all White House records were in the storage room at Mar-a-Lago and that “he was not advised” there were records anywhere else. Ryan Goodman of Just Security notes that this likely points to Trump as the person lying to him. The subpoena for security videos from the vicinity of the storage room at Mar-a-Lago reached back to January 10, 2022.

This afternoon, Missy Ryan of the Washington Post reported that a senior U.S. official has revealed that since 2014, Russia has spent at least $300 million in more than 24 countries to weaken democracies and strengthen global forces friendly to Putin’s interests. That would likely include funds spent attacking U.S. elections, most notably that of 2016, as detailed in the five-volume report of the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee on Russian Active Measures, Campaigns, and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election. The administration commissioned a review of Russian efforts this summer and discovered that Russia intended to continue pouring money into destabilizing other countries.

The administration will declassify some of the report to show the techniques Russia has been using. “By shining this light on Russian covert political financing and Russian attempts to undermine democratic processes, we’re putting these foreign parties and candidates on notice that if they accept Russian money secretly we can and we will expose it,” the official told reporters.

Meanwhile, Russian president Putin’s power at home is wobbling. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz tweeted today that he had a 90-minute phone call with Putin in which he demanded that Russia withdraw its troops from Ukraine and recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Fifty Russian municipal deputies have publicly called for Putin to resign.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 14, 2022 (Wednesday)

It appears that John Durham’s investigation into why the FBI opened an investigation into the ties between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russian operatives is coming to an end.

Durham’s investigation was a prime example of Trump’s attempt to use the Department of Justice not to enforce the nation’s laws, but to hurt his enemies, a charge former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman has made in his new book. Trump, Berman said, wanted his friends protected and his enemies—including former secretaries of state John Kerry and Hillary Clinton—prosecuted.

In April 2019, the month after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election finally saw daylight, Attorney General William Barr tapped United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut John Durham to investigate the circumstances under which the FBI began to look into Russian interference in the election in the first place.

The appointment was clearly an attempt to continue to distract people from the results of the Mueller report, which Barr had had an instrumental role in diminishing. Barr took office on February 14, 2019, just as Mueller was finishing his report. As Mueller’s superior, Barr got a copy of the report before anyone else, and he spun it to the media, claiming it exonerated the president and his team. In fact, Mueller established that Russia had illegally intervened in the election to benefit Trump and that the campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.” Mueller complained to Barr about the spin, but it was too late: the public had bought it.

Trump and his allies jumped on Durham's investigation, promising it would prove that FBI agents were part of a “Deep State” and that Durham would uncover “the crime of the century.” In December 2020, after Trump had lost the election, Barr revealed that he had made Durham a special counsel the previous October so that Durham could continue his work into the next administration.

But the investigation itself fizzled. Durham pressed charges against only three people. One pleaded guilty to altering an email and was sentenced to probation and community service. A grand jury alleged two others lied to the FBI. One was acquitted of the charges last May. The other is supposed to go on trial next month but has asked a judge to throw out the case for lack of evidence. But Durham’s three-year investigation did provide talking points for those attacking the FBI’s Russia investigation, keeping alive Trump’s false claims that it was just a “witch hunt.”

Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice was a profound attack on the principles of democracy. Using the law to attack enemies is a hallmark of authoritarians—just ask opposition leader Alexsei Navalny in Russia, who has been sentenced to incarceration on trumped-up charges to get him out of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s way—while it also encourages lawbreaking from those who don’t fear legal consequences.

We have seen that sense of being above the law today in stories about the willingness of Mississippi officials, including former governor Phil Bryant, to work with former NFL player Brett Favre to divert about $5 million in federal welfare funds from helping people in poverty to building a volleyball facility at the University of Southern Mississippi, where his daughter was a volleyball player.

We have seen it in the anger that Trump allies show when law enforcement treats them as it would anyone suspected of lawbreaking. MyPillow chief executive officer Mike Lindell explained by video that yesterday FBI agents took his phone and that “what we’ve done is weaponize the FBI…it’s disgusting….” Agents executed the search warrant as part of a federal investigation into the alleged breach of Colorado voting machines.

We have seen it in Jeffrey Clark’s response today to ethics charges brought against him by the D.C. Bar. Clark was employed by the Department of Justice in late 2020, when he worked to swing the department behind Trump’s lie that he had won the election, a shift that would have utterly destroyed the rule of law in the U.S. Now he claims the D.C. Bar cannot punish him because normal rules of behavior don’t apply. In a filing today, he told the bar: “[T]the President has an absolute right to seek legal and other forms of advice…and officers of the United States have an absolute duty and corresponding privilege to provide their opinions on a confidential basis.”

The turning of the courts into a tool for partisan advantage has been part of the Republican project since 1986, when Reagan’s attorney general Edwin Meese vowed to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.” That partisan use of the courts inspired then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to help Trump replace about 30% of the federal bench and to swing the Supreme Court to the far right with three new justices.

An examination by Politico’s Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney shows that Trump’s judges were less experienced on the bench and had spent more time in politics than the judges appointed by other presidents, and that Trump expected them to side with him, calling them “my judges.” “If it’s my judges, you know how they’re gonna decide,” he told evangelical leaders in 2016. And some of them have, indeed, sided with the former president in surprising ways, most recently when Judge Aileen Cannon, confirmed after Trump lost the 2020 election, agreed with his request for a special master to review the government documents recovered by the government from Mar-a-Lago.

Trump’s judges have revealed a willingness to break precedent to achieve political ends, and nowhere is that clearer than in the willingness of the Supreme Court to replace long-settled law with their own preferences, most notably in their Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to abortion, but also in West Virginia v. EPA, limiting Congress’s ability to delegate regulatory authority to agencies, and so on.

That replacement of settled law with what looks to be political preferences has tanked popular faith in the Supreme Court. On Monday, Justice Elena Kagan noted that, “Judges create legitimacy problems for themselves…when they instead stray into places where it looks like they’re an extension of the political process or when they’re imposing their own personal preferences.” People should be able to expect that “changes in personnel don’t send the entire legal system up for grabs.”

President Joe Biden appears to be trying to restore the rule of law to the Department of Justice, going out of his way to note that he is not involved with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decisions. Increasingly, it looks like Garland’s Justice Department is bearing down on those who considered themselves untouchable.

The trials and convictions of those who participated in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continue. Yesterday, three more rioters were found guilty of multiple charges. Twenty-five year old Patrick McCaughey III, of Ridgefield, Connecticut, who crushed Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges in a doorway, faces decades in prison.

Also today, Pamela Brown, Evan Perez, Jeremy Herb, and Kristen Holmes reported at CNN that not all of Trump’s loyalists are still acting as if they are above the law. Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has complied with a Department of Justice subpoena.

Perhaps most revealing of the restoration of the rule of law at the Justice Department is that former attorney general Barr has been on the television circuit defending the FBI and Biden’s Department of Justice from Trump’s fury over the FBI’s execution of a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago that yielded documents—or empty folders—bearing the highest classified markings.

That is, the same man who sponsored Durham’s political mission has recently begun to speak up for the rule of law.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 15, 2022 (Thursday)

This morning we awoke to news that rail carriers and union leaders had reached an agreement to avoid a national rail strike that would have badly tangled the supply chains that are just now starting to move efficiently again. That, in turn, would have affected everything from drinking water—the chlorine to purify urban systems is shipped by train—to consumer goods, costing up to $2 billion a day and likely sparking job losses and contributing to the inflation that has only recently begun to ease.

Like many of the victories President Joe Biden has celebrated during his term, this deal was complicated, requiring the administration to bring together a number of moving pieces. In the 1980s and the 1990s, the U.S. railroad industry consolidated into seven main carriers, which are now making record profits. In 2021, profits for the two largest railroad corporations in the U.S.—the Union Pacific and BNSF—jumped 12% to $21.8 billion and 11.6% to $22.5 billion, respectively.

But those profits have come from cost-cutting measures that included job losses from an industry that had remained stable for the previous 25 years. Between November 2018 and December 2020, the industry lost 40,000 jobs, most of them among the people who actually operated the trains, as the railroads adopted a new system called Precision Schedule Railroading (PSR). This system made the trains far more efficient by keeping workers on very tight schedules that leave little time for anything but work. Any disruption in those schedules—a family emergency, for example—brought disciplinary action and possible job loss. Although workers got an average of 3 weeks’ vacation and holidays, the rest of their time, including weekends, was tightly controlled, while smaller crews meant more dangerous working conditions.

Union leaders and railroad management have been negotiating for more than two and a half years for new contracts, and in July, Biden established a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) to try to resolve the differences before the September 16 deadline by which the railway workers could legally strike.

The PEB’s August report called for significant wage increases but kicked down the road the problems associated with PSR. The National Carriers Conference Committee, which represents the railroads, called the report “fair and appropriate”; not all of the 13 involved unions did.

Thanks to the 1926 Railway Labor Act, Congress can force railroad workers to stay on the job, and that is precisely what Republicans proposed in this crisis: forcing workers to accept the recommendations of the PEB. This had political fire just two months before the midterms, as Republicans were trying to force Biden and the Democrats either to abandon the workers they claim to champion or to accept responsibility for a devastating strike. The railroads, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and business groups all favored this approach.

The administration put its weight behind negotiations, including not only three cabinet secretaries—Labor Secretary Marty Walsh (who is himself a former union official), Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack—as well as Director of the National Economic Council Brian Deese, but also the president, who worked the phones and got mad that management would not loosen scheduling rules. The details of the deal are not yet published, but it appears to have accepted most of the PEB recommendations on pay, given workers a day of paid sick leave—union leaders wanted 15, up from none—and, apparently, removed the penalties for missing time for illness or medical emergencies, one of the workers’ key demands.

The deal is a big deal, but it has not yet been accepted by the union members, who will still be on tight schedules although they can now take unpaid time off for medical emergencies without losing their jobs. (My guess is that higher pay is intended to make this seem like a workable solution to the scheduling issue.) Initial responses to the agreement seemed mixed.

The deal does, though, highlight that Biden is using the power of the presidency to protect the American people while trying to be fair to labor and management, a system pioneered by Republican president Theodore Roosevelt and adopted afterward by Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Republican Dwight Eisenhower, among others. It’s a very different principle than the idea that workers should accept whatever conditions management imposes on them.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board yesterday wrote: “You’d think some $5 trillion in new spending by this Congress, much of which will fatten union bottom lines, would be enough to buy some labor peace. If not, Democrats on Capitol Hill have the power to impose another cooling off period so the two sides can negotiate without a strike. Let’s see if Democrats side with their Big Labor allies, or with the U.S. economy that needs the trains to run on time.”

“Thanks for your concern,” Biden tweeted today. “To answer your question: yes, the trains are running on time.”

Yesterday, ABC News senior national correspondent Terry Moran pointed out that Biden and his team have “masterfully” handled “the greatest international security crisis since 9/11,” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They united NATO against Moscow and held the alliance together, wrecked the Russian economy, helped Europeans find energy from new sources, kept the U.S. and NATO out of the war, helped Ukraine with intelligence and weapons, all despite those at home working against him.

Long term, this will advance U.S. interests not only by strengthening alliances, but also by demonstrating that America can be a force for good and by showing Putin’s brand of authoritarianism “as a con, a cheap costume donned by the thieves and gangsters in the Kremlin.”

Today, the White House held a bipartisan summit against “hate-fueled violence in our country,” promising “that when Americans stand united to renew civic bonds and heal divides, we can help prevent acts of hate and violence.” At the “United We Stand” summit, Biden offered a “whole-of-society response to prevent, respond to, and recover from hate-fueled violence, and to foster national unity.” Attending the summit were survivors of gun violence, religious leaders, community organizers, law enforcement officers, philanthropists, journalists, and local politicians. Susan Bro, whose daughter Heather Heyer was killed by a white supremacist at the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, introduced the president.

“[T]here are core values that should bring us together as Americans,” Biden said, “And one of them is standing together against hate, racism, bigotry, and violence that have long haunted and plagued our nation.” “In the last few years, it’s been given much too much oxygen in our politics, in our media, and on the Internet; too much hate—all for power and profit.”

“[T]he vast majority of Americans are overwhelmingly united against such violence,” he said. “The vast majority of us believe in honesty, decency, and respect for others, patriotism, liberty, justice for all, hope, and possibilities.”

Biden announced new investments in community building and called for “a new era of national service” with a $15 hourly wage and for Congress to remove social media’s near immunity for hate speech. He called for individuals to step up as well, speaking out against hate and building bridges.

“We must choose to be a nation of hope, unity, and optimism or a nation of fear and division and hate,” he said.

And I am ending here, on that note, leaving for later the many other things that happened today, because this is the third anniversary of these Letters from an American, and it strikes me what a contrast these stories are to the news of Trump’s phone call asking Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky to smear Biden that launched this project. I like that the three-year marker reflects that change, and that it, in turn, reflects you all. These letters are really yours, driven by your questions, complaints, tips, ideas, decency, principles, and kindness. I thank you for all of it, and for your faith, both in me and in American democracy.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 16, 2022 (Friday)

The big story in the news over the past couple of days is that Florida governor Ron DeSantis chartered two planes to fly about 50 migrants, most of whom were from Venezuela, to Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts.

The story is still developing. Although DeSantis is the governor of Florida, the migrants appear to have come from Texas, and it currently appears that they were lured onto the planes—paid for with taxpayer money—with the false promise of work and housing in New York City or Boston. In addition, there are allegations from a lawyer working with the migrants that officials from the Department of Homeland Security falsified information about the migrants to set them up for automatic deportation. As I write this, it is not clear what their actual status is: have they applied for asylum and been processed, or are they undocumented immigrants?

As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo says, none of it adds up.

None of it, that is, except the politics. DeSantis apparently dispatched the migrants with a videographer to take images of them arriving, entirely unexpectedly, on the upscale island, presumably in an attempt to present the image that Democratic areas can’t handle immigrants (in fact, more than 12% of the island’s 17,000 full-time residents were born in foreign countries, and 22% of the residents are non-white). But the residents of the island greeted the migrants; found beds, food, and medical care; and worked with authorities to move them back to the mainland where there are support services and housing. In the meantime, there are questions about the legality of DeSantis chartering planes to move migrants from state to state.

There are two big stories behind DeSantis’s move.

First is that the Republicans are on the ropes over the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision and the capture of the party by its MAGA wing. That slide into radical extremism means the party is contracting, but it is not clear at all that base voters will show up in the midterms without former president Trump on the ballot.

Rallying voters with threats of “aliens” swamping traditional society is a common tactic of right-wing politicians; it was the central argument that brought Hungary’s Viktor Orbán into his current authoritarian position. Republican governors Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona have been bussing migrants to Washington—about 10,000 of them—saying they would bring the immigrant issue to the doorsteps of Democrats. Now DeSantis is in on the trick.

Immigrants are nothing new to northern cities, of course. The U.S. is in a period of high immigration. Currently, 15% of the inhabitants of Washington, D.C., are foreign born, only slightly less than the 16.8% of the population of Texas that is foreign born. About 29% of the inhabitants of Boston come from outside U.S. borders, as do 36% of the inhabitants of New York City.

In the lead-up to the midterms, Republicans have tried to distract from their unpopular stands on abortion, contraception, marriage equality, and so on, by hammering on the idea that the Democrats have created “open borders”; that criminal immigrants are bringing in huge amounts of drugs, especially fentanyl; and that Biden is secretly flying undocumented immigrants into Republican states in the middle of the night. Beginning in July, they began to insist that the country is being “invaded.”

In fact, the border is not “open.” Fences, surveillance technology, and about 20,000 Border Patrol agents make the border more secure than it has ever been. That means apprehensions of undocumented migrants are up, with U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) recording more than 3 million encounters at the border since January 2021. Those high numbers reflect people stopped from coming in and are artificially inflated because many who are stopped try again. CBP estimates that about 27% of those stopped at the border are repeat apprehensions.

Although much fentanyl is being stopped, some is indeed coming in, but through official ports of entry in large trucks or cars, not on individual migrants, who statistically are far less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes. And the federal government is not secretly flying anyone anywhere (although, ironically, DeSantis is); U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sometimes moves migrants between detention centers, and CPB transfers unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services. These flights have been going on for years.

The second story is the history of American immigration, which is far more complicated and interesting than the current news stories suggest.

Mexican immigration is nothing new; our western agribusinesses were built on migrant labor of Mexicans, Japanese, and poor whites, among others, in the late 19th century. From the time the current border was set in 1848 until the 1930s, people moved back and forth across it without restrictions. But in 1965, Congress passed the Hart-Celler Act, putting a cap on Latin American immigration for the first time. The cap was low: just 20,000, although 50,000 workers were coming annually.

After 1965, workers continued to come as they always had, and to be employed, as always. But now their presence was illegal. In 1986, Congress tried to fix the problem by offering amnesty to 2.3 million Mexicans who were living in the U.S. and by cracking down on employers who hired undocumented workers. But rather than ending the problem of undocumented workers, the new law exacerbated it by beginning the process of militarizing the border. Until then, migrants into the United States had been offset by an equal number leaving at the end of the season. Once the border became heavily guarded, Mexican migrants refused to take the chance of leaving.

Then, in the 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) flooded Mexico with U.S. corn and drove Mexican farmers to find work in the American Southeast. This immigration boom had passed by 2007, when the number of undocumented Mexicans living in the United States began to decline as more Mexicans left the U.S. than came.

In 2013 a large majority of Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, backed a bill to fix the disconnect caused by the 1965 law. In 2013, with a bipartisan vote of 68–32, the Senate passed a bill giving a 13-year pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, who would have to meet security requirements. It required employers to verify that they were hiring legal workers. It created a visa system for unskilled workers, and it got rid of preference for family migration in favor of skill-based migration. And it strengthened border security. It would have passed the House, but House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) refused to bring it up for a vote, aware that the issue of immigration would rally Republican voters.

But most of the immigrants coming over the southern border now are not Mexican migrants.

Beginning around 2014, people began to flee "warlike levels of violence" in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, coming to the U.S. for asylum. This is legal, although most come illegally, taking their chances with smugglers who collect fees to protect migrants on the Mexican side of the border and to get them into the U.S.

The Obama administration tried to deter migrants by expanding the detention of families, and it made significant investments in Central America in an attempt to stabilize the region by expanding economic development and promoting security. The Trump administration emphasized deterrence. It cut off support to Central American countries, worked with authoritarians to try to stop regional gangs, drastically limited the number of refugees the U.S. would admit, and—infamously—deliberately separated children from their parents to deter would-be asylum seekers.

The number of migrants to the U.S. began to drop in 2000 and continued to drop throughout Trump’s years in office. The Trump administration gutted immigration staff and facilities and then cut off immigration during the pandemic under Title 42, a public health order.

The Biden administration coincided with the easing of the pandemic and catastrophic storms in Central America, leading migration to jump, but the administration continued to turn migrants back under Title 42 and resumed working with Central American countries to stem the violence that is sparking people to flee. (In nine months, the Trump administration expelled more than 400,000 people under Title 42; in Biden’s first 18 months, his administration expelled 1.7 million people.)

The Biden administration sought to end Title 42 last May, but a lawsuit by Republican states led a federal judge in Louisiana to keep the policy in place. People arriving at the U.S. border have the right to apply for asylum even under Title 42.

There are a lot of moving pieces in the immigration debate: migrants need safety, the U.S. needs workers, our immigrant-processing systems are understaffed, and our laws are outdated. They need real solutions, not political stunts.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 17, 2022 (Saturday)

In 1761, 55-year-old Benjamin Franklin attended the coronation of King George III and later wrote that he expected the young monarch’s reign would “be happy and truly glorious.” Then, in 1776, he helped to draft and then signed the Declaration of Independence. An 81-year-old man in 1787, he urged his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to rally behind the new plan of government they had written.

“I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them,” he said, “For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.”

The framers of the new constitution hoped it would fix the problems of the first attempt to create a new nation. During the Revolutionary War, the Second Continental Congress had hammered out a plan for a confederation of states, but with fears of government tyranny still uppermost in lawmakers’ minds, they centered power in the states rather than in a national government.

The result—the Articles of Confederation—was a “firm league of friendship” among the 13 new states, overseen by a congress of men chosen by the state legislatures and in which each state had one vote. The new pact gave the federal government few duties and even fewer ways to meet them. Indicating their inclinations, in the first substantive paragraph the authors of the agreement said: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”

Within a decade, the states were refusing to contribute money to the new government and were starting to contemplate their own trade agreements with other countries. An economic recession in 1786 threatened farmers in western Massachusetts with the loss of their farms when the state government in the eastern part of the state refused relief; in turn, when farmers led by Revolutionary War captain Daniel Shays marched on Boston, propertied men were so terrified their own property would be seized that they raised their own army for protection.

The new system clearly could not protect property of either the poor or the rich and thus faced the threat of landless mobs. The nation seemed on the verge of tearing itself apart, and the new Americans were all too aware that both England and Spain were standing by, waiting to make the most of the opportunities such chaos would create.

And so, in 1786, leaders called for a reworking of the new government centered not on the states, but on the people of the nation represented by a national government. The document began, “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union….”

The Constitution established a representative democracy, a republic, in which three branches of government would balance each other to prevent the rise of a tyrant. Congress would write all “necessary and proper” laws, levy taxes, borrow money, pay the nation’s debts, establish a postal service, establish courts, declare war, support an army and navy, organize and call forth “the militia to execute the Laws of the Union” and “provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.”

The president would execute the laws, but if Congress overstepped, the president could veto proposed legislation. In turn, Congress could override a presidential veto. Congress could declare war, but the president was the commander in chief of the army and had the power to make treaties with foreign powers. It was all quite an elegant system of paths and tripwires, really.

A judicial branch would settle disputes between inhabitants of the different states and guarantee every defendant a right to a jury trial.

In this system, the new national government was uppermost. The Constitution provided that “[t]he Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States,” and promised that “the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion….”

Finally, it declared: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

“I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such,” Franklin said after a weary four months spent hashing it out, “because I think a general Government necessary for us,” and, he said, it “astonishes me…to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our…States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.” “On the whole,” he said to his colleagues, “I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility—and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.”

On September 17, 1787, they did.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 18, 2022 (Sunday)

Today's photo is a meditation on love and faith found early one morning in "a collection of stuff in the yard of a man who lives on the outermost inhabited island on the coast of Maine," as my photographer friend Peter Ralston put it.

I'll see you tomorrow.

[Photo, "The Source," by Peter Ralston]

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 19, 2022 (Monday)

On Saturday, the anniversary of the day in 1787 on which the Framers signed the U.S. Constitution, Attorney General Merrick Garland administered the oath of allegiance to 200 immigrants in the Great Hall at Ellis Island. From 1892 to 1954, nearly 12 million immigrants stopped on the island as part of their journey to the United States, and from 1900 to 1924, the Great Hall was filled with as many as 5000 new arrivals a day, sitting on benches under the high ceiling that had been tiled in the spectacular patterns of Spanish-born architect Rafael Guastavino—who came to the U.S. in 1881—where they awaited health inspections and registration.

“It is my great honor to welcome you as the newest citizens of the United States of America,” Garland said. “Congratulations!... Just now, each of you took an oath of allegiance to the United States. In so doing, you took your place alongside generations who came before you, many through this very building, seeking protection, freedom, and opportunity. This country—your country—wholeheartedly welcomes you.”

As an introduction to the message he wanted to deliver, both to the new citizens and to old ones, Garland spoke of his own history as the grandson and son-in-law of those fleeing religious persecution, who came to the U.S. for the protection of our laws.

“The protection of law—the Rule of Law—is the foundation of our system of government,” the attorney general said.

“The Rule of Law means that the same laws apply to all of us, regardless of whether we are this country’s newest citizens or whether our [families] have been here for generations.

“The Rule of Law means that the law treats each of us alike: there is not one rule for friends, another for foes; one rule for the powerful, another for the powerless; a rule for the rich, another for the poor; or different rules, depending upon one’s race or ethnicity or country of origin.

“The Rule of Law means that we are all protected in the exercise of our civil rights; in our freedom to worship and think as we please; and in the peaceful expression of our opinions, our beliefs, and our ideas.

“Of course, we still have work to do to make a more perfect union. Although the Rule of Law has always been our guiding light, we have not always been faithful to it.

“The Rule of Law is not assured. It is fragile. It demands constant effort and vigilance.

“The responsibility to ensure the Rule of Law is and has been the duty of every generation in our country’s history. It is now your duty as well. And it is one that is especially urgent today at a time of intense polarization in America.”

Garland went on to ask the people in the room to share a promise “that each of us will protect each other and our democracy,” that “we will uphold the Rule of Law and seek to make real the promise of equal justice under law,” and that “we will do what is right, even if that means doing what is difficult.”

It is hard to imagine that his words were not intended to convey that he intends to follow the legal trails left behind by the former administration wherever they lead.

Certainly, the former president, who is under scrutiny for stealing national secrets, scheming to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and inciting mob violence against the U.S. government, appears to be concerned.

Over the weekend, in a rally on Saturday in Ohio, Trump made it clear that he is no longer playing with a violent, extremist base, but rather cultivating it. In the days before the event, he “retruthed” posts from the conspiracy theory QAnon, whose followers believe that he is leading a secret war against pedophiles and cannibals and that he will soon be placed back into power, arrest his Democratic enemies, try them, and execute some of them. That moment of his return is called “the Storm,” and one of his “retruths” assured his audience that “The Storm is Coming.” The rally played the QAnon theme song—or something so like it as to be indistinguishable from it—and featured other QAnon-adjacent politicians.

Trump seems to know he is down to his last line of supporters, and he is rallying them to be ready to commit violence on his behalf, much as he did in the weeks before January 6, 2021. But the rally appeared to have attracted only a few thousand people, a far cry from the crowds he commanded when he was in office. His power resides now primarily in his ability to deliver or withhold his supporters, whom the party desperately needs. In exchange for delivering his supporters, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post points out, Trump seems to be demanding that a Republican Congress put an end to his legal troubles.

Those legal troubles are mounting.

On September 5, 2022, Judge Aileen Cannon granted Trump’s request for a special master to review the materials FBI agents seized in their search of Mar-a-Lago on August 8. Those materials included more than 100 that bore classified markings, some at the highest levels. Cannon ordered the Department of Justice to stop its criminal investigation of Trump until the special master reviews the material. The DOJ asked Cannon to reconsider, because its ongoing review of the national security damage is tied to the criminal investigation. She refused and, at Trump’s team’s suggestion, appointed Judge Raymond Dearie special master.

Legal scholars say Cannon’s rulings are deeply problematic, but they looked as if they would buy Trump time until after the midterms, when Republicans might have control of one or both houses of Congress to help him out. While they are appealing the ruling, the DOJ is also responding to it.

A filing tonight shows that Dearie has ordered all inspection and labeling done by October 7, rather than the November 30 date the Trump team expected. It also shows that Dearie has asked Trump to specify which documents he claims to have declassified before claiming them as his property. Trump’s lawyers say they don’t want to tell the judge anything specific about what Trump might or might not have declassified, suggesting they want to reserve that for a possible criminal case.

Former U.S. attorney and legal commenter Joyce White Vance noted that he is “presumably avoiding the need to acknowledge he lied until after the midterm elections.”

As Trump faces legal trouble, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appears to be trying to gather Trump’s voters to himself with his stunt of sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard off Massachusetts with a camera crew that gave video footage to the Fox News Channel but without telling Massachusetts authorities the migrants were coming. It was performative cruelty designed to show “liberals” rejecting immigrants in their backyards, and the fact that the people of Martha’s Vineyard welcomed them and got them back to the mainland and to shelter did not change that narrative in right-wing media: officials have been swamped with angry phone calls about their “hypocrisy,” and today a small plane towed a banner over the island reading, “Vineyard Hypocrites.”

But Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo noted all along that DeSantis’s story didn’t add up. He is a Florida governor, but he moved people from Texas, and the story is hardly one that looks like a government operation. It appears that a tall, blonde woman going by “Perla” worked with two men and two other women to find migrants to move, promising them work and housing in Massachusetts and putting them up in a hotel until they got 48 people to go.

Judd Legum of Popular Information added the piece that the migrants were not undocumented, as DeSantis repeatedly claimed, but in fact are here legally after applying for asylum. Someone gave them brochures promising 8 months’ cash assistance, food, housing, clothing, job training, and so on, benefits available only to a specific and small category of refugees, which they are not.

If they were misled about either their destination or their opportunities, those lying to them might run up against legal charges. For their part, DeSantis and Lieutenant Governor Jeanette Nuñez say it is “categorically false” that they were misled.

Tonight, the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office in Texas announced it has opened up a criminal investigation.

There is one man tonight who is not worried about further legal troubles, though. The administration today secured the release of Mark Frerichs, kidnapped in Afghanistan in January 2020 and held for 31 months, by exchanging him for Bashir Noorzai, who was sentenced to life in prison for drug trafficking in 2009.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 20, 2022 (Tuesday)

There is big news today out of Russia, where the legislative body abruptly passed harsh penalties on those who don’t report to military duty, who surrender, or who refuse to fight against Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russian-installed officials in the parts of Ukraine occupied by Russia announced referenda for later this week on joining those territories to Russia.

Once those territories vote to join Russia—as authorities will undoubtedly declare, no matter what any actual vote might look like—Russia says it will see any attack on that region by Ukraine as an attack on Russia itself.

This looks quite as if Putin is worried the recent Ukrainian advance is going to force the Russians out of the Ukrainian territory they invaded in 2014, and is setting up a scenario to be able to hold that territory, at least.

Today, Putin was scheduled to make a major speech, but after several hours of delay, media figures announced the speech would take place tomorrow.

The news out of Russia made the Moscow Stock Exchange drop almost 7%.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that if Russia does, in fact, “stage these sham ‘referenda’, the United States and the international community will never recognize Russia’s claims to any purportedly-annexed parts of Ukraine. We continue to stand with the people of Ukraine.”

As Russia staggers, countries that were formerly in its orbit are realigning with the movement toward liberal democracy. Today the president of Kazakhstan, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, wrote an op-ed declaring, “There is simply no viable alternative to globalization, interdependence and the international rules-based order.” So, he said, “we are doubling down on the liberal, international, open policies that have driven such a dramatic increase in standards of living around the world.” He promised to decentralize and distribute power throughout Kazakhstan, strengthen parliament and local authorities, encourage political parties, and limit presidential terms, all to “move toward a new…model of a presidential republic with a stronger parliament and a more accountable government.”

Meanwhile, at the United States Agency for International Development today, Blinken said that the U.S. and partners “came together in support of the benefits that flow from democratic governance. If we continue to invest in and improve upon our democracies, they will not only persevere, they will prevail.”

Protests have broken out in Russia’s ally Iran as well. Women infuriated by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, arrested by Iran's morality police for allegedly breaking the law regulating the headscarf covering her head and loose clothing disguising her body, are burning their headscarves and shouting “death to the dictator,” meaning Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who is old and ill. They are supported by men, who are helping to fight off the police trying to stop the protests.

Here in the U.S., federal agencies are sending teams with hundreds of employees to Puerto Rico to help respond to the devastation left by Hurricane Fiona, which left the island without power and with severe flooding when it hit recently. When Hurricane Maria hit in 2017, more than 3000 residents died. Since then the Federal Emergency Management Agency has built warehouses and moved in generators and other commodities.

Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced yesterday that the Senate will vote later this week on the DISCLOSE Act, sponsored by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), which requires super PACs and other groups that do not have to disclose their donors—so-called dark money groups—to identify those who give $10,000 or more during an election season. It would also prohibit foreign entities from contributing at all. In a blow against those who have helped to pack our courts, it would require anyone spending money to advance the candidacies of judicial nominees to disclose their donors, too.

Thanks to the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, such advocacy groups can take unlimited money from individuals, corporations, or other entities so long as they don’t directly coordinate with a candidate, and they do not have to identify who the donors are. “Their ruling has paved the way for billions in unlimited campaign contributions by Super PACs and other dark money groups over the last decade,” Schumer said. “Ordinary citizens, meanwhile, have had their voices drowned out by elites who have millions to spare for political donations.”

Pointing to the recent $1.6 billion donation to a new right-wing political advocacy trust, President Joe Biden noted that the public found out about that donation only because someone tipped off a reporter.

Republicans are expected to oppose the bill.

Today, three of the migrants Florida governor Ron DeSantis flew from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard filed a class action lawsuit against DeSantis, secretary of the Florida Department of Transportation Jared W. Purdue, the state of Florida, the Florida Department of Transportation, and others, for planning and executing “a premeditated, fraudulent, and illegal scheme” to exploit vulnerable migrants—in this country legally—“for the sole purpose of advancing their own personal, financial and political interests.”

The suit alleges that the defendants trolled the streets outside a migrant shelter in Texas offering humanitarian assistance, “then made false promises and false representations that if Plaintiffs and class members were willing to board airplanes to other states, they would receive employment, housing, educational opportunities, and other like assistance upon their arrival.” Once they agreed, the defendants put them up in hotels away from the migrant center where someone might tell them they were being abused.

The defendants allegedly paid $615,000 to charter two private planes ($12,300 per passenger) and told the plaintiffs they were being sent to Washington, D.C., or to Boston. While on the plane, the defendants gave the migrants “a shiny, red folder that included other official-looking materials, including a brochure entitled ‘Massachusetts Refugee Benefits’” full of false information.

The migrants were dropped on Martha’s Vineyard in the evening without food, water, or shelter, and with no one aware they were coming. Then the defendants disappeared and refused to answer calls from the plaintiffs to learn what was going on. This, the plaintiffs say, was “cruelty akin to what they fled in their home country.” They allege the defendants violated their Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights as well as the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The next day, DeSantis claimed responsibility. Since then he has claimed on Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity’s show that the migrants traveled voluntarily and that they signed consent forms, although he could explain how he had authority to move migrants from Texas when he is the governor of Florida only by saying that migrants come to Florida, but “the problem is we’re not seeing mass movements of them…. It’s just coming in onesie-twosies.” So he had those likely to come to Florida rounded up in Texas.

Today he called the lawsuit “political theater.”

As they indicated last night they would, Trump’s lawyers today refused to produce any evidence that Trump had actually declassified any of the national security material FBI agents seized at Mar-a-Lago on August 8. They also told Special Master Judge Raymond Dearie that they wanted to examine the records the agents took before they decided to assert that Trump had declassified them, although they do not have the relevant security clearances. Dearie seemed disinclined to acquiesce to their request.

And tonight, the Department of Justice cited Trump’s lawyers’ refusal to assert that he declassified any of the material in its comprehensive request for a stay of Judge Aileen Cannon’s order stopping “the government from using its own records with classification markings—including markings reserved for records of the highest sensitivity—in an ongoing criminal investigation into whether those very records were mishandled or compromised.”

Earlier this month, New York Attorney General Letitia James rejected an offer from the Trump Organization to settle a civil case concerning whether Trump lied about the value of his properties to manipulate tax laws or bank loans. Tomorrow at 10:30 a.m. (Eastern), she will make a major announcement.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 21, 2022 (Wednesday)

Russian president Vladimir Putin announced today that he is mobilizing the Russian population to fight Ukraine. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu put that number at 300,000 soldiers. At the same time, the legislature abruptly changed the laws to inflict harsh penalties on those who don’t report to military duty, who surrender, or who refuse to fight. Reports suggest that 20–40% of the soldiers from some units have quit.

The cost of airline tickets out of Russia immediately skyrocketed.

Having called for the territories Russia claims to hold referenda on annexation to Russia, and clearly expecting that those votes will call for annexation, Putin also said that “Russia will use all the instruments at its disposal to counter a threat against its territorial integrity—this is not a bluff.” He is arguing that he will consider any Ukrainian attempt to retake its own territory as an attack on Russia and has told his people that the West is responsible for the Ukrainian resistance to Russian conquest. He is threatening to use nuclear weapons to conquer Ukraine, in what seems an admission that Russia is on the ropes.

Putin began his attack on Ukraine in late February with the expectation it would be short and decisive. More than six months later, the Russian economy is in tatters, the armies are collapsing, and the future of Putin’s administration is uncertain.

President Joe Biden responded in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly in New York. He reminded his audience that the Ukraine crisis was “a brutal, needless war—a war chosen by one man…. This world should see these outrageous acts for what they are. Putin claims he had to act because Russia was threatened. But no one threatened Russia, and no one other than Russia sought conflict.”

Biden urged the world to stand firm against Russia’s aggression and reiterated that “the United States is opening an era of relentless diplomacy to address the challenges that matter most to people’s lives—all people’s lives: tackling the climate crisis… strengthening global health security; feeding the world.”

It is no secret, Biden said, “that in the contest between democracy and autocracy, the United States—and I, as President—champion a vision for our world that is grounded in the values of democracy.”

Midday, today, New York attorney general Letitia James announced that her office has filed a $250 million civil lawsuit against Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and two executives from the company—Allan Weisselberg and Jeff McConney—accusing them of years of fraudulent financial practices, lying to banks about the value of their assets by billions of dollars while undervaluing those same properties for tax purposes.

The investigation began more than three years ago when Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, testified under oath that Trump lied about the value of his properties to get better loan terms and lower taxes. The instances James identified today were eye-popping. Mar-a-Lago is worth around $75 million; Trump valued it at $739 million based on its potential for development even though Trump himself had signed deeds sharply restricting that development. Rental units worth $750,000 were valued at nearly $50 million.

“The pattern of fraud that was used by Mr. Trump and the Trump organization for their own financial benefit was astounding,” James said.

Forced to testify in the investigation last month, Trump refused to answer questions, invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 440 times. In a civil trial, jurors can draw negative inferences from a witness taking the Fifth. Last month, James rejected an offer from the Trump Organization to settle the case.

The suit seeks to recover the profits from the scheme, to ban the Trumps from engaging in real estate transactions for five years, and to prohibit Trump or his children from running any business licensed in New York state. James also filed a criminal referral to federal prosecutors and a tax fraud referral to the IRS.

If the suit succeeds, it will devastate the Trump Organization.

Then tonight, in a major victory for the Department of Justice, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta ruled that Judge Aileen Cannon’s lower court “abused its discretion” when it temporarily banned the Justice Department from using the roughly 100 documents with classification markings in its criminal investigation of the former president.

The decision was unanimous. Two of the three judges on the panel were appointed by Trump.

At issue are the documents Trump stole from the U.S. government when he left the White House. All of those documents belong to the U.S. government—that is, the American people—but some of them are classified, some at the highest level of classification.

Today’s struggle is not over the 184 classified documents in the first 15 boxes of material Trump returned to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in January 2022, or the 38 additional classified documents recovered after a subpoena. It’s about the 100 or more documents with classified markings FBI agents recovered from Mar-a-Lago on August 8.

Trump wanted a special master to determine if any of the documents recovered on August 8 actually belonged to him or were protected by attorney-client privilege, and a court to rule that until the special master had reviewed the documents, the Department of Justice could not use them in a criminal investigation of the former president.

On Labor Day, Judge Cannon agreed with Trump, so the Justice Department asked for the part of her decision that involved the classified documents to be stopped, since it could not untangle the criminal investigation from the investigation into the damage the national security had suffered from this breach. She refused, but today’s decision gave the DOJ what it wanted.

“For our part, we cannot discern why Plaintiff would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one-hundred documents with classification markings,” it said. “Classified documents…are ‘owned by, produced by or for, or…under the control of the United States Government’... and “they include information the ‘unauthorized disclosure [of which] could reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to the national security.’” It continued: Trump “has not even attempted to show that he has a need to know the information contained in the classified documents.”

It noted that while Trump “suggests that he may have declassified these documents when he was President,” “the record contains no evidence that any of these records were declassified,” and that yesterday, Trump’s lawyers “resisted providing any evidence that he had declassified any of these documents.” The U.S., the court said, “would suffer irreparable injury” if the bar on using the documents for a criminal investigation stays in place, because that investigation is “inextricably intertwined” with the ongoing national security review. The government needs to figure out who saw the documents, whether they were compromised, and what else might be missing.

This afternoon, before the ruling, in an interview on the Fox News Channel, Trump said: “I declassified the documents when they left the White House…. There doesn’t have to be a process as I understand it. You’re the president of the United States, you can declassify…even by thinking about it.” (In fact, there is a process for declassification.) He also suggested that the archivists at NARA are “a radical left group of people” who were hiding documents, and that maybe the FBI was looking “for the Hillary Clinton emails” when they searched Mar-a-Lago.

Also today, CNN reported that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who was active in the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, will speak to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

To prevent any future attempt to overturn an election, the House today passed a fix to the Electoral Count Act, making it clear the vice president cannot refuse to count certified electors and making it harder for congress members to object to those certified ballots. The vote was 229 to 203. Only nine Republicans, most of whom are retiring or who lost their primaries, joined the Democrats to pass the measure.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 22, 2022 (Thursday)

Big stories in different parts of the world today.

The Russian mobilization—the first since World War II—appears to be aiming at 1 million new soldiers, rather than the 300,000 suggested yesterday. Officials are scouring villages to conscript men, especially ethnic minorities, to fill the quotas the government has established. Stories are circulating of men given only an hour to appear at recruitment centers, students being given draft notices while they were sitting in class, and workers taken off the job.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government has officially condemned Russia’s attacks on the civilian population of Ukraine: the forced deportations, disappearances, detainments, torture, and other abuses. The State Department said that “President Putin must be held accountable for these atrocities.” Indeed, even North Korea has distanced itself from Russia, saying in an official statement that it has never supplied Russia with weapons and has no plans to do so.

The U.S. today also imposed sanctions on Iran’s morality police and other government leaders after the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for wearing her head covering too loosely. Her death has prompted protests in Tehran and other areas, with Iranians seeing her death as a sign of the extremism of the country’s religious leaders.

And yet, not everyone is on board with distancing themselves from authoritarian governments. Today, Jared Kushner received the Hungarian Order of Merit at the Hungarian consulate in New York.

Here at home, President Biden has rushed help to Puerto Rico. The island is reeling from Hurricane Fiona, which knocked out a power grid not fully recovered from Hurricane Maria almost exactly five years ago. On Sunday he issued an emergency declaration, freeing up federal money to help the region, and yesterday he issued a major disaster declaration, which allows the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) to pay for debris removal, water restoration, temporary housing and home repairs, and crisis counselors; to provide low-cost loans to cover uninsured property losses; and so on.

When he ran for president, Biden promised he would provide aid to Puerto Rico, which was still rebuilding after Hurricane Maria killed 3000 people and left hundreds of thousands of people without power for months. Today, at FEMA’s Region 2 headquarters at One World Trade Center in New York City, Biden indicated he sees his response to Hurricane Fiona as a test of the federal government. He recalled President Ronald Reagan’s famous line: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.” “But we really are,” Biden said, “[a]nd…I hope you’re satisfied with the response so far. We’ll be with the…folks of Puerto Rico now and until this is done and we recover.”

While Biden is trying to demonstrate that the government works, the former president is finding that out.

Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta overturned the decision of Judge Aileen Cannon saying that the Department of Justice could not use the materials seized in the August 8 search of Mar-a-Lago until a special master had reviewed them. The 11th Circuit agreed with the Department of Justice that the 100 or so classified documents should be exempt from that decision. It ruled that the Department of Justice and the FBI can proceed with both the national security investigation of the documents with classified markings that Trump stole from the national government and the criminal investigation of that theft, including those documents.

Legal commenter Teri Kanefield noted that Trump was likely most concerned about the documents with classification markings because while all the material belonged to the United States—that is, to us—it is the classified material that threatens our national security and thus puts him in the greatest legal jeopardy. That, she suggests, is why he is making such a fuss about whether he declassified the material.

But the court has removed those documents from the special master’s review. “So now,” Kanefield notes, “[Trump] can pay for a special master to look through everything else while the DOJ continues a criminal investigation of the doc[ument]s that matter.”

Today that special master, U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie—who was Trump’s pick for the job, by the way—ordered Trump’s lawyers to back up Trump’s wild claims in court. The former president has alleged that the FBI planted documents at Mar-a-Lago, that some of the recovered documents were actually his, and that he had, in fact, secretly declassified some of the materials with classified markings. Dearie gave his lawyers until September 30 to tell him which documents, if any, on the Justice Department’s inventory of the material they recovered from Mar-a-Lago on August 8 have been described incorrectly.

“This submission shall be Plaintiff’s final opportunity to raise any factual dispute as to the completeness and accuracy of the Detailed Property Inventory,” Dearie wrote.

This morning, former Trump attorney Sidney Powell was supposed to testify before a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, about her involvement in a breach of election systems in Coffee County. The data firm whose operatives gained access to the system says it was hired by Powell. She did not appear for today’s scheduled interview.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 23, 2022 (Friday)

Today, House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who took over as the chair of the House Republican Conference after the party rejected Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) for her refusal to back the January 6 insurrection, released the House Republicans’ plan for the country.

Covering just a single page, it presents vague aspirations—many of which Biden has already put in place—but focuses on the radical extremes of the MAGA party while trying to make those extremes sound mild.

The so-called “Commitment to America” calls for a strong economy, a safe nation, a free future, and an accountable government. So far, so good.

But the first topic—making the economy strong—is a paraphrase of what the Biden administration has been doing. The Republicans call for fighting inflation and lowering the cost of living, making America energy independent, bringing down gas prices, strengthening the supply chain, and ending the country’s dependence on China.

This is quite literally the platform of the Democrats, but while the Republicans offer no actual proposals to contribute to these goals, Biden has taken concrete steps to address inflation by taking on the shipping monopolies that hiked transportation costs, for example, while Democrats in Congress have passed legislation capping the cost of certain prescription medications. Biden has released reserves to help combat high gas prices, which have now fallen close to their cost last March—a barrel of oil is now under $80—while expanding our nation’s pool of truck drivers and just last week averting a train strike that would have endangered supply chains. The incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act are designed specifically to make America energy independent while addressing climate change, and Biden’s extraordinary efforts to support economic development in the Indo-Pacific region, along with the CHIPS and Science Act, were explicitly designed to reduce U.S. dependence on China.

It feels rather as if the Republicans recognize that Biden’s policies are popular, and are hoping that voters haven’t noticed that he is actually putting them in place.

Then the document gets to the heart of its argument, recycling MAGA talking points in language that makes it very attractive. Who doesn’t want national safety, for example?

But national safety is described here as securing the border and combatting illegal immigration (something already in place), adding 200,000 police officers through recruiting bonuses, cracking down on prosecutors and district attorneys who refuse to prosecute crimes (this is likely directed at those who say they will not prosecute women for obtaining abortions), criminalizing all fentanyl, and supporting our troops and exercising peace through strength (which likely means reversing Biden’s emphasis on multilateral diplomacy to return to using the U.S. military as a global enforcer)— all MAGA demands.

“A Future That’s Built on Freedom” is a similar sleight of hand, meaning something far from the freedom of the recent past. Here it means giving parents control over their childrens’ education (more book banning and laws that prohibit teaching subjects that make students “uncomfortable”), “defend[ing] fairness by ensuring that only women can compete in women’s sports” (there’s the anti-trans statement), achieving “longer, healthier lives for Americans” by what appears to be getting rid of the Affordable Care Act, and what appears to be a defense of the use of ivermectin and other quack cures popular on the right (“lower prices through transparency, choice, and competition,” “invest in lifesaving cures,” and “improve access to telemedicine”). It also demands confronting “Big Tech” to make it fair, which is likely a reference to the right wing’s conviction that social media discriminates against it by banning hate speech.

The section about accountable government calls for preserving constitutional freedoms, which they interpret as an apparent national ban on abortion—a constitutional right until this past June—saying they will “protect the lives of unborn children and their mothers.” They defend “religious freedom,” which the right wing, including the Supreme Court, has interpreted as freedom for Christian schools to receive public tax money and for Christian coaches to pray with students. The document also calls for safeguarding the Second Amendment, which the right wing has increasingly interpreted since the 1970s to mean that the government cannot regulate gun ownership.

This section of the document calls for rigorous oversight of the government “to rein in government abuse of power and corruption,” providing “real transparency,” and requiring the White House “to answer for its incompetence at home and abroad.” It also says Republicans will “save and strengthen Social Security and Medicare.”

While the part of this section that calls for stopping government abuse and incompetence seems rich coming from the MAGA Republicans, the statement that they intend to protect Social Security and Medicare strikes me as I felt when hearing Trump tell voters in 2020 that he would protect Obamacare at the very time his lawyers were in court trying to overturn the law. Now, in this moment, leading Republicans have vowed to get rid of Social Security and Medicare, which is an interesting way to “save and strengthen” them.

Similarly, the section promising to “restore the people’s voice” calls for voting restrictions.

In short, the document feels like the doublespeak from George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984. To defend the indefensible, Orwell wrote in an essay titled “Politics and the English Language,” “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness…. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), who focused on the power of language to alter reality and who helped to write the 1994 Contract with America that enabled the Republicans to take control of the House for the first time since 1954, worked on this document. The Contract with America, which party leaders called a contract as a promise that it would be binding, led the Republicans to shut down the government for 28 days between November 1995 and January 1996 to get their way before they entirely abandoned the "contract."

To sell today’s document to voters, Republicans used a slick video, but Jennifer Bendery of HuffPost noted that the film uses stock videos from Russia and Ukraine in its “Commitment to America.” When Bendery reached out to McCarthy for comment, his spokesperson Mark Bednar responded: “Interesting how you guys aren’t remotely interested in the issues facing the American people in the video.”

But will it work? The document tries to win Trump voters without actually mentioning Trump, who now alienates all but his fervent supporters. But he continues to dominate the Republican Party and to grab the headlines. Tonight, 60 Minutes teased a story that will broadcast on Sunday and is already raising eyebrows. In it, Denver Riggleman, former senior tech advisor for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, said that the White House switchboard connected a call to a rioter’s phone while the Capitol was under siege on January 6, 2021.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 24, 2022 (Saturday)

In Arizona, Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson has restored a law put into effect by Arizona’s Territorial legislature in 1864 and then reworked in 1901 that has been widely interpreted as a ban on all abortions except to save a woman's life. Oddly, I know quite a bit about the 1864 Arizona Territorial legislature, and its story matters as we think about the attempt to impose its will in modern America.

In fact, the Civil War era law seems not particularly concerned with women handling their own reproductive care—it actually seems to ignore that practice entirely. The laws for this territory, chaotic and still at war in 1864, appear to reflect the need to rein in a lawless population of men.

The criminal code talks about “miscarriage” in the context of other male misbehavior. It focuses at great length on dueling, for example— making illegal not only the act of dueling (punishable by three years in jail) but also having anything to do with a duel. And then, in the section that became the law now resurrected in Arizona, the law takes on the issue of poisoning.

In that context, the context of punishing those who secretly administer poison to kill someone, it says that anyone who uses poison or instruments “with the intention to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child” would face two to five years in jail, “Provided, that no physician shall be affected by the last clause of this section, who in the discharge of his professional duties deems it necessary to produce the miscarriage of any woman in order to save her life.”

The next section warns against cutting out tongues or eyes, slitting noses or lips, or “rendering…useless” someone’s arm or leg.

The law that is currently interpreted to outlaw abortion care seemed designed to keep men in the chaos of the Civil War from inflicting damage on others—including pregnant women—rather than to police women’s reproductive care, which women largely handled on their own or through the help of doctors who used drugs and instruments to remove what they called dangerous blockages of women’s natural cycles in the four to five months before fetal movement became obvious.

Written to police the behavior of men, the code tells a larger story about power and control.

The Arizona Territorial legislature in 1864 had 18 men in the lower House of Representatives and 9 men in the upper house, the Council, for a total of 27 men. They met on September 26, 1864, in Prescott. The session ended about six weeks later, on November 10.

The very first thing the legislators did was to authorize the governor to appoint a commissioner to prepare a code of laws for the territory. But William T. Howell, a judge who had arrived in the territory the previous December, had already written one, which the legislature promptly accepted as a blueprint.

Although they did discuss his laws, the members later thanked Judge Howell for “preparing his excellent and able Code of Laws” and, as a mark of their appreciation, provided that the laws would officially be called "The Howell Code.” (They also paid him a handsome $2500, which was equivalent to at least 5 years’ salary for a workingman in that era.) Judge Howell wrote the territory’s criminal code essentially single-handedly.

The second thing the legislature did was to give a member of the House of Representatives a divorce from his wife.

Then they established a county road near Prescott.

Then they gave a local army surgeon a divorce from his wife.

In a total of 40 laws, the legislature incorporated a number of road companies, railway companies, ferry companies, and mining companies. They appropriated money for schools and incorporated the Arizona Historical Society.

These 27 men constructed a body of laws to bring order to the territory and to jump-start development. But their vision for the territory was a very particular one.

The legislature provided that “No black or mulatto, or Indian, Mongolian, or Asiatic, shall be permitted to [testify in court] against any white person,” thus making it impossible for them to protect their property, their families, or themselves from their white neighbors. It declared that “all marriages between a white person and a [Black person], shall…be absolutely void.”

And it defined the age of consent for sexual intercourse to be just ten years old (even if a younger child had “consented”).

So, in 1864, a legislature of 27 white men created a body of laws that discriminated against Black people and people of color and considered girls as young as 10 able to consent to sex, and they adopted a body of criminal laws written by one single man.

And in 2022, one of those laws is back in force in Arizona.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 25, 2022 (Sunday)

End of summer.

No matter how much I love what I do, I never doubt that he has the better office.

I'll see you tomorrow.

[Photo by Buddy Poland.]

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 26, 2022 (Monday)

A headline in the New York Times today read: “Factory Jobs Are Booming Like It’s the 1970s.” The story explained that more money in the hands of consumers thanks to federal stimulus spending, along with a new skepticism of stretched supply lines, has created a rebound in American manufacturing.

Since the 1970s, authors Jim Tankersley, Alan Rappeport, and Ana Swanson explain, outsourcing and automation have meant that every recession has seen factory jobs disappear and never return as employers used downturns to move operations to countries with lower wage levels. This time, though, American manufacturers have not only regained all the jobs lost during the pandemic, they have also added about 67,000 more. Those numbers would be higher if the labor market weren’t so tight, a condition leading employers to offer higher wages and better benefits.

Biden has made it clear that he is trying to overturn 40 years of “supply side” economics, ushered in by President Ronald Reagan. This system was designed to free up capital at the top of the economy through tax cuts and deregulation in the belief that putting capital in the hands of the wealthy—the “supply side”— would lead them to invest more in the economy, thus making it grow more quickly and providing more jobs. While Republicans came to embrace that ideology wholeheartedly, in fact it never showed signs of increasing economic growth. What it did was to move wealth dramatically upward. It also made the measure of the economy the health of Wall Street rather than Main Street.

Since Abraham Lincoln’s administration, which faced a similar economic stratification and a similar justification for it, another approach to the economy has stood against this ideology. Leaders from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Delano Roosevelt have argued that providing opportunity for people at the lower end of the economy—the “demand side”—would drive production and consumption, spreading prosperity upward. Biden has followed in this tradition. Insisting that he would build the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out,” he, along with the Democrats in Congress, bolstered domestic manufacturing with measures like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act.

Now, statistics show, that investment has paid off. Chad Moutray, the chief economist for the National Association of Manufacturers, told the New York Times reporters: “We have 67,000 more workers today than we had in February 2020. I didn’t think we would get there, to be honest with you.”

National Economic Council director Brian Deese told the reporters, “One of the most striking things that we are seeing now is the number of companies—U.S. companies and global companies—that are committing to build and expand their manufacturing footprint in the United States, and doing so based on their view that not only did the pandemic highlight the need for more resilience in their supply chains, but that the United States is creating a policy environment that makes long-term investment here in the United States more attractive.”

Meanwhile, the real net worth of the bottom 50% of U.S. households has climbed 60% since Biden took office, now reaching $67,524.

One of the things that will continue to feed this change is the plan to forgive significant student loan debt, especially among low-income Black and Brown Americans. This story is hitting the news today after the Congressional Budget Office responded to a series of questions posed by Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) and Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC), both fervently opposed to the program. The CBO’s responses to those specific questions have been widely published, suggesting the program will cost the U.S. $400 billion. This is sparking cries about its expense, but this particular CBO number calculates the cost over the next 30 years rather than the usual ten, does not address the stimulus effects of the relief, and does not take into account how much anyone would actually have repaid. The estimate is, the CBO states in its letter, “highly uncertain.”

In contrast to Biden’s economic program, on Friday the new government of Prime Minister Liz Truss announced the most radical tax cuts in Britain since 1972, cutting the top income tax rate as well as corporate taxes to spur the economy. This unfunded cut will mean borrowing at rising interest rates. Concerns about inflation, already hammering the British economy, made the value of the pound, which is the English unit of currency, drop to its lowest level since 1985.

These different economic visions are in conflict here in the United States. Former Trump economic advisor Steve Moore reacted to the Truss tax cuts by saying: “This is exactly what we should be doing in the US." White House economic advisor Jared Bernstein said: "President Biden has been very clear about the negative track record of trickle-down, Reagan-style tax cuts."

Republicans have managed to keep voters behind their economic program by downplaying it and emphasizing cultural issues, primarily abortion, which reliably turned out anti-abortion voters. Now that the Supreme Court has overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, Republicans have a demographic problem: a majority of voters support reproductive rights and are turning out to vote, and there is no longer a reason for anti-abortion voters to show up.

So Republican leaders are downplaying abortion: reporter Eric Garcia noted today that Republican representative and Senate candidate Ted Budd (R-NC), who is a cosponsor of the House version of Senator Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) national abortion bill, didn’t mention his stance in a recent rally with former president Trump. They are also inventing new cultural crises, most notably an attack on LGBTQIA folks but also a renewed attack on immigrants.

Trump has gone further, jumping aboard the QAnon train, which the FBI considers a domestic terrorism threat, as his own legal troubles are mounting. His lawyers failed to slow down the criminal investigation into his theft of documents, including many marked with the highest levels of classification. New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued Trump, his company, and his children and two associates for fraud. And now the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is beginning to turn up more information.

On Friday the committee subpoenaed Wisconsin House Speaker Robin Vos to ask about a phone call he had with Trump in July 2022 (not a typo) in which Trump tried to get him to change the 2020 result in Wisconsin. Vos is challenging the subpoena.

In the lead-up to Wednesday’s midday public hearing of the committee, Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that election denier Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel associated with Trump loyalist Michael Flynn, was in contact with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in late December 2020 about gaining access to the voting systems in Arizona and Georgia. Waldron referred to Arizona as “our lead domino we were counting on to start the cascade,” to overturn the election.

Meanwhile, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, was texting QAnon links to Meadows. And now, after flirting with QAnon since 2020, Trump has embraced it wholeheartedly, first “retruthing” social media posts featuring him as a QAnon hero and warning that “The Storm Is Coming,” then using QAnon music at a rally. Now, he has sent out an email calling for the death penalty for drug dealers—a favorite theme of fascists since the 1930s and a major part of the program of former dictator Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whom Trump admires—along with the warning that “Under Democrat control, the streets of our great cities are drenched in the blood of innocent victims,” tapping into the QAnon themes of violent retribution for those they see as preying on America’s youth.

“I certainly will do whatever it takes to make sure Donald Trump isn't anywhere close to the Oval Office,” Representative Liz Cheney said this weekend at The Texas Tribune Festival, which highlights politics and policy. “And if he is the nominee, I won't be a Republican.” She warned that a Republican majority in the House would empower Trump Republicans like Jim Jordan (OH), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), and Lauren Boebert (CO).

And when asked if Trump should testify before the committee, Cheney answered: “Any interaction that Donald Trump has with the committee will be under oath and subject to penalty of perjury.”

Halifax2TheMax · September 2022

mickeyrat said:

September 26, 2022 (Monday)

A headline in the New York Times today read: “Factory Jobs Are Booming Like It’s the 1970s.” The story explained that more money in the hands of consumers thanks to federal stimulus spending, along with a new skepticism of stretched supply lines, has created a rebound in American manufacturing.

Since the 1970s, authors Jim Tankersley, Alan Rappeport, and Ana Swanson explain, outsourcing and automation have meant that every recession has seen factory jobs disappear and never return as employers used downturns to move operations to countries with lower wage levels. This time, though, American manufacturers have not only regained all the jobs lost during the pandemic, they have also added about 67,000 more. Those numbers would be higher if the labor market weren’t so tight, a condition leading employers to offer higher wages and better benefits.

Biden has made it clear that he is trying to overturn 40 years of “supply side” economics, ushered in by President Ronald Reagan. This system was designed to free up capital at the top of the economy through tax cuts and deregulation in the belief that putting capital in the hands of the wealthy—the “supply side”— would lead them to invest more in the economy, thus making it grow more quickly and providing more jobs. While Republicans came to embrace that ideology wholeheartedly, in fact it never showed signs of increasing economic growth. What it did was to move wealth dramatically upward. It also made the measure of the economy the health of Wall Street rather than Main Street.

Since Abraham Lincoln’s administration, which faced a similar economic stratification and a similar justification for it, another approach to the economy has stood against this ideology. Leaders from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Delano Roosevelt have argued that providing opportunity for people at the lower end of the economy—the “demand side”—would drive production and consumption, spreading prosperity upward. Biden has followed in this tradition. Insisting that he would build the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out,” he, along with the Democrats in Congress, bolstered domestic manufacturing with measures like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act.

Now, statistics show, that investment has paid off. Chad Moutray, the chief economist for the National Association of Manufacturers, told the New York Times reporters: “We have 67,000 more workers today than we had in February 2020. I didn’t think we would get there, to be honest with you.”

National Economic Council director Brian Deese told the reporters, “One of the most striking things that we are seeing now is the number of companies—U.S. companies and global companies—that are committing to build and expand their manufacturing footprint in the United States, and doing so based on their view that not only did the pandemic highlight the need for more resilience in their supply chains, but that the United States is creating a policy environment that makes long-term investment here in the United States more attractive.”

Meanwhile, the real net worth of the bottom 50% of U.S. households has climbed 60% since Biden took office, now reaching $67,524.

One of the things that will continue to feed this change is the plan to forgive significant student loan debt, especially among low-income Black and Brown Americans. This story is hitting the news today after the Congressional Budget Office responded to a series of questions posed by Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) and Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC), both fervently opposed to the program. The CBO’s responses to those specific questions have been widely published, suggesting the program will cost the U.S. $400 billion. This is sparking cries about its expense, but this particular CBO number calculates the cost over the next 30 years rather than the usual ten, does not address the stimulus effects of the relief, and does not take into account how much anyone would actually have repaid. The estimate is, the CBO states in its letter, “highly uncertain.”

In contrast to Biden’s economic program, on Friday the new government of Prime Minister Liz Truss announced the most radical tax cuts in Britain since 1972, cutting the top income tax rate as well as corporate taxes to spur the economy. This unfunded cut will mean borrowing at rising interest rates. Concerns about inflation, already hammering the British economy, made the value of the pound, which is the English unit of currency, drop to its lowest level since 1985.

These different economic visions are in conflict here in the United States. Former Trump economic advisor Steve Moore reacted to the Truss tax cuts by saying: “This is exactly what we should be doing in the US." White House economic advisor Jared Bernstein said: "President Biden has been very clear about the negative track record of trickle-down, Reagan-style tax cuts."

Republicans have managed to keep voters behind their economic program by downplaying it and emphasizing cultural issues, primarily abortion, which reliably turned out anti-abortion voters. Now that the Supreme Court has overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, Republicans have a demographic problem: a majority of voters support reproductive rights and are turning out to vote, and there is no longer a reason for anti-abortion voters to show up.

So Republican leaders are downplaying abortion: reporter Eric Garcia noted today that Republican representative and Senate candidate Ted Budd (R-NC), who is a cosponsor of the House version of Senator Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) national abortion bill, didn’t mention his stance in a recent rally with former president Trump. They are also inventing new cultural crises, most notably an attack on LGBTQIA folks but also a renewed attack on immigrants.

Trump has gone further, jumping aboard the QAnon train, which the FBI considers a domestic terrorism threat, as his own legal troubles are mounting. His lawyers failed to slow down the criminal investigation into his theft of documents, including many marked with the highest levels of classification. New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued Trump, his company, and his children and two associates for fraud. And now the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is beginning to turn up more information.

On Friday the committee subpoenaed Wisconsin House Speaker Robin Vos to ask about a phone call he had with Trump in July 2022 (not a typo) in which Trump tried to get him to change the 2020 result in Wisconsin. Vos is challenging the subpoena.

In the lead-up to Wednesday’s midday public hearing of the committee, Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that election denier Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel associated with Trump loyalist Michael Flynn, was in contact with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in late December 2020 about gaining access to the voting systems in Arizona and Georgia. Waldron referred to Arizona as “our lead domino we were counting on to start the cascade,” to overturn the election.

Meanwhile, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, was texting QAnon links to Meadows. And now, after flirting with QAnon since 2020, Trump has embraced it wholeheartedly, first “retruthing” social media posts featuring him as a QAnon hero and warning that “The Storm Is Coming,” then using QAnon music at a rally. Now, he has sent out an email calling for the death penalty for drug dealers—a favorite theme of fascists since the 1930s and a major part of the program of former dictator Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whom Trump admires—along with the warning that “Under Democrat control, the streets of our great cities are drenched in the blood of innocent victims,” tapping into the QAnon themes of violent retribution for those they see as preying on America’s youth.

“I certainly will do whatever it takes to make sure Donald Trump isn't anywhere close to the Oval Office,” Representative Liz Cheney said this weekend at The Texas Tribune Festival, which highlights politics and policy. “And if he is the nominee, I won't be a Republican.” She warned that a Republican majority in the House would empower Trump Republicans like Jim Jordan (OH), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), and Lauren Boebert (CO).

And when asked if Trump should testify before the committee, Cheney answered: “Any interaction that Donald Trump has with the committee will be under oath and subject to penalty of perjury.”

Damn you Brandon!

static111 · September 2022

mickeyrat said:

September 26, 2022 (Monday)

A headline in the New York Times today read: “Factory Jobs Are Booming Like It’s the 1970s.” The story explained that more money in the hands of consumers thanks to federal stimulus spending, along with a new skepticism of stretched supply lines, has created a rebound in American manufacturing.

Since the 1970s, authors Jim Tankersley, Alan Rappeport, and Ana Swanson explain, outsourcing and automation have meant that every recession has seen factory jobs disappear and never return as employers used downturns to move operations to countries with lower wage levels. This time, though, American manufacturers have not only regained all the jobs lost during the pandemic, they have also added about 67,000 more. Those numbers would be higher if the labor market weren’t so tight, a condition leading employers to offer higher wages and better benefits.

Biden has made it clear that he is trying to overturn 40 years of “supply side” economics, ushered in by President Ronald Reagan. This system was designed to free up capital at the top of the economy through tax cuts and deregulation in the belief that putting capital in the hands of the wealthy—the “supply side”— would lead them to invest more in the economy, thus making it grow more quickly and providing more jobs. While Republicans came to embrace that ideology wholeheartedly, in fact it never showed signs of increasing economic growth. What it did was to move wealth dramatically upward. It also made the measure of the economy the health of Wall Street rather than Main Street.

Since Abraham Lincoln’s administration, which faced a similar economic stratification and a similar justification for it, another approach to the economy has stood against this ideology. Leaders from Lincoln to Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Delano Roosevelt have argued that providing opportunity for people at the lower end of the economy—the “demand side”—would drive production and consumption, spreading prosperity upward. Biden has followed in this tradition. Insisting that he would build the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out,” he, along with the Democrats in Congress, bolstered domestic manufacturing with measures like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act.

Now, statistics show, that investment has paid off. Chad Moutray, the chief economist for the National Association of Manufacturers, told the New York Times reporters: “We have 67,000 more workers today than we had in February 2020. I didn’t think we would get there, to be honest with you.”

National Economic Council director Brian Deese told the reporters, “One of the most striking things that we are seeing now is the number of companies—U.S. companies and global companies—that are committing to build and expand their manufacturing footprint in the United States, and doing so based on their view that not only did the pandemic highlight the need for more resilience in their supply chains, but that the United States is creating a policy environment that makes long-term investment here in the United States more attractive.”

Meanwhile, the real net worth of the bottom 50% of U.S. households has climbed 60% since Biden took office, now reaching $67,524.

One of the things that will continue to feed this change is the plan to forgive significant student loan debt, especially among low-income Black and Brown Americans. This story is hitting the news today after the Congressional Budget Office responded to a series of questions posed by Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) and Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC), both fervently opposed to the program. The CBO’s responses to those specific questions have been widely published, suggesting the program will cost the U.S. $400 billion. This is sparking cries about its expense, but this particular CBO number calculates the cost over the next 30 years rather than the usual ten, does not address the stimulus effects of the relief, and does not take into account how much anyone would actually have repaid. The estimate is, the CBO states in its letter, “highly uncertain.”

In contrast to Biden’s economic program, on Friday the new government of Prime Minister Liz Truss announced the most radical tax cuts in Britain since 1972, cutting the top income tax rate as well as corporate taxes to spur the economy. This unfunded cut will mean borrowing at rising interest rates. Concerns about inflation, already hammering the British economy, made the value of the pound, which is the English unit of currency, drop to its lowest level since 1985.

These different economic visions are in conflict here in the United States. Former Trump economic advisor Steve Moore reacted to the Truss tax cuts by saying: “This is exactly what we should be doing in the US." White House economic advisor Jared Bernstein said: "President Biden has been very clear about the negative track record of trickle-down, Reagan-style tax cuts."

Republicans have managed to keep voters behind their economic program by downplaying it and emphasizing cultural issues, primarily abortion, which reliably turned out anti-abortion voters. Now that the Supreme Court has overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, Republicans have a demographic problem: a majority of voters support reproductive rights and are turning out to vote, and there is no longer a reason for anti-abortion voters to show up.

So Republican leaders are downplaying abortion: reporter Eric Garcia noted today that Republican representative and Senate candidate Ted Budd (R-NC), who is a cosponsor of the House version of Senator Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) national abortion bill, didn’t mention his stance in a recent rally with former president Trump. They are also inventing new cultural crises, most notably an attack on LGBTQIA folks but also a renewed attack on immigrants.

Trump has gone further, jumping aboard the QAnon train, which the FBI considers a domestic terrorism threat, as his own legal troubles are mounting. His lawyers failed to slow down the criminal investigation into his theft of documents, including many marked with the highest levels of classification. New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued Trump, his company, and his children and two associates for fraud. And now the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol is beginning to turn up more information.

On Friday the committee subpoenaed Wisconsin House Speaker Robin Vos to ask about a phone call he had with Trump in July 2022 (not a typo) in which Trump tried to get him to change the 2020 result in Wisconsin. Vos is challenging the subpoena.

In the lead-up to Wednesday’s midday public hearing of the committee, Zachary Cohen of CNN reported today that election denier Phil Waldron, a former Army colonel associated with Trump loyalist Michael Flynn, was in contact with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in late December 2020 about gaining access to the voting systems in Arizona and Georgia. Waldron referred to Arizona as “our lead domino we were counting on to start the cascade,” to overturn the election.

Meanwhile, Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, was texting QAnon links to Meadows. And now, after flirting with QAnon since 2020, Trump has embraced it wholeheartedly, first “retruthing” social media posts featuring him as a QAnon hero and warning that “The Storm Is Coming,” then using QAnon music at a rally. Now, he has sent out an email calling for the death penalty for drug dealers—a favorite theme of fascists since the 1930s and a major part of the program of former dictator Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, whom Trump admires—along with the warning that “Under Democrat control, the streets of our great cities are drenched in the blood of innocent victims,” tapping into the QAnon themes of violent retribution for those they see as preying on America’s youth.

“I certainly will do whatever it takes to make sure Donald Trump isn't anywhere close to the Oval Office,” Representative Liz Cheney said this weekend at The Texas Tribune Festival, which highlights politics and policy. “And if he is the nominee, I won't be a Republican.” She warned that a Republican majority in the House would empower Trump Republicans like Jim Jordan (OH), Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), and Lauren Boebert (CO).

And when asked if Trump should testify before the committee, Cheney answered: “Any interaction that Donald Trump has with the committee will be under oath and subject to penalty of perjury.”

Wall Street isn't the measure of economic growth? Seems like just yesterday someone was asking me who would want to work in a factory and how it would add to consumer costs if Americans did have factory jobs. I'm so confused...is this good news or bad news? (disclaimer: I work in factories and make good money) Henry Ford had this figured out years ago, albeit reluctantly.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 27, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today, President Joe Biden held an event in the Rose Garden at the White House to celebrate the lower drug costs possible thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed without any Republican votes in either the House or the Senate. Phasing in over the next few years, the measure will cap the out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs at $2000 a year and make vaccinations free for seniors on Medicare. If the price of drugs rises faster than inflation, drug companies will have to rebate the difference to Medicare. And Biden noted that today, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that the premium for Medicare Part B, which pays for doctor visits, will decrease this year.

All of this was possible, he said, because the biggest corporations in America will have to pay a minimum corporate tax of 15%. “The days of billion-dollar companies paying zero taxes are over.” “And,” he added, “we’re doing all this by bringing down the deficit at the same time. You hear about us being ‘big spenders’? Well, they raised the debt by $2 trillion. We’ve reduced the deficit in my first year, 2021, by $350 billion.”

Biden called out the Republican budget plan, written by Florida senator Rick Scott, to sunset all federal legislation in five years, promising that Congress will reauthorize it if it is worthwhile. This means that every five years, Congress will have to vote to reauthorize Social Security and Medicare or they will end. Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson has gone further, calling for moving Social Security and Medicare spending from mandatory spending, which is protected, to discretionary spending, which must be reapproved every year, thus making it vulnerable to cuts or even elimination.

“I have a different idea,” Biden said. “I’ll protect those programs. I’ll make them stronger. And I’ll lower your cost to be able to keep them.”

Biden likely made this stand, at least in part, because Republican attack ads have been telling seniors that the Democrats have made cuts to Medicare. It is technically true that costs will drop: the government should save $237 billion between 2022 and 2031 from the Inflation Reduction Act’s drug policies. But these savings come from the fact that the IRA lets the federal government negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over prices, not because it will cut the benefits seniors receive.

Disinformation seems to be the hallmark of the midterm campaign.

In June, Republicans championed the overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision protecting the right to abortion, at first insisting that the Dobbs v. Jackson Womens’ Health decision would simply send the question of abortion rights back to the states. Now, with Republican lawmakers calling for a national law outlawing abortion everywhere, those running for election are scrubbing their websites of their abortion stances and downplaying the issue.

But today a 2019 radio interview with Pennsylvania state senator Doug Mastriano, now the Republican nominee for Pennsylvania governor, emerged. In it, Mastriano said that women obtaining abortions should be charged with murder. Mastriano has tried to say that his personal views are “irrelevant” because the legislature is in charge of rewriting the laws, but last week at Pennsylvania’s March for Life he called abortion rights “the single most important issue…in our lifetime,” and he has said he looks forward to signing restrictive measures into law.

Mastriano has called his Democratic opponent, Pennsylvania attorney general Josh Shapiro, extreme, although Shapiro supports current state law.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has also gotten in on the disinformation game. Texas governor Greg Abbott has been ferrying migrants from the southern border north, appealing to the right-wing base with the argument that such movement will illustrate to “liberal” cities the burdens such migrants impose on the border states. On September 14, DeSantis got into the act, flying 48 unsuspecting migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. As DeSantis said: “The minute even a small fraction of what those border towns deal with every day are brought to their front door, they all go berserk.”

In fact, the people of Martha’s Vineyard welcomed the migrants, fed and sheltered them, and got them back to the mainland where they could have access to housing and human services. More to the point, it is a myth that Republican-dominated border states are bearing the brunt of migrants seeking asylum. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post asked the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (TRAC) to figure out where the asylum seekers in the U.S. are.

From court records, TRAC calculated that 750,000 people are awaiting asylum hearings. More than 125,000 of them are in California. More than 110,000 are in New York. About 98,000 are scheduled for hearings in Florida, while about 75,000 are waiting in Texas. Most of the rest are scheduled for court hearings in Democratic-dominated states, such as New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maryland.

DeSantis’s political performance has drawn attention not only from those who like the cruelty he has displayed, but also from those who have asked questions about the $1.6 million contract his administration signed with air charter company Vertol Systems to move the migrants. NBC’s Marc Caputo noted that Vertol has contributed to DeSantis’s top allies and is well connected to Republican Florida lawmakers. A later plan to fly migrants to Delaware near Biden’s beach home was canceled, and the DeSantis administration refused to release a copy of the Vertol contract.

The Florida state budget that authorized $12 million for moving migrants specified that “unauthorized aliens” were to be flown from “this state”: Florida. The migrants taken to Martha’s Vineyard were not “illegal immigrants” as DeSantis’s office says; they were legally seeking asylum—and thus were “authorized” to be in the U.S.—and were flown not from Florida but simply touched down there on their trip from Texas to Massachusetts.

Shortly before midnight on the day DeSantis shipped the migrants, his deputy press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, tweeted a photograph of former president Barack Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard home, saying “7 bedrooms with 8 and a half bathrooms in a 6,892-square-foot house on nearly 30 acres. Plenty of space.”

Now, Hurricane Ian is about to make landfall in Florida either tomorrow or early Thursday and threatens to be one of the most dangerous and costliest storms in U.S. history. Tonight, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center warned that it would hit land as a Category 4 storm. In addition to hurricane-force winds, they predict a storm surge of up to 12 feet between Fort Myers and Sarasota, and up to 2 feet of rain.

In the Rose Garden today, Biden assured people that his administration “is on alert and in action to help the people of Florida.” Biden approved DeSantis’s request for emergency assistance as soon as he received it, sent in federal assistance before the storm hit, and spoke with the mayors of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, the areas most likely to be in the storm’s path.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has already sent 700 personnel to Florida, along with 3.5 million liters of water, 3.7 million meals, and hundreds of generators. Biden urged people to obey the instructions of local officials: “Your safety is more important than anything.”

Tonight, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted that President Biden spoke with DeSantis this evening about “the steps the Federal government is taking to help Florida prepare for Hurricane Ian. The President and the Governor committed to continued close coordination.”

Because of the storm, the public hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol scheduled for Wednesday has been postponed.

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 28, 2022 (Wednesday)

More than 1.5 million Florida residents are without power as Hurricane Ian is pounding the southwestern coast and moving inland. The hurricane was close to a Category 5 storm when it made landfall about 3 this afternoon, with the predicted 12-foot storm surge materializing near Fort Myers. It has been slowing since it hit land, but the damage, including to this year's orange crop, is already considerable.

This destructive storm highlights the distance between reality and the ideology that calls for getting rid of the federal government.

As a newly elected congress member in 2013, now-governor of Florida Ron DeSantis was one of the 67 House Republicans who voted against a $9.7 billion federal flood insurance assistance package for the victims of Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey. Now, with Florida on the ropes, DeSantis asked President Joe Biden for an emergency declaration to free up federal money and federal help even before the storm hit, and said Tuesday, “We all need to work together, regardless of party lines.”

Since the 1980s, the argument for dismantling the government has been that federal regulations hamper the operation of the free market, thus slowing economic growth, while the taxes required to maintain a bureaucratic system take money away from those who otherwise would invest in businesses. The avowed theory is that a freely operating market will free up money on the “supply side” of the economy. Flush with cash, investors will theoretically pump that money into new enterprises that will hire workers, and everyone will prosper together.

Yesterday the Congressional Budget Office released a study of trends in the distribution of family wealth between 1989—immediately after President Ronald Reagan began the antiregulation and antitax push—and 2019. In those thirty years, total real wealth held by families tripled from $38 trillion to $115 trillion. But the distribution of that growth was not even.

Money moved toward the families in the top 10%, and especially in the top 1%, shifting from families with less income and education toward those with more wealth and education. In the 30 years examined, the share of wealth belonging to families in the top 10% increased from 63% in 1989 to 72% in 2019, from $24.3 trillion to $82.4 trillion (an increase of 240%). The share of total wealth held by families in the top 1% increased from 27% to 34% in the same period. In 2019, families in the bottom half of the economy held only 2% of the national wealth, and those in the bottom quarter owed about $11,000 more than they owned.

The relative invisibility of these statistics after forty years under Republican ideology has enabled today’s Republicans to insist the Democrats are “socialists” who are trying to redistribute wealth downward even as our laws are clearly redistributing it upward.

Last night, California governor Gavin Newsom, who is running for reelection, insisted on MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tonight that Democrats must push back against the Republican domination of culture wars. Newsom pointed out that 8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates are Republican states and that the gun death rate in Texas is 67% higher than that in California. Newsom expressed dismay that Democrats aren’t better at advocating their policies.

That omission is likely a result of the fact that after World War II, it never occurred to most Americans that anyone here would need to defend democracy. And yet we are now facing the rise of “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy,” which argues that democracy’s protection of equal rights weakens societies by destroying their moral core and by splitting the people internally. Its adherents call for limiting the vote; privileging white, heterosexual Christian citizens; and standing behind an authoritarian leader who will stamp out opposition—that is, a system that is not a democracy at all.

There is a direct correlation between growing economic inequality and the growing popularity of authoritarianism. Scholars of authoritarian systems note that a population that feels economically, religiously, or culturally dispossessed is an easy target for an authoritarian who promises to bring back a mythological world in which its members were powerful.

But, having lifted strongmen into power, they learn that they were only tools to put in place someone whose decisions are absolute and who is no longer bound by the law.

Today the New York Times published a series of telephone calls from Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine. The men were poorly equipped, badly commanded, completely disillusioned, and utterly disgusted with Russian president Vladimir Putin, while their people back home complained that the economy was collapsing and the gains of the past 30 years were being swept away.

Meanwhile, Russia has had to strip its troops away from its borders to replace the soldiers lost in Ukraine, and the situation does not appear to be improving. The calls published in the New York Times were captured before Russia’s current mobilization, which has prompted a mass exodus out of the country. Since last week, 53,000 Russians have fled to Georgia; more than 98,000 have fled to Kazakhstan.

In the U.S. today, Zachary Cohen, Holmes Lybrand, and Jackson Grigsby of CNN reported on footage taken by a Danish film crew that followed Trump loyalist Roger Stone for about three years for a documentary. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has seen the footage and permitted the release of certain clips from around the time of the 2020 election and the January 6 attack.

In July 2020, Stone was already saying that Trump’s team would not accept the results of the election, clearly expecting that Trump would lose. The day before the election, he said: “F*ck the voting, let’s get right to the violence.” Like Steve Bannon, Stone also said that Trump should simply declare victory, saying: “Possession is nine tenths of the law." The filmmakers later recorded him asking for a pardon for his participation in the insurrection, noting that since Trump had already pardoned him once, after his conviction for lying to lawmakers about his actions and his relationship to Russia in the 2016 campaign, no one would care if Trump pardoned him again.

Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who presided over Roger Stone’s trial for lying to lawmakers about his ties to Russia during the 2016 election, called out “high-ranking members of Congress and state officials” for being “so afraid of losing their power” that they won’t contradict Trump when he lies that he won the 2020 election. She warned that the courts must hold the line against the lies and the violence Republican lawmakers are encouraging.

Meanwhile, Trump’s demand for a special master to review the materials FBI agents took from Mar-a-Lago on August 8 has put him on the spot. The demand for the review seemed designed to slow the examination of the documents with classification markings, but those have now been exempted by an appeals court, and special master Judge Raymond Dearie is puncturing Trump’s wild claims that he declassified documents or that the FBI planted them at Mar-a-Lago by asking Trump’s lawyers to put those claims in writing for the court.

Dearie has asked them to identify which of the 200,000 pages of documents not marked classified Trump wants to claim are covered by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege. If he wants to claim executive privilege, he also must explain why the executive branch, currently run by President Biden, has no right to see those documents.

Dearie has also asked them to verify by Friday the inventory written by the FBI agents of what they recovered or to note what items on it were allegedly planted. So, the lawyers must either admit that Trump held classified documents or claim that he declassified them (there is no evidence that he did), assert that the FBI planted those documents, or lie. Instead, they are trying to avoid verifying the inventory.

That review will cost Trump a lot. He has to pay a vendor to digitize the roughly 200,000 pages, then pay $500 an hour for the review, plus the cost of his own lawyers.

While those machinations are taking place, today, for the first time since 1969, the White House held a conference on hunger, nutrition, and health. Biden is bringing together the private sector and government to try to end hunger in America by 2030. The 1969 conference under President Richard Nixon led to a big expansion in food assistance programs. Now, a variety of companies and foundations have pledged $8 billion to address food insecurity, while Democrats in Congress are calling for more free meals in schools and extending school food programs through the summer. Biden has also called for making the expanded child tax credit permanent.

brianlux · September 2022

^^^Good 'old wRONg DeSantis

mickeyrat · September 2022

September 29, 2022 (Thursday)

Today the Senate approved a short-term extension of government funding to prevent a shutdown. The deal funds the government until December 16 and also provides about $12 billion in aid to Ukraine as it fights off Russia’s invasion. The House is expected to pass the measure tomorrow.

Behind this measure is a potential nightmare scenario. MAGA Republicans have already threatened to refuse to fund the government unless President Joe Biden and the Democrats reverse all their policies. If Republicans take control of either the House or the Senate—or both—in the midterms, they have the potential to throw the government into default, something that has never happened before.

The Republicans have this weapon because the U.S. has a weird funding system put in place more than 100 years ago. Congress appropriates money for programs that the Treasury then has to fund. But there is a “debt ceiling” for how much the government can borrow. If Congress has spent more money than the debt ceiling will permit, Congress must raise that ceiling or the government will default.

The debt ceiling is not an appropriation, it simply permits the government to pay debts already incurred.

Congress actually originally intended the debt ceiling to enable the government to be flexible in its borrowing. In the era of World War I, when it needed to raise a lot of money fast, Congress stopped passing specific revenue measures and instead set a cap on how much money the government could borrow through all of the different instruments it used.

Now, though, the debt ceiling has become a political cudgel because if it is not raised when Congress spends more than it has the ability to repay, the country will default on its debts.

Congress has raised the debt ceiling more than 100 times since it first went into effect, including 18 times under Ronald Reagan, and indeed, the Republicans raised it three times under former president Donald Trump. But when they had to raise it almost exactly a year ago under Biden, Republicans refused.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned then that a default “could trigger a spike in interest rates, a steep drop in stock prices and other financial turmoil. Our current economic recovery would reverse into recession, with billions of dollars of growth and millions of jobs lost.” It would jeopardize the status of the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency. Financial services firm Moody's Analytics warned that a default would cost up to 6 million jobs, create an unemployment rate of nearly 9%, and wipe out $15 trillion in household wealth.

And yet, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who had voted to raise or suspend the debt ceiling 32 times in his career, said, “There is no chance, no chance the Republican conference will…help Democrats…resume ramming through partisan socialism.” His stand was in part because it was not clear he had the votes he needed to support an increase, even though establishment Republicans like McConnell were quite aware of the damage a default would create.

Driving the Republican stance was former president Trump, who pushed MAGA Republicans to use the threat of default to get what they want. “The way I look at it,” he wrote, “what the Democrats are proposing, on so many different levels, will destroy our country. Therefore, Republicans have no choice but to do what they have to do, and the Democrats will have no choice but to concede all of the horror they are trying to inflict upon the future of the United States.” Trump was not happy when McConnell backed down. He issued a statement blaming McConnell for “folding” and added, “He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand.”

Now the equation has changed. With the Republican Party controlled by its MAGA members, it is not clear that a Republican-dominated House or Senate would allow the government to pay its bills. The ranking member of the House Budget Committee, Representative Jason Smith of Missouri, told Alayna Treene of Axios that he thinks the Republican should use the debt ceiling as leverage to “reverse” the administration’s “radical” policies. He indicated he would like the Republicans to pass a bill tying a higher debt ceiling to the destruction of all the Democrats’ policies and dare Biden to reject it. “Surely he wouldn’t default,” Smith said.

This plan is an echo of an effort by former Confederate leaders to destroy the federal government’s Reconstruction policies by withholding funds until the president did as they demanded. In 1879, having taken control of both houses of Congress during a recession, Democrats believed they had a mandate to get rid of federal protection of Black rights. Insisting they were fighting for liberty from a tyrannical government, they attached to appropriations bills riders that would force President Rutherford B. Hayes either to withdraw the remaining U.S. troops in the South (it’s a myth that they left in 1877) or to leave the government unfunded.

Cartoonist Thomas Nast drew an image of Fort Sumter, the installation in Charleston Harbor fired on by Confederate troops in April 1861, with the caption: “REVOLUTIONARY, AS USUAL—It is not the first time that an attempt has been made to stop the Government.” Three weeks later, the cover of Harper’s Weekly showed a skeletal U.S. soldier, starved at the infamous Andersonville prison camp, as a symbol of the starvation of the government.

Southern Democrats told newspapers they had blundered when they fought on the battlefields: far better to control the country from within Congress. Extremist newspapers threatened violence as they called for congress members to “drive or starve Mr. Hayes into signing a bill that sweeps these obnoxious laws out of existence.” But some fellow Democrats thought the southerners had gone too far. The Chicago Times deplored “the revolutionary course of attempting to subordinate the president to the dominant party in congress by menacing the very existence of the constitution.”

Republican House minority leader James Garfield (R-OH) noted: “They will let the government perish for want of supplies.” “If this is not revolution, which if persisted in will destroy the government, [then] I am wholly wrong in my conception of both the word and the thing.” A Civil War veteran who had seen battle at Shiloh and Chickamauga, Garfield understood revolution.

Garfield and Hayes refused to bow to the ex-Confederates’ demands, and their stand rallied northerners who had begun to drift toward the Democrats back to their standard. The Democrats were engaged in “a conspiracy against the government itself,” Harper’s Weekly wrote, and voters agreed. In the election of 1880, they rejected Democratic presidential candidate Winfield S. Hancock, who had been considered the frontrunner, and instead elected Garfield, who ran on a platform that emphasized a strong national government and defense of Black rights.

In 1879 the congressional fight was a continuation of the themes of the Civil War, played out over the funding of the government. If today’s Republicans retake power in the fall elections, a similar fight in 2023 will likely look much the same.

mickeyrat · October 2022

September 30, 2022 (Friday)

After a two-month stalemate, earlier this month Ukraine launched a game-changing counteroffensive against the Russians occupying their eastern territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.

Over the summer, Ukrainian forces destroyed Russian arms, command centers, and supplies behind Russian lines with U.S.-supplied long-range High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), then began to talk of a counteroffensive in the south, near Kherson. To guard against such a move, Russia moved many of its soldiers from the northeast to Kherson, leaving its northeastern troops stretched thin.

On September 6, Ukrainians moved, but not near Kherson in the south. Instead, they struck hard on the weakened northeastern lines, cutting quickly through the stretched and disheartened Russian occupiers and capturing more than 6000 square miles in less than a week. Russian troops abandoned their weapons and fled.

Russian president Vladimir Putin had launched the war on February 24 with the expectation that a lightning-quick attack would give him control of Ukraine before other nations could react, much as when he had invaded Crimea in 2014, or Georgia in 2008.

But he did not reckon with the careful rebuilding and training the Ukrainian military had undergone since 2014 as it worked to hold off Russia. He also misjudged the strength and commitment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which former president Trump had worked hard to dismantle. In office only a year at that point, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken had made reconstructing the world’s democratic alliances a top priority.

Those alliances held against Russia’s invasion of a sovereign nation as they had not before when Putin had bought appeasement with promises: “Don’t believe those who try to use Russia to scare you, who say that, after Crimea, other [Ukrainian] regions will follow,” he said in 2014. “We don’t want to carve up Ukraine. We don’t need this.” In 2022, international sanctions began to bite into and then to bring down the Russian economy, while shipments of weapons and economic support kept the Ukrainians supplied. Rather than a quick, successful strike, Putin found himself in a drawn-out and deeply unpopular conflict.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive tightened the screws further. Putin responded to it on September 21 by hinting that he might use nuclear weapons and calling for what initially was described as “partial” mobilization, a move he had tried to avoid because of its potential to turn the Russian people against him. Immediately, Russian men headed for the country’s borders, while civilians and draftees, provided with few supplies and no training, began to resist.

Putin also announced that the four occupied regions would hold referenda on joining Russia and would be part of Russia as soon as those referenda occurred, so any attacks on them would be considered attacks on Russian territory. With this upfront admission that the vote was predetermined, Putin’s move was clearly designed to enable him to keep the Ukrainian territory he seems about to lose. It also violated international law by attacking another nation’s sovereignty, and Biden and other democratic leaders condemned it in advance.

Then, on September 26, the Nord Stream pipelines on the floor of the Baltic Sea that send natural gas from Russia to Europe appear to have been sabotaged with TNT in what appears to have been a warning that Russia could attack the critical infrastructure of NATO countries. In this case, neither of the pipelines was in use, and blowing them up might simply have been a way to get rid of them in such a way to collect insurance on assets that are losing value as Europe turns to alternative energy.

But the explosions might also have been a warning that the seven major pipelines delivering Norwegian gas to Europe could be next. Former president Trump promptly “truthed”: “Do not make matters worse with the pipeline blowup. Be strategic, be smart (brilliant!), get a negotiated deal done NOW. Both sides need and want it. The entire World is at stake. I will head up group???”

Today, in a televised ceremony, Putin announced that the sham referenda had taken place and that “there are four new regions of Russia.” The four territories, which Russia does not fully control, cover about 18% of Ukraine. Putin’s speech seemed to indicate a concern that the countries under his sway are sliding away. He focused on the “West,” claiming that Russia itself is under attack from western democracies. “The West is looking for new opportunities to hit us and they always dreamt about breaking our state into smaller states who will be fighting against each other,” he said. “They cannot be happy with this idea that there is this large country with all [these] natural riches and people who will never live under a foreign oppression.”

He offered to negotiate for an end to the war, but said that the “four new regions of Russia aren’t up for negotiation.”

Journalist Anne Applebaum, who is a specialist on Central and Eastern Europe, identified Putin’s actions as a war not just on Ukraine, but on world order and the rule of law, a system embraced by the democratic world. It is, she writes in The Atlantic, “a statement of contempt for democracy itself.” That world order says that big countries cannot attack smaller countries and that mass slaughter is unacceptable. In contrast, in Putin’s world, she writes, “Only brutality matters.”

Secretary of State Blinken tweeted: “Today, we took swift and severe measures in response to President Putin's attempt to annex regions of Ukraine—a clear violation of international law. We will continue to impose costs on anyone that provides political or economic support for this sham.”

In turn, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine is applying for “accelerated ascension” into NATO. Ukraine’s membership in the organization would require other NATO countries to send troops to fight Russia. Admission to NATO requires the consent of all 30 members, and that consent is unlikely to materialize in the midst of a war, but Zelenky’s announcement overshadowed Putin’s.

Zelensky appealed to the ethnic minorities conscripted into Russian armies not to fight, telling them that more than 58,000 Russian soldiers had already died in Ukraine and warning them that they do not have to die for Putin. If they do come, he warned, those who are sent without dog tags should tattoo their names on their bodies so the Ukrainian authorities can inform their relatives when they are killed.

“The United States condemns Russia’s fraudulent attempt today to annex sovereign Ukrainian territory,” President Biden said. “Russia is violating international law, trampling on the United Nations Charter, and showing its contempt for peaceful nations everywhere. Make no mistake: these actions have no legitimacy.”

The U.S. announced new sanctions against Russians and Russian entities and will continue to provide aid to the Ukrainians. In what sounded like a reference to the damaged pipelines, Biden told reporters “America’s fully prepared with our NATO allies to defend every single inch of NATO territory, every single inch,” Mr. Biden said, adding: “Mr. Putin, don’t misunderstand what I’m saying.”

Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops have advanced around the city of Lyman and appear to be on the cusp of encircling the Russian troops there. Lyman is a key logistics and transportation hub, and the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank, says its loss “will likely be highly consequential to the Russian grouping.”

Today, a Washington Post op-ed by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, now serving a nine-year sentence in a maximum-security penal colony on trumped up charges, bore a title unimaginable a year ago: “This is what a post-Putin Russia should look like.”

mickeyrat · October 2022

October 1, 2022 (Saturday)

I started to write a quick wrap-up of some of today’s stories, only to find that there is no such thing as a quick wrap-up these days. I don’t know about you, but I need some days when I am not deep in the weeds of who is doing what, and why, especially when a lot of those weeds are toxic.

So here, tonight, is a Saturday photo… and an unusual one. Last weekend, we were out with a friend at night and the stars were cascading across the sky. But instead of turning my camera up, I pointed mine down toward the black harbor and ended up– quite unintentionally– with a very Maine sort of display.

An unexpected gift in the most unlikely of circumstances.

I’ll be back at it tomorrow.

mickeyrat · October 2022

October 2, 2022 (Sunday)

There’s a moment in Representative Adam Schiff’s 2021 book Midnight in Washington that jumps out. The book centers around the first impeachment of former president Trump for withholding congressionally approved funds for Ukraine to fight off Russian incursions. In managing the impeachment trial before the Senate, Schiff (D-CA) and his team had prepared thoroughly and carefully to demonstrate that Trump had, in fact, withheld the money in order to force Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to help Trump rig the 2020 election.

Trump’s team wanted Zelensky to announce that he was launching an investigation into Hunter Biden, whose father, Joe Biden, was the opponent Trump most feared for the 2020 presidential election. The media would jump at such an announcement and chew it over until by the time the election came around, voters would associate Biden with criminality, just as they had condemned Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, over her use of a private email server.

As Schiff prepared to summarize the powerful testimony that supported the case for impeachment, a member of his staff stopped him. Schiff recalled the staffer telling him: “They think we’ve proven him guilty. They need to know why he should be removed.”

Schiff interpreted that question to mean that senators wanted to know why THEY should remove him. After all, he was giving them the judges they wanted and permitting them to run the country as they wished.

Schiff’s masterful summary of the case both at the trial and in his book answered that question, explaining that senators should have taken on themselves the responsibility for removing Trump from office because he threatened the country’s national security and, if not checked, would continue to abuse his power.

In the end, only Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) voted to convict Trump of abuse of power (but not obstruction of Congress), but that one vote from “one brave man,” Schiff recalled, “had validated my belief and that of the Founders, that the people possessed sufficient virtue to be self-governing.”

But there is another interpretation of the reason senators wanted to know why Trump should be removed even though they admitted he was guilty of trying to rig an election with machinations that hurt the country’s national security: The leaders of the Republican Party had abandoned the rule of law.

After World War II, political philosopher Hannah Arendt explained that lies are central to the rise of authoritarianism. In place of reality, authoritarians lie to create a “fictitious world through consistent lying.” Ordinary people embraced such lies because they believed everyone lied anyhow, and if caught trusting a lie, they would “take refuge in cynicism,” saying they had known all along they were being lied to and admiring their leaders “for their superior tactical cleverness.” But leaders embraced the lies because they reinforced those leaders’ superiority, and gave them power, over those who did believe them.

That pattern, in which lies undermine the rule of law, seems to be going around these days. It is in the news internationally as Russian president Vladimir Putin is directly challenging international law both by taking Ukrainian territory by force and by committing war crimes. He justifies that destruction of the rule of law by claiming that sham referenda in four regions of Ukraine have made those regions Russian, and that any attempt of Ukrainians to reclaim their territory will be an attack on Russia that may require a nuclear response.

The rejection of the rule of law is also in the news at home, as Republican leaders appear to be following Trump’s lead. Tonight, New York Times reporters Edgar Sandoval, Miriam Jordan, Patricia Mazzei, and J. David Goodman explained the lies behind Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s dumping of migrants at Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts last month.

Since Biden took office, Republicans have tried to make unauthorized immigration a key election issue. In June 2021, Texas governor Greg Abbott and Arizona governor Doug Ducey invoked the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, an agreement that lets states send aid to each other after a governor has declared a disaster or an emergency. Abbott has declared a disaster and Ducey an emergency over the influx of migrants to the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that the Biden administration is “unwilling or unable” to secure the border. They called for governors of other states to send “additional law enforcement personnel and equipment” to “arrest migrants who illegally cross the border into our territory.”

Iowa governor Kim Reynolds, Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts, and Florida governor Ron DeSantis all pledged to send law enforcement to Texas and Arizona; South Dakota governor Kristi Noem one-upped them by announcing that she would send 50 South Dakota National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and that billionaires Willis and Reba Johnson from Franklin, Tennessee, would pay for the troops.

Florida’s budget this year—signed in June—continued this trend with a $12 million fund “to facilitate the transport of unauthorized aliens out of Florida.” According to Douglas Soule of the Tallahassee Democrat, that money came from interest on the $8.8 billion Florida got from the American Rescue Plan to address the coronavirus pandemic. Because it was interest, rather than principal, it was not covered by the federal requirement to address Covid-19, as the federal money itself was.

The idea was to highlight federal transportation of “unauthorized” migrants into Florida, but by August the money was untouched because there actually weren’t large groups of migrants coming to the state. So DeSantis focused instead on Texas, where a woman the New York Times reporters identified as Perla Huerta, a U.S. Army veteran who was a combat medic and a counterintelligence agent for two decades before being discharged last month, recruited destitute migrants to go north with the promise of work. Vertol Systems, which charters airplanes and is well connected with Florida Republican politicians, was paid more than $1.5 million, but how they were hired and by whom is not clear.

The people the operation targeted were legal asylum seekers, who were provided with fake maps and misled about where they were going.

Putin has to reckon with reality, in the form of Russian men fleeing the country, protests in Dagestan and elsewhere, the international community standing firm on the law, and Ukrainian forces continuing to gain ground. Less than a day after Putin announced he had taken the Ukrainian regions, Russian troops fled from the key transport city of Lyman.

Whether DeSantis and the Republican Party will have to reckon with reality in 2022 remains unclear. But it seems unlikely that any reality check will come from Republican leaders. Just this weekend, they have refused to comment on Trump’s inflammatory statement about Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), which seemed to encourage violence against him and included a racist smear against McConnell’s wife, Trump transportation secretary Elaine Chao.

In the Washington Post, columnist Karen Tumulty concluded that while Trump was outrageous, “there is plenty of fault to go around. The Republican Party’s refusal to denounce him makes them complicit.”

mickeyrat · October 2022

October 3, 2022 (Monday)

This morning, the trial of Oath Keeper founder Elmer Stewart Rhodes and four others began in Washington, D.C. They are on trial for various counts of seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy to prevent U.S. officials from carrying out their official duties, obstruction of justice, and impeding police officers, all related to their important part in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

These are five of the nine charged; according to Lawfare editor Roger Parloff, who has been following the case closely, the other four will go on trial in November, and the split is because there wasn’t a courtroom big enough in Washington to hold a trial of all nine. Parloff also notes that the last “unambiguously successful” seditious conspiracy trial was of Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called blind sheik, and his associates for bombing the World Trade Center in 1993. Since then, the charge has been used to prosecute small al-Qaeda cells.

Prosecutors said the Oath Keepers set out on January 6 “to shatter a bedrock of American democracy” by stopping the peaceful transfer of power. They stockpiled weapons, breached the Capitol, and tried “to stop by whatever means necessary the lawful transfer of presidential power, including by taking up arms against the United States government,” attacking “not just the Capitol, not just Congress, not just our government—but our country itself.”

The defense said the government was mischaracterizing what happened, and overreaching. The Oath Keepers came to Washington as security guards dedicated to “peacekeeping,” who showed up expecting that then-president Donald Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act to activate the Oath Keepers to defend Trump’s government.

Also today, the Supreme Court began its new term this week with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on the bench. In the minority, Jackson will not change the right-wing slant of the court, which the editorial board of the New York Times on Saturday called “a judicial arm of the Republican Party,” discarding “the traditions and processes that have allowed the court to appear fair and nonpartisan.”

One of the cases before the Supreme Court in this session is Moore v. Harper, which is about the “independent state legislature” doctrine. That doctrine is a new legal theory based on the election clause of the U.S. Constitution, which reads that "the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” The theory says that this clause means that the legislature alone can determine elections in a state, unchecked by the state courts or even the state constitution.

The case comes from North Carolina, where the state supreme court in February declared that the new congressional and state legislature maps so heavily favored Republicans as to be “unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt.” The Republican-dominated legislature says it alone has the power to determine state districts.

Revered conservative judge J. Michael Luttig, who sat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, is clear about this doctrine’s illegitimacy. Calling Moore v. Harper “the most important case for American democracy in the almost two and a half centuries since America’s founding,” he made his understanding of that case clear in an article in The Atlantic today titled “There Is Absolutely Nothing to Support the ‘Independent State Legislature’ Theory.” The subtitle explained: “Such a doctrine would be antithetical to the Framers’ intent, and to the text, fundamental design, and architecture of the Constitution.”

Luttig correctly identifies this theory as “the centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election”; had it been in place, Trump’s scheme for throwing out Biden’s electors in favor of his own would have worked, and he would now be in the White House. Luttig calls it “baffling” that six of the Supreme Court justices have “flirted” with the theory, because “[t]here is literally no support in the Constitution, the pre-ratification debates, or the history from the time of our nation’s founding or the Constitution’s framing for a theory of an independent state legislature that would foreclose state judicial review of state legislatures’ redistricting decisions.” Indeed, the Constitution says just the opposite.

While Trump’s loyalists continue to try to stack the mechanics of our system in favor of the former president, his troubles continue to mount. Yesterday, even the Wall Street Journal editorial board complained of Trump’s “reckless…tirade” against Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), a tirade this political historian, who is very aware of the power of words, will not quote in public. The editorial board called Trump out for endangering McConnell’s life.

In an interview with Chauncey DeVega of Salon today, lawyer and Lincoln Project founder George Conway warned that Trump “is basically a cornered animal,” trapped by legal troubles, losing his connection to the public, and facing consequences for his actions for the first time in his life.

Conway predicted that Trump’s theft of government documents is “the shortest distance between him and an orange jumpsuit, for the simple reason that it is a simple case.” “Given the details of the case and all the related charges, I don't know how the DOJ doesn't prosecute Trump,” he said. “And I don't know how Trump is not convicted, especially if he is tried in the District of Columbia.”

To get out of trouble, Conway said, Trump will threaten violence. And, indeed, he has been doing so, telling a crowd on October 1, “I don’t believe we’ll ever have a fair election again. I don’t believe it.” Legal analyst and former U.S. attorney Joyce White Vance accurately identifies this as [a] message designed to justify abandoning democracy & installing a strongman.”

And yet, just tonight, Trump’s troubles got worse. Josh Dawsey and Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post directly connected Trump to the withholding of the federal documents when they reported that in February, Trump asked one of his lawyers, Alex Cannon, to lie to the National Archives and Records Administration, telling them that he had returned everything the archives wanted. Cannon refused. In May, after a subpoena, former One America News personality and Trump lawyer Christina Bobb did sign a document saying that Trump had handed over "all documents that are responsive to the subpoena" after a "diligent search." Bobb has now retained an attorney and says she’s willing to talk to the Department of Justice about her role in the case.

In an interview tonight, Trump accused the FBI or the archivists from the National Archives and Records Administration of planting or removing documents in order to frame him, saying that NARA is “largely radical-left run.”

Trump is not the only one in hot water tonight. Roger Sollenberger of the Daily Beast reported that a former girlfriend of Trump-backed Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker in Georgia revealed that Walker paid for her to have an abortion in 2009. Walker has taken an extreme stand against abortion, saying he opposes it without any exceptions and supports the Republican plan for a federal law to ban the procedure nationwide. Abortion is the big dividing line between Walker and his opponent, Senator Raphael Warnock, who supports abortion rights. Walker called the story “a flat-out lie,” but the woman provided Sollenberger with a receipt from a clinic, a check from Walker, and a get well card Walker had signed, while Walker’s campaign has been marred by his own repeated lies.

Then, an account that appeared to be that of Walker’s adult son, who had been a big supporter of his father’s campaign on social media, got involved, tweeting that Walker had made “a mockery” of him and his mother. “You’re not a ‘family man’ when you left us to bang a bunch of women, threatened to kill us, and had us move over 6 times in 6 months running from your violence,” the younger Walker tweeted.

The elder Walker claims he will sue the Daily Beast tomorrow morning.

For his part, when Shannon McCaffrey and Greg Bluestein of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked Senator Warnock about the story, he said he would continue to focus on policy. “I’ll let the pundits decide how they think it will impact the race,” Warnock said. “But I have been consistent in my view that a patient’s room is too narrow and cramped for space for a woman and the government.”

mickeyrat · October 2022

October 4, 2022 (Tuesday)

Anti-abortion Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker did not, in fact, sue the Daily Beast over the story he paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion. Instead, his son Christian Walker took to social media to call his father out for lying, abuse, and abandonment and to call out MAGA Republicans for continuing to support his father while claiming to believe in “family values.”

Walker’s supporters immediately blamed the son for hurting his father’s campaign. The candidate himself stayed away from the media, attending a private event sponsored by “Prayer Warriors for Herschel.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, organized to elect Republicans to the Senate, and the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, both reaffirmed their support for Walker. They will continue to keep spending to boost his campaign. Still, concern about the outcome in Georgia has prompted the right-wing super PAC Club for Growth Action to plan a massive $2 million ad buy in Spanish for the Nevada senate race, backing Republican Adam Laxalt against Democratic senator Catherine Cortez Masto.

Dana Loesch, a former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association and a former writer and editor for the right-wing media outlet Breitbart, made the position of party leadership clear: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles,” she said. “I want control of the Senate.”

It is unclear if this scandal will hurt Walker with supporters who have already swallowed lies about his businesses, academic achievements, relationship with law enforcement, multiple children, and accusations of domestic violence. But abortion is a key issue—perhaps THE key issue—in this election, and the demonstration that a Republican Senate candidate is calling for a nationwide abortion ban even as he paid for a girlfriend’s abortion will likely not sit well with those upset about the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Republicans are determined to take control of the country no matter what it takes.

Today, Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, who is up for reelection, revised his August story about his role in overturning the 2020 election. After saying his part in the delivery of fake electoral votes to the vice president was only “a couple seconds,” he now says that he texted with Wisconsin-based lawyer Jim Troupis, who was working for Trump to overturn the results of the election in Wisconsin, for about an hour. He also downplayed the events of January 6 as not an “armed insurrection.”

In the Washington, D.C., trial of the Oath Keepers today, though, prosecutors played a recording of a November 2020 meeting in which Oath Keepers planned to bring weapons to Washington and “fight” for Trump. The gang’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, said it would be “great” if protesters were there, because violence would enable Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.

“Pepper spray is legal. Tasers are legal. And stun guns are legal. And it doesn’t hurt to have a lead pipe with a flag on it,” codefendant Kelly Meggs told attendees.

A lawyer for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol revealed in court today that the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, Kelli Ward, repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination when testifying before the committee. Ward was one of Arizona’s false electors.

Also today, in a story about Trump’s disregard for the correct handling of classified records, Washington Post reporters Shane Harris, Josh Dawsey, Ellen Nakashima, and Jacqueline Alemany said Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general, told them that Trump “rejected the Presidential Records Act entirely.”

The Presidential Records Act is a federal law.

In contrast to the course of the current Republican Party, President Joe Biden has focused on demonstrating that democracy works. Today, the CHIPS and Science Act, which provided $52 billion in public investment in semiconductor manufacture, appeared once again to pay off: Micron announced that it would spend up to $100 billion over the next 20 years to build up to four plants in upstate New York near Syracuse to build computer chips. The company estimates that the project will create almost 50,000 jobs generally over the next 20 years, with about 9,000 of those in the plants themselves.

“To those who doubted that America could dominate the industries of the future, I say this,” Biden said in a statement. “[Y]ou should never bet against the American people.”

Today, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson brought an important new philosophy to the law when the Supreme Court heard arguments over Merrill v. Milligan, a voting rights case. This case concerns Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which, as summarized by the Department of Justice, “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the language minority groups identified” in the act.

In 2021, Alabama’s legislature cut the state into seven districts that “crack and pack” Black voters. About 27% of the residents of Alabama are Black, but they are either “packed” into one district or “cracked” among the others, diluting their overall strength.

Registered voters, the Alabama chapter of the NAACP, and the multifaith Greater Birmingham Ministries sued under the Voting Rights Act. A district court of three judges, two of whom were appointed by Trump, agreed that the redistricting violated the law and gave the legislature two weeks to redraw the map to create two Black-majority districts.

The state immediately filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court, which was granted, allowing the states to use the original map for this year’s elections.

In today’s arguments, Alabama Solicitor General Edmund G. LaCour Jr. claimed that states must draw districts that are “race neutral.” When Justice Jackson pressed him to explain, he turned to the Fourteenth Amendment, saying it “is a prohibition, not an obligation, to engage in race discrimination.”

Jackson then turned on its head the so-called “originalism” that has taken over the court. “I understood that we looked at the history and traditions of the Constitution and what the framers and founders thought about,” she said, “and when I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment in a race-conscious way.”

She’s right, of course, and while she followed up with more Reconstruction history, she could have gone even farther: when President Andrew Johnson vetoed the 1866 civil rights bill on the explicit grounds that it was not race neutral (among other things), Congress repassed it over his veto and based the Fourteenth Amendment on it.

Jackson’s approach was about more than this case, important though it is. She brought to the court what has been called “progressive originalism” or, perhaps more accurately, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern’s term “egalitarian constitutionalism.” The Reconstruction Amendments—the 13th, 14th, and 15th—give to the federal government the power to protect individual rights in the states, and originalists’ avoidance of them has always stood out. Those amendments launched an entirely new era in our history; scholars call it a “second founding.”

Now, it appears, that second founding has an advocate on the Supreme Court.

mickeyrat · October 2022

October 5, 2022 (Wednesday)

Today the OPEC+ oil cartel announced it will cut output by 2 million barrels a day, beginning in November. Since the world currently consumes about 100 million barrels of oil a day, this will be a cut of about 2%.

OPEC is short for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. It includes 13 member states, led by Saudi Arabia, and produces 44% of the world’s oil. Eleven other countries work alongside OPEC and make up OPEC+. Those additional countries include Russia, and together with OPEC, they control more than half of the world’s oil, about 55% of it.

OPEC+ countries cooperate to reduce market competition and raise prices.

The cost of oil has dropped steadily during the course of the summer, falling about 32% until it fell below $80 a barrel for the American oil the U.S. uses as a benchmark. With today’s announcement, the price of a barrel of oil started to move upward again.

The decision of OPEC+ to cut production is not simply about prices. It is about the ongoing struggle over democracy playing out in Ukraine, as the Ukrainians fight off the Russian invaders.

The Russian economy depends upon oil sales, and the U.S. and European Union have sought to cut into that money to hurt Russia’s ability to continue its attack in Ukraine. A day ago, after Russia illegally annexed four regions of Ukraine, the 27 member nations in the European Union joined the G7 (which is made up of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) to set a price cap on Russian oil, in addition to another round of sanctions. Theoretically, this plan should have enabled countries that need Russian oil for heat this winter to get it, while keeping the prices low enough to starve Putin’s war efforts.

Russia is co-chair of OPEC+ and is desperate for oil money, on which its economy depends. That economy is crumbling under international sanctions, and Russia’s oil production has dropped about a million barrels a day at the same time that the country has been forced to discount its oil to sell it. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is failing, it needs more money, and Russia asked for the OPEC+ cuts to increase prices.

“It’s clear that OPEC+ is aligning with Russia with today’s announcement,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, and OPEC+ delegates said the move was, indeed, a big win for Russia.

Biden took heat earlier this year when he traveled to Saudi Arabia to ask leaders to increase production, in part to ease gas prices here in the U.S., which soared after the economy came roaring back after the worst of the pandemic passed and after Putin invaded Ukraine. At the time, the Saudis increased production slightly, but this announced cut makes Saudi Arabia’s rejection of Biden’s request clear, even though the Saudi energy minister, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, said that OPEC+ was simply trying to stabilize markets in the face of a cooling global economy.

It is not immediately clear just how badly this development will hurt prices as the global economy slows and there is less demand for oil. Still, the announcement of the cuts a month before the U.S. midterms certainly seems like an attempt to influence U.S. politics. It is no secret that Saudi leaders cultivated the Trump family, which returned their overtures, and last year, Saudi leader Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman overruled the advisors of the main Saudi sovereign wealth fund to invest $2 billion of the fund in a new investment company run by Jared Kushner, former president Trump’s son-in-law.

Of today’s news, the Biden White House said: “The president is disappointed by the shortsighted decision by OPEC+ to cut production quotas while the global economy is dealing with the continued negative impact of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. At a time when maintaining a global supply of energy is of paramount importance, this decision will have the most negative impact on lower- and middle-income countries that are already reeling from elevated energy prices.”

Apparently recognizing that higher oil prices could well translate into higher gas prices and hamstring the Democrats right before the midterms, the White House statement touted how the president and allies around the world have helped to bring gas prices down by $1.20 to an average of $3.29 a gallon. It said that the administration would continue to release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a release that has significantly lowered oil prices and is part of why OPEC+ is upset. The administration will also continue to increase domestic production and has asked U.S. energy companies, which have been making record profits, to close “the historically large gap between wholesale and retail gas prices—so that American consumers are paying less at the pump.”

The administration also said that “in light of today’s action,” it would “consult with Congress on additional tools and authorities to reduce OPEC’s control over energy prices.”

“Finally,” it said, “today’s announcement is a reminder of why it is so critical that the United States reduce its reliance on foreign sources of fossil fuels.” It reminded Americans that the Inflation Reduction Act was the nation’s most significant investment ever in transitioning to clean energy and increasing energy security by fulfilling our energy needs at home.

(Folks: Perhaps fittingly, our power is out. I won’t be able to make corrections tonight, so apologies in advance if I’ve messed something up. And don’t worry– we are perfectly safe– this just happens here sometimes.)

mickeyrat · October 2022

October 6, 2022 (Thursday)

The scandal involving Herschel Walker, the staunchly anti-abortion Georgia candidate for the Senate who appears to have paid for an ex-girlfriend’s abortion in 2009, got worse today. After he claimed he did not know the woman who said he paid for an abortion, the woman said she was the mother of one of his other, newly acknowledged, children, so of course he knows her.

Just five years ago, Representative Tim Murphy (R-PA), who belonged to the Republican Pro-Life Caucus, resigned just hours after the story broke that he pressured a woman with whom he was having an affair to get an abortion. Now, Republicans are rallying around Walker, with former NRA spokesperson and former Breitbart writer Dana Loesch saying: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”

In the Philadelphia Inquirer, columnist Will Bunch pointed out that Republican leaders have not condemned Walker for his hypocrisy on abortion, his lies about it and about the many other things he has lied about during the campaign, or the many allegations of domestic violence women have made about him. Instead, his campaign says it has raised half a million dollars since the news broke, while Walker recorded an ad claiming he has been “saved by grace.”

Bunch noted what many observers have already called out: that the Republicans no longer care about anything but winning. But he went on: they insist on winning so they can put their vision of Christian domination into effect. “[T]he so-called 'family values' of American fundamentalists…turn out to be mere window dressing that can be tossed for the movement’s true aim: authoritarianism,” he wrote.

Bunch linked to a piece that scholar of fascism Brynn Tannehill published in today’s New Republic, noting that religion in the U.S. is declining among younger folks and that older evangelicals are increasingly concerned they are losing power, at the same time that their Christianity has become a political identity. Tannehill wrote: “The real danger of this widening schism…lies in this creating the conditions for a future that looks more like present-day Russia or Iran.”

The Republican Party’s shift toward authoritarianism is clear in the refusal of a majority of the party’s nominees for office this fall to agree that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Amy Gardner of the Washington Post ran the numbers and found that 299 Republican candidates for the House, Senate, and important state offices are election deniers, and that 174 of them are running in districts that are safely Republican. If Republicans win the House in November, election deniers will form a strong voting bloc that will affect the choice of the next speaker; some are already complaining that House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is too moderate. Many of those elected in states will oversee state elections.

The Republican narrative that Democrats can win only by cheating began back in 1994, after the Democrats made registering to vote easier with the 1993 so-called Motor Voter Act. In 1994, losing Republican candidates complained their opponents had cheated, and congressional Republicans kept that narrative alive with congressional investigations. Over time, “voter fraud” became the way Republicans explained away the unpopularity of their ideas.

Trump’s continuing insistence that he won the 2020 election, and the Republican Party’s embrace of that lie despite the fact that Biden won by more than 7 million votes in the popular vote and by 306 to 232 in the Electoral College, says that they will never again consider the election of a Democrat legitimate.

In Arizona, where the Republican nominee for governor, Kari Lake, has said that Biden is an illegitimate president and the Republican nominee for secretary of state, Mark Finchem, has said that he would not have certified the true 2020 election results in Arizona, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) last night at an event at Arizona State University urged Arizona voters to elect Democrats.

“If you care about democracy and you care about the survival of our republic, then you need to understand—we all have to understand—that we cannot give people power who have told us that they will not honor elections,” Cheney said.

The trial of five Oath Keepers in Washington, D.C., for seditious conspiracy has provided more insight into how far members of the gang were willing to go to keep Trump in office. Today, former Oath Keeper John Zimmerman, who left the gang before January 6, 2021, testified that he heard Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes talking in September 2020 with someone Zimmerman believed was a member of the Secret Service.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Bertino, a leader of the extremist right-wing Proud Boys gang that worked alongside the Oath Keepers on January 6, 2021, today told a federal judge he will plead guilty to seditious conspiracy. Bertino, who was not in Washington on January 6, was a top lieutenant to Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio and is now cooperating with the Justice Department. Like others involved in the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Bertino appeared to believe they were “SAVING THE CONSTITUTION,” as he posted to the rioters. He later wrote: “1776 motherf*ck*rs.”

Lawyers for Trump have told New York Times reporters Michael S. Schmidt, Maggie Haberman, and Katie Benner that the Justice Department does not think Trump has returned all the documents he stole from the White House. That information came from Jay I. Bratt, who leads the Justice Department’s counterintelligence operations, and it has split Trump’s lawyers between those who want him to cooperate and those backing Trump’s instinct to fight.

We still don’t know just what is in those documents, and who else has seen them. This is an unfortunate wild card as Biden is trying to rebuild alliances to defend democracy. In the trial of Thomas J. Barrack Jr., an investor and Trump backer being prosecuted for secretly working for the United Arab Emirates during Trump’s term, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson today said he did not know about the contacts between Barrack, Jared Kushner, and representatives for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that are coming to light in trial testimony.

In contrast to those backing Trump, Biden today worked toward equal justice before the law when he pardoned all U.S. citizens and permanent residents who have been convicted of possession of marijuana. Many state governments have already made possession legal—a position that Americans overwhelmingly support—and since arrests for possession fall far more heavily on minorities than on white offenders although their rates of marijuana use are similar, advocates for fairness in the criminal justice code have called for this reform. While the pardon will free few if any incarcerated people, it will get rid of criminal records that make it harder to get jobs, housing, and educational opportunities.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who has advocated for a comprehensive marijuana reform bill for years, tweeted: “This is a step forward in correcting the historical injustices of failed drug policies.”

Biden called for governors to pardon possession offenses at the state level and asked officials to look into moving marijuana to a less dangerous category of drug, but he made it clear he wanted to keep “important limitations on trafficking, marketing, and under-age sales.”

brianlux · October 2022

Interesting that she makes no mention of the Hunter Biden scandal which is making headlines elsewhere? Is she worried about drawing attention to it? Or just figures it doesn't merit the time?

Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

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