Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

  November 12, 2022 (Saturday)

A little before 9:30 p.m. Eastern time, NBC called Nevada’s tight Senate race for the incumbent: Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto. Cortez Masto defeated Adam Laxalt, a former attorney general for the state, whom former president Trump had endorsed.  

This means that the Democrats keep control of the Senate.

Democrats will have 50 votes in the new Congress just as they did in the current one, enabling Vice President Kamala Harris to break ties in their favor.

Harris may not need to break ties, though, if the last Senate seat goes to the Democrats. That last seat is the one outstanding seat from Georgia. In the election there, Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock garnered about 35,000 more votes than Trump-endorsed Republican Herschel Walker, but neither man won 50% of the vote. Under Georgia law, this forces a runoff, which will be held on December 6. Walker is a deeply flawed candidate, and now that his election cannot give the Republicans control of the Senate, it is not clear that voters will turn out for him.  

As of late October, NPR reported that outside groups had spent almost a billion dollars on the campaigns of Republican Senate candidates, hoping to take control of that body. Key to that desire for control was control of the judiciary, where the right wing has entrenched itself as it has become increasingly extreme and unpopular. Even without control of the House—which is still unclear as election officials continue to count votes—Democratic control of the Senate means that President Joe Biden will be able to continue confirming judges.

After the Nevada race was called, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters that the victory was “a vindication for Democrats, our agenda, and…for the American people.” He explained: “The American people rejected the antidemocratic extremist MAGA Republicans.”

  November 14, 2022 (Monday)

The contours of last Tuesday’s midterm election continue to come into focus. They are good, indeed, for the Democrats and Democratic president Joe Biden. Foremost is that the Democrats have not lost a Senate seat and could well pick one up after the December 6 runoff election between Georgia senator Rafael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker.

Those results are strong. According to Axios senior political correspondent Josh Kraushaar, only in 1934, under Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt; 1962, under Democratic president John F. Kennedy; and 2002, under Republican president George W. Bush and just after the 9/11 attacks, has a president’s party not lost a Senate seat in the midterms and lost fewer than 10 House seats. Since World War II, midterms have cost the party in power an average of 28 seats.  

Democrats also did well in state governments, picking up some state governorships—including Arizona’s tonight, as Democrat Katie Hobbs is projected to have beaten Trump-backed Republican election denier Kari Lake—and taking control in some legislative chambers, although again, it’s not clear yet how many. They also denied the Republicans veto-proof supermajorities in others.

Also crucial was the defeat of election deniers, who backed Trump’s false allegations that he won the 2020 election, in six key elections where those folks would have been in charge of certifying ballots for their states in the future. In Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico, voters rejected election deniers running to become secretary of state. Indiana voters elected as secretary of state election denier Diego Morales, who has been mired in scandal, securing Republican control of the state.

In Nevada, Republican Jim Marchant was personally recruited by Trump’s people to run for secretary of state, and they asked him to put together a group of those who thought like him across the nation. At a Trump rally in October, Marchant promised voters that “[w]hen my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re going to fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024.”

Instead, voters chose Democrat Cisco Aguilar, who told Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times: “People are tired of chaos…. They want stability; they want normalcy; they want somebody who’s going to be an adult and make decisions that are fair, transparent, and in the best interest of all Nevadans.”

While many of us have been focusing on events here at home, the outcome of the election had huge implications for foreign policy. As today’s column by conservative columnist Max Boot of the Washington Post notes, “Republicans lost the election—and so did [Russian president Vladimir] Putin, MBS [Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman], and [former/incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu.”

Autocrats and hard-right leaders liked Trump at the head of the U.S. government, for he was far more inclined to operate transactionally on the basis of financial benefits, while Biden and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, have advanced a foreign policy based on democratic values. Leaders like MBS have ignored Biden or denigrated him, expecting that a reelected Trump in 2024 would revert to the system they preferred. Now those calculations have hit a snag.

Indeed, Russia put its bots and trolls back to work before the election to weaken Biden in the hope that a Republican Congress would cut aid to Ukraine, as Republican leaders had suggested they would. The Russian army is in terrible trouble in Ukraine, and its best bet for a lift is for the international coalition the U.S. anchors to fall apart. Russian propagandists suggested that Putin suppressed news that the Russians were withdrawing from the Ukrainian city of Kherson until after the election to avoid giving the Democrats a boost in the polls.  

Today, Secretary of State Blinken announced more sanctions against Russian companies and individuals, in Russia and abroad, “to disrupt Russia’s military supply chains and impose high costs on President Putin’s enablers.” Director of the CIA William Burns met recently in Turkey with his Russian counterpart to convey “a message on the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons” and “the risks of escalation,” but said the U.S. is firmly behind “our fundamental principle: nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”  

Also today, the General Assembly of the United Nations approved a resolution saying that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine violated international law and that Russia must pay war reparations. In Germany and Poland, the governments separately announced they were taking over natural gas companies that had been tied to Russia’s huge energy company, Gazprom, in order to guarantee energy supplies to their people.  

On Friday, November 11, Biden spoke at the United Nations climate change conference in Egypt. He was the only leader of a major polluting nation to go to the meeting, and there he stressed U.S. leadership, pointing to the Inflation Reduction Act’s $370 billion investment in the U.S. shift to clean energy and other climate-positive changes. Also on Friday, his administration announced it would use the U.S. government’s buying power to push suppliers toward climate-positive positions. Protesters called attention to how little the U.S. has done for poorer countries harmed by climate change that has been caused by richer countries.

From Egypt, the president traveled to Cambodia for a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), including Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. In the past year, the U.S. has announced more than $250 million in new initiatives with ASEAN, investing especially in infrastructure in an apparent attempt to disrupt China’s dominance of the region by supporting counterweights in the region. The U.S. is now elevating the cooperation with ASEAN to a comprehensive strategic partnership to support a rules-based Indo-Pacific region, maritime cooperation, economic and technological cooperation, and sustainable development. “ASEAN is the heart of my administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy, and we continue to strengthen our commitment to work in lockstep with an empowered, unified ASEAN,” Biden said.

While in Cambodia, Biden also met with Japanese prime minister                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Kishida Fumio and reinforced the U.S. “ironclad commitment to the defense of Japan” after North Korea’s recent ballistic missile tests. Biden and Kishida reiterated their plan to strengthen and modernize the relationship between the U.S. and Japan to “address threats to the free and open Indo-Pacific.”

From there, Biden traveled to Bali, Indonesia, for a meeting of the G20, a forum of 19 countries and the European Union comprising countries that make up most of the nation’s largest economies.

Today the president met for more than three hours with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The main message from the meeting was that the two countries are communicating, and while each is standing firm on its national sovereignty, each sees room to cooperate on major global issues.

Biden made it a point to say that U.S. policies toward Taiwan have not changed—a concern that created ripples of uncertainty when House speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island nation last summer—and both he and Xi agreed that Russia should not use nuclear weapons in Ukraine. In a sign that relations are easing, Biden said that Blinken and other U.S. officials will visit China to begin working on issues of mutual interest..

Meanwhile, authorities in Iran are cracking down on the protesters there, with news of torture and now of a death sentence for one of the 15,000 protesters who have been arrested. Today,  national security advisor Jake Sullivan condemned the human rights abuses inflicted on its citizens by the Iranian government and called for “accountability…through sanctions and other means.”

In Bali today, the president reminded reporters: “On my first trip overseas last year, I said that America was back—back at home, back at the table, and back to leading the world. In the year and a half that’s followed, we’ve shown exactly what that means. America is keeping its commitments. America is investing in our strength at home. America is working alongside our allies and partners to deliver real, meaningful progress around the world. And at this critical moment, no nation is better positioned to help build the future we want than the United States of America.”

  November 16, 2022 (Wednesday)

It turns out that caution was warranted before drawing conclusions about the missile that fell into Poland yesterday, killing two civilians. Today, Polish president Andrzej Duda told reporters that the missile was likely an “unfortunate accident” caused by Ukrainian attempts to counter a group of about 100 Russian missiles launched at Ukraine.

“We have no evidence at the moment that it was a rocket launched by Russian forces,” Duda said. “However, there are many indications that it was a missile that was used by Ukraine’s antimissile defense.”

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) secretary general Jens Stoltenberg agreed that there is currently no evidence that Russia had deliberately attacked Poland. Poland is a member of NATO, whose mutual defense pact requires members to see any attack on one NATO member as an attack on all of them. Nonetheless, Stoltenberg reiterated that, at the end of the day, the blame for the errant missile still fell on Russia. “Russia bears ultimate responsibility as it continues its illegal war against Ukraine.”

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky says he’s not convinced of this explanation.

Stoltenberg also participated today in a virtual meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, formed in April for defense chiefs and ministers from those countries supporting Ukraine to coordinate military assistance and train Ukrainian soldiers to use it. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin convened the group’s seventh meeting, days after the U.S. pledged more assistance that will bring its total so far up to $18.6 billion, and seven other countries also either delivered or pledged more military assistance.

Austin praised the Ukrainian determination “to live in a free and sovereign country” and said the group would discuss what is necessary to “ensure that Ukraine can continue to consolidate its gains and keep its momentum on the battlefield even throughout the winter.” At a press conference afterward, Austin called the meeting “highly successful” and noted that Sweden today offered another $287 million, Spain is sending 2 more HAWK launchers and missiles, and Canada is sending another $500 million in assistance and more in winter gear. Germany is sending more defense supplies, artillery, and ammunition. Greece and Poland are sending more ammunition as well.

Austin concluded: “[O]ur resolve is only strengthened by Russia's indefensible attacks on civilian targets, and we'll continue to stand together in common purpose because no member of this contact group wants to live in a world where big countries bulldoze their peaceful neighbors, and we won't just accept Putin's imperial aggression and erosion of international norms as some kind of new normal. Instead, we will continue to stand up for Ukraine's inalienable rights to defend itself. We'll continue to strengthen our unity and resolve. We'll continue to show the power of partnership.”  

Taking the microphone, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said that Russia failed to achieve its strategic objectives with a quick strike at Ukraine in February. Then they changed their operational objectives to seize the Donbas. They failed. Then they tried to seize Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. They failed there, too.

“So across the entire front line trace of some 900 or so kilometers, the Ukrainians have achieved success after success after success and the Russians have failed every single time. They've lost strategically, they've lost operationally, and I repeat, they lost tactically.”

Milley said that Russia is now settling in to inflict suffering on the civilian population with strikes designed to cut electricity and heat. This, he points out, is a war crime.

Milley noted that Russia could stop the war at any time, and he pledged that the U.S. would stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes to keep them free, sovereign, independent with their territory intact.” That being said, he warned that while “the Russian military is suffering tremendously,” it is not going to withdraw entirely from Ukraine any time soon. He suggested that with the military “really hurting bad” there might be a possibility of a political solution to get Putin to withdraw his troops.

Meanwhile, election fallout continues.

The Republican civil war between the far right and the medium right is playing out in leadership struggles.

In the Senate, Rick Scott (R-FL) launched a challenge to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) from the right, with Trump’s support. Scott told other senators that “it’s time for bold change.” For his part, McConnell in March struck out at Scott’s plan for the party, saying “We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years.” One senator called today’s meeting “a rhetorical slugfest.”  McConnell won the secret vote by 37 to 10 with 1 senator abstaining.

The media has now projected that the Republicans will take control of the House, where Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is also facing a challenge from the far right as he is seeking to become House speaker. Unlike Republican Senate leadership, though, the House speaker is elected by the full House. Yesterday the House Republican conference nominated McCarthy for speaker, over far-right MAGA Republican Andy Biggs (R-AZ). Biggs got 31 votes to McCarthy’s 188, suggesting that the far-right “Freedom Caucus” can command only 31 votes.

McCarthy has courted the far right by promising to strip Democrats of power, kicking Representatives Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) off the House Intelligence Committee, for example. Still, he needs 218 votes to become speaker, and MAGA Republican Matt Gaetz (R-FL) told CNN that McCarthy does not have the votes.

The election of a House speaker can be a way for different factions to test out their power at the beginning of a session. If McCarthy can’t muster the necessary votes, the speakership could open to a far more moderate Republican who could get Democratic votes. That shift might, in fact, look good to a number of Republicans who see how thoroughly voters in some areas rejected extremism in the midterms. Or the need for more moderate votes could swing McCarthy away from the MAGA crowd. It’s not clear yet, but it might tell us a lot. In 1856, at a time when party alignments were shifting markedly, it took the House two months and 133 ballots finally to choose Representative Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts, and by then, everyone knew exactly who backed whom.

Other fallout from the election suggests the election has created some immediate results. After asking Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to delay consideration of a bill to protect marriage equality until after the election, twelve—but only twelve—Senate Republicans have voted with all the Democrats to advance a bill to protect marriage equality for same-sex and interracial couples. The measure repeals the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage under federal laws as between one man and one woman, and guarantees that states recognize marriages that were legal in the states where they were performed.
 
“Love is love,” President Biden said in a statement as he returned from Indonesia, “and Americans should have the right to marry the person they love…. The Respect for Marriage Act will ensure that LGBTQI+ couples and interracial couples are respected and protected equally under federal law, and provide more certainty to these families since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs [v. Jackson Women’s Health, which challenged judicial protection of marriage equality].”

Biden thanked the members of Congress who worked together to move the measure forward, and asked them to “send this bill to my desk where I will promptly sign it into law.”

  November 18, 2022 (Friday)

The price of crude oil this morning was $78.47 a barrel, down from $92.61 a barrel on November 4, falling by at least 18% over the past two weeks. This should help to relieve high costs of gas for consumers, although when the price falls to around $70 a barrel, the administration will begin to refill the strategic petroleum reserve, the release of which has helped to bring down gas prices. Diesel prices, though, are going up because of shortages caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a shortage of refinery capabilities after a 2019 fire shut down a refinery in Pennsylvania.

Shipping prices are also coming down, getting back to a normal range after crazy heights after the pandemic that fed inflation. The dislocations of the coronavirus pandemic sent shipping costs as much as 547% over the usual range by last January, driving up the prices of consumer goods. The return of more normal costs for transportation should help bring those prices down.

As Americans head out of town for the holidays, President Biden reminded them today that his administration is taking on the hidden “junk fees” on airline tickets and hotel rooms.

In other economic news, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has already spurred dramatic investment in American manufacturing of battery equipment. Previously, China was dominating that industry, but now America is developing its own battery sector to help the nation move toward electrical vehicles and other climate-friendly technologies.

Biden pushed for the IRA to combat climate change, provide jobs, and compete with China. By passing the IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Biden administration “has basically seized the bull by the horns,” Sanjiv Malhotra, the chief executive of a company building a battery plant in rural West Virginia told Harry Dempsey and Myles McCormick of the Financial Times. Malhotra’s new plant will hire out-of-work coal miners.

Meanwhile, the two parties continue to try to organize themselves into new patterns after the midterms. The far-right, pro-gun “Second Amendment Caucus” today hosted Kyle Rittenhouse, the 19-year-old who shot three men, killing two of them, in summer 2020 during a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and who was later acquitted of homicide.

Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO), whose Democratic opponent, Adam Frisch, conceded today rather than force a hand recount of their close election, told Emily Brooks of The Hill: “It was an honor to have Kyle join the Second Amendment Caucus. He is a powerful example of why we must never give an inch on our Second Amendment rights, and his perseverance and love for our country was an inspiration to the caucus.” Rittenhouse tweeted a photograph of himself at the Capitol with the caption: “T-minus 5 years until I call this place my office?”

Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is facing opposition from the far-right MAGA Republicans in his quest to be speaker of the House, and welcoming Rittenhouse signals to the base that they will have a strong voice in the new Congress.

New candidates for Democratic leadership in the House are stepping up now that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she is stepping down. Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) today launched a bid to become the Democratic leader. Emphasizing continuity from Pelosi, with whom he is close, Jeffries called for working with Republicans “where possible…to deliver results for the American people,” but noted that “the opposing party appears to have no plan to accomplish anything meaningful. If the Republican Conference continues to major in demagoguery and minor in disinformation, their bankruptcy of ideas must be aggressively exposed on an ongoing basis.”

Jeffries called for Democrats to “unify around an agenda designed to make life better for everyday Americans from all walks of life,” and to center Democratic “communication strategy around the messaging principle that values unite, issues divide. House Democrats are actually the party that defends freedom, promotes economic opportunity and values families by uplifting them. We must make sure that the perception of the Democratic brand matches up with the reality that we do in fact authentically share values that unite the Heartland, Urban America, Rural America, Suburban America and Small Town America.”

Massachusetts Representative Katherine Clark is running for the number two position in the party leadership—the place Steny Hoyer (D-MD) has held since 2003—and California Representative Peter Aguilar is running for the number 3 position. Both Clark and Aguilar are close to Jeffries, and the three are seen as a team.

The coming Republican control of the House means shifting of the investigation into former president Trump. Trump was subpoenaed on November 14 to testify before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol but didn’t acknowledge the subpoena. The committee said it would “evaluate next steps.”

Yesterday, committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said he established a subcommittee about a month ago to look at "all outstanding issues" and to consider criminal and civil referrals to the Department of Justice. The members of the subcommittee are all lawyers: Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Liz Cheney (R-WY), Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).

Today, days after Trump announced he would seek reelection in 2024, Attorney General Merrick Garland said he had appointed a special counsel to assume control over the investigations of the former president. One is the investigation into Trump’s theft of United States documents, including some that were classified at the highest levels, when he left office. The other is Trump’s role in the events leading up to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol in an attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election for Trump.

The Department of Justice has been investigating both of these issues since they came to light, but with Trump now in the political ring for 2024—in part because he hoped an announcement would stop his prosecution—and with Biden likely to announce later, Garland said he thought it was important to demonstrate that the investigations were independent. It is also of note that a special counsel can be removed only for misconduct, insulating the investigations from the new Republican majority in the House. The White House was not given advance notice of Garland’s action.

Garland appointed to the position Jack Smith, a graduate of Harvard Law School who served as a prosecutor for government corruption cases and since 2018 has been a war crimes prosecutor in The Hague. A former colleague said of him: “I have no idea what his political beliefs are because he’s completely apolitical. He’s committed to doing what is right.”

The appointment frustrated those who saw no reason to treat Trump differently than any other U.S. citizen and thought it would significantly slow the investigation; others saw it as a sign the Justice Department would indict the former president. Tonight, referring to the issue of the stolen documents, Trump’s attorney general William Barr told CNN, “I personally think they probably have the basis for legitimately indicting [Trump].... They have the case.”

  November 19, 2022 (Saturday)

For three hot days, from July 1 to July 3, 1863, more than 150,000 soldiers from the armies of the United States of America and the Confederate States of America slashed at each other in the hills and through the fields around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

When the battered armies limped out of town after the brutal battle, they left scattered behind them more than seven thousand corpses in a town with fewer than 2500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, the townspeople had to get the dead soldiers into the ground as quickly as they possibly could, marking the hasty graves with nothing more than pencil on wooden boards.

A local lawyer, David Wills, who had huddled in his cellar with his family and their neighbors during the battle, called for the creation of a national cemetery in the town, where the bodies of the United States soldiers who had died in the battle could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and Wills and an organizing committee planned an elaborate dedication ceremony to be held a few weeks after workers began moving remains into the new national cemetery.

They invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. To deliver the keynote address, they asked prominent orator Edward Everett, who wanted to do such extensive research into the battle that they had to move the ceremony to November 19, a later date than they had first contemplated.

And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Abraham Lincoln to make a few appropriate remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.

On November 19, 1863, about fifteen thousand people gathered in Gettysburg for the dedication ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln stood up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, speaking slowly, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln began.

While the southern enslavers who were making war on the United States had stood firm on the Constitution and said that its protection of property rights—including their enslavement of their Black neighbors— was the heart of the nation, Lincoln tied the country's meaning instead to the Declaration of Independence.

The men who wrote the Declaration considered the “truths” they listed “self-evident”: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But Lincoln had no such confidence. By his time, the idea that all men were created equal was a “proposition,” and Americans of his day were “engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Standing near where so many men had died four months before, Lincoln honored “those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.” But he noted that those “brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated” the ground “far above our poor power to add or detract.”

Instead, “[i]t is for us the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He urged the men and women in the audience to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion."

In November 1863, after more than two years of deadly fighting, Lincoln rallied Americans not just behind the idea of freedom for Black Americans that he had declared the previous January with the Emancipation Proclamation, but also behind a new concept of America, one that would bring to life the ideas the founders had put in the Declaration but never brought to life: that all men are created equal, and that governments "derive... their just powers from the consent of the governed."

Lincoln urged Americans "to here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

  November 21, 2022 (Monday)

Two big stories landed over the weekend.

The first harks back to the furor last May when the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health—the decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized abortion rights as a constitutional right—was leaked to Politico before it was released. At the time, Chief Justice John Roberts called the leak a “singular and egregious breach of…trust” and ordered an investigation to find the leaker. In late October, Justice Samuel Alito told the Heritage Foundation that the leak was a “grave betrayal of trust by somebody, and it was a shock” that had made the court’s right-wing majority “targets for assassination.”  

On Saturday, Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker of the New York Times reported that the Reverend Rob Schenck, formerly an antiabortion activist, wrote to Roberts in July (although the letter was dated June 7, 2022) to say that in 2014 he had received advance notice of the court’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby—the decision allowing corporations to deny their employees contraceptive health care coverage—from a woman who had just had dinner with Justice and Mrs. Alito. The dinner guest told Schenck that she had learned that Alito was writing the decision and that it would favor evangelical Christians. Schenck, who has become an advocate of choice as he is trying to mark himself as a progressive evangelical leader, signed the letter to Roberts, “Yours in the interest of truth and fairness.”

Schenck provided the reporters with contemporary emails suggesting he knew the outcome of the Hobby Lobby case ahead of time, and they talked to four people who confirmed that he had confidential information about it before the court handed it down. He used that information to prepare a public relations push ready to go the minute the decision was public.

The leak of a Supreme Court decision is shocking and potentially illegal, but even more shocking than the revelation that there have been two major leaks from the court—both of right-wing opinions authored by Alito—was the story the reporters unraveled of the degree to which evangelical activists worked to become close to the justices, especially through participation in the court’s historical society, as well as religious events, a plan Schenck called “Operation Higher Court.” Their goal was to influence the justices quietly, and it appears to have been at least somewhat successful: in July, Peggy Nienaber, the executive director of Liberty Counsel’s D.C. ministry, who worked with Schenck, was caught on a hot mic saying she prayed with certain Supreme Court justices.

On Sunday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) wrote to Chief Justice John Roberts to say that if the court is not going to investigate the breaches, lawmakers will.

New York Times reporters were evidently busy this weekend, because Eric Lipton and Maggie Haberman reported Sunday that the Trump family has begun to work not just with foreign nationals, but with foreign governments themselves. The Trumps have recently signed a $4 billion deal with a Saudi Arabian real estate company that is backed by the government of Oman.

The Trumps are deeply tangled with the Saudis already, of course, hosting the LIV Golf tournaments backed by the Saudi government and—in Jared Kushner’s case—investing $2 billion of Saudi government funds, a deal that Saudi leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, personally approved after the panel that screens investments advised against the deal.

Meanwhile, prosecutors today called their last witness in the criminal trial of the Trump Organization for fraud and tax evasion. Key witness Allen Weisselberg, former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, has painted a picture of an organization that avoided taxes by paying officers with private school tuition, cars, and rent money. The company denies all charges and says the fraudulent movement of money can be tied to Weisselberg alone.

Finally tonight, on a lighter note, this morning President Joe Biden pardoned turkeys Chocolate and Chip, lucky turkeys indeed in this season where supply chain choke points and the late season, virulent avian flu meant the culling of 7.3 million birds earlier this year, at least 3.6% of the nation’s turkeys. Chocolate and Chip will live out their lives on the campus of North Carolina State University.

Later, the president and First Lady Jill Biden had a “Friendsgiving” dinner this afternoon at the Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, with service members and military families, greeting them table by table and then thanking both the “best fighting force in the history of the world” and those at home who, in the words of poet John Milton, “stand and wait.”

 November 23, 2022 (Wednesday)

The past week has brought seven mass shootings in the United States. Twenty-two people have been killed and 44 wounded. I’ll have more to say later about our epidemic of gun violence, but tonight, on the night before Thanksgiving, when I traditionally post the story of the holiday’s history, I simply want to acknowledge the terrible sorrow behind tomorrow’s newly empty chairs.  

Thanksgiving itself came from a time of violence: the Civil War.

The Pilgrims and the Wampanoags did indeed share a harvest celebration together at Plymouth in fall 1621, but that moment got forgotten almost immediately, overwritten by the long history of the settlers’ attacks on their Indigenous neighbors.

In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady's Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slaveholding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.

And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.

Southern leaders wanted to destroy the United States of America and create their own country, based not in the traditional American idea that “all men are created equal,” but rather in its opposite: that some men were better than others and had the right to enslave their neighbors. In the 1850s, convinced that society worked best if a few wealthy men ran it, southern leaders had bent the laws of the United States to their benefit, using it to protect enslavement above all.

In 1860, northerners elected Abraham Lincoln to the presidency to stop rich southern enslavers from taking over the government and using it to cement their own wealth and power. As soon as he was elected, southern leaders pulled their states out of the Union to set up their own country. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and the fledgling Republican Party set out to end the slaveholders’ rebellion.

The early years of the war did not go well for the U.S. By the end of 1862, the armies still held, but people on the home front were losing faith. Leaders recognized the need both to acknowledge the suffering and to keep Americans loyal to the cause. In November and December, seventeen state governors declared state thanksgiving holidays.

New York governor Edwin Morgan’s widely reprinted proclamation about the holiday reflected that the previous year “is numbered among the dark periods of history, and its sorrowful records are graven on many hearthstones.” But this was nonetheless a time for giving thanks, he wrote, because “the precious blood shed in the cause of our country will hallow and strengthen our love and our reverence for it and its institutions…. Our Government and institutions placed in jeopardy have brought us to a more just appreciation of their value.”

The next year Lincoln got ahead of the state proclamations. On July 15 he declared a national day of Thanksgiving, and the relief in his proclamation was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.

President Lincoln set Thursday, August 6, 1863, for the national day of Thanksgiving. On that day, ministers across the country listed the signal victories of the U.S. Army and Navy in the past year and reassured their congregations that it was only a matter of time until the United States government put down the southern rebellion. Their predictions acknowledged the dead and reinforced the idea that their sacrifice had not been in vain.

In October 1863, President Lincoln declared a second national day of Thanksgiving. In the past year, he declared, the nation had been blessed.

In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, he wrote, Americans had maintained their laws and their institutions and had kept foreign countries from meddling with their nation.

They had paid for the war as they went, refusing to permit the destruction to cripple the economy. Instead, as they funded the war, they had also advanced farming, industry, mining, and shipping. Immigrants had poured into the country to replace men lost on the battlefield, and the economy was booming.

And Lincoln had recently promised that the government would end slavery once and for all. The country, he predicted, “with a large increase of freedom,” would survive, stronger and more prosperous than ever. The president invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.

The following year, Lincoln proclaimed another day of Thanksgiving, this time congratulating Americans that God had favored them not only with immigration but also with the emancipation of formerly enslaved people. “Moreover,” Lincoln wrote, “He has been pleased to animate and inspire our minds and hearts with fortitude, courage, and resolution sufficient for the great trial of civil war into which we have been brought by our adherence as a nation to the cause of freedom and humanity, and to afford to us reasonable hopes of an ultimate and happy deliverance from all our dangers and afflictions.”

In 1861, Americans went to war to keep a cabal from taking control of the government and turning it into an oligarchy. The fight against that rebellion seemed at first to be too much for the nation to survive. But Americans rallied and threw their hearts into the cause on the battlefields even as they continued to work on the home front to create a government that defended democracy and equality before the law.

And they won.

My best to you all for Thanksgiving 2022.

  November 25, 2022 (Friday)

Yesterday, Representative Mary Peltola (D-AK) won Alaska’s House seat for a full term after taking it this summer in a special election to replace Representative Don Young (R-AK), who died in office in March after 49 years in Congress. Peltola is the first woman to represent Alaska and, as Yup’ik, is the first Alaska Native to serve in Congress.

Peltola was endorsed by Alaskans of both parties, including Republicans like Senator Lisa Murkowski. Peltola promised to protect abortion and the salmon fisheries and was elected thanks to Alaska’s recent adoption of ranked choice voting, in which votes from poorly polling candidates are redistributed to those at the top until one gets more than 50%. This method of voting tends to favor moderates. Peltola’s reelection stopped former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, whom Trump endorsed, from reentering politics.

Murkowski has also won reelection, defeating a Trump-backed challenger endorsed by the Alaska Republican Party. Trump targeted Murkowski after she voted to convict him for incitement of insurrection during his second impeachment after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The reelections of Peltola and Murkowski illustrate that we are, in many different ways, at a sea change moment in American history.

In the past two years, Democrats have successfully pushed back on forty years of efforts to dismantle the business regulation, basic social safety net, promotion of infrastructure, protection of civil rights, and international cooperation that were the fundamental principles underpinning American government after the Depression and World War II. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with the Democratic Congress, have rebuilt some of the economic fairness of the old system and invested in infrastructure, while Biden, Harris, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have strengthened the foreign alliances that the former president had undermined.

Democratic leadership is also changing in the House of Representatives as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD), and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) have stepped out of the top three leadership roles in the House to make way for members of a new generation, presumably Representatives Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Katherine Clark (D-MA), and Pete Aguilar (D-CA). Pelosi’s team has defended the liberal consensus and expanded it into health care and measures to address climate change; the new generation of Democrats seems likely to center issues like childcare and racial equality more fully than their predecessors did.

These changes embrace the demographic change the last election made so clear. Gen Z—the generation born after 1997—is racially and ethnically diverse. Its members want the government to do more to solve problems than it has done in their lifetime, and they are now politically awake. That generation looks much like the Millennials from the generation preceding it—those born between 1981 and 1996—and both groups strongly favor Democratic policies.

Peltola reflects another change visible after the election: the record number of women elected to office this cycle. Peltola will add one more woman to the House of Representatives, bringing the total to 124, one more than the record set by the current Congress. Murkowski will bring the total of female senators to 25, which is one fewer than the record of 26, set in 2020 thanks to a few special appointments for unexpectedly empty seats.

But the place women’s representation really changed in 2022 was in the number of women elected to govern their states. In 2018, just 16 female candidates ran for governorships. In 2022, there were 36 governor’s contests, and 25 women ran in them. Until now there have been only 45 women governors in our history, and only 9 in office at one time.

Beginning in 2023, a record number of twelve women will hold governorships. Incumbent female governors in Alabama, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, New Mexico, Michigan and South Dakota were reelected. Voters in Arizona, Arkansas, Massachusetts, and Oregon elected new governors who are women. And New Yorkers elected Kathy Hochul, who took office initially in 2021 to replace resigning governor Andrew Cuomo.

Meredith Conroy and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux of FiveThirtyEight note that historically, voters are less likely to vote for women for solo offices than as group lawmakers, but Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics, told Jennifer Shutt of the Idaho Capital Sun that a number of factors fed the success rate of women candidates this cycle. First, there is now a long enough history of women in high positions of leadership that voters have confidence in them, especially as some of them—like Kay Ivey in Alabama and Hochul in New York—stepped into their positions after their male predecessors resigned in disgrace.  

Even more key, perhaps, was the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion guaranteed in 1973 by Roe v. Wade. Women turned out to protect their right to healthcare in this election and, not surprisingly, they turned to women governors who made protecting abortion care central to their reelection campaigns.

The female governors have a great deal of legislative experience, perhaps in part because their rise through the political ranks has been slow as it has been hampered by resistance. Republicans reelected female governors in South Dakota, Iowa, and Alabama and added Trump’s former White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, as governor of Arkansas. While Sanders has no experience in elected office, the other three—South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, Iowa’s Kim Reynolds, and Alabama’s Kay Ivey—all have significant experience in their state governments and, in Noem’s case, in Congress.

The same is even more true on the Democratic side. Maine’s Janet Mills, Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, Arizona’s Katie Hobbs, New York’s Kathy Hochul, New Mexico’s Michelle Lujan Grisham, Oregon’s Tina Kotek, and Kansas’s Laura Kelly all have legislative experience; Maura Healey of Massachusetts twice won election as state attorney general.

While Noem made headlines for her fervent support of former president Trump, the new Democratic governors all ran as competent administrators who strongly opposed Trump-type politics. Maine’s Mills ran against a former governor who once described himself as “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular,” and Michigan’s Whitmer was such a target of the former president that she became the target of a kidnapping and murder plot.

This focus on competence and moderation clearly boosted Peltola and Murkowski, along with female candidates for governor, but the expansion of representation still does not come close to reflecting the actual percentage of women in the U.S. population. Nor does it reflect racial and ethnic identities. Women representatives are more diverse than in the Senate, but only two women senators—Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Mazie Hirono (D-HI)—are Asian American, and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) is Latina. Since Vice President Kamala Harris resigned from the Senate to take her current office, there have been no Black women in the Senate.

Of the women governors, only New Mexico governor Michelle Lujan Grisham is Latina, and voters have not yet put a Black women governor at the head of a state. They did, though, put Karen Bass, a Black former congressional representative, in charge of Los Angeles, with record voter turnout. Bass will be the first female mayor in the city’s 241-year history, and her charge is a big one: the city’s 3.8 million people give it more inhabitants than 22 U.S. states. Voters have also embraced other diversity: the new governors in Massachusetts and Oregon are openly lesbian.

That female candidates won so many seats—some contests had women running against each other—is “a really good reminder that women get to be as diverse in their viewpoints and perspectives, priorities, et cetera, as their male counterparts,” Dittmar told Jasmine Mithani of The 19th. “We get to see that being a woman candidate, being a woman doesn't mean the same thing for everybody.”
 
The expansion of our political representation to reflect the many different people in our diverse democracy can only be a good thing.

  November 28, 2022 (Monday)

Four of twelve unions have rejected the deal the administration brokered in mid-September between rail carriers and union workers to avert a national strike. They remain concerned about their lack of paid sick days. More generally, though, they oppose a new staffing system implemented after 2018, which created record profits for the country’s main rail carriers but cost the industry 40,000 jobs, mainly among the people who actually operate the trains, leading to brutal schedules and dangerous working conditions.   

The new system, called Precision Schedule Railroading (PSR), made 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 negotiated for more than two and a half years for new contracts without success.

 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 and health care benefits 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,” but not all the unions did.

Now four of the unions are holding out for better sick leave provisions, and it is likely that the unions will all walk out together if they go.

This threatens supply chains and the economy in general—down to the safety of water systems, since trains carry the chemicals that purify water systems—right before the holidays and as we try to stave off a recession. The deadline for agreeing to the deal is December 9.
 
This evening, President Joe Biden issued a statement calling on Congress to pass legislation to put the agreement into force to avert a “potentially crippling” railway shutdown. “Let me be clear,” he said, “a rail shutdown would devastate our economy. Without freight rail, many U.S. industries would shut down…[and] as many as 765,000 Americans—many union workers themselves—could be put out of work in the first two weeks alone. Communities could lose access to chemicals necessary to ensure clean drinking water. Farms and ranches across the country could be unable to feed their livestock.”

“As a proud pro-labor President,” he continued, “I am reluctant to override the ratification procedures and the views of those who voted against the agreement.” He wants laws to establish paid leave and stronger protections for workers, he said, “[b]ut at this critical moment for our economy, in the holiday season, we cannot let our strongly held conviction for better outcomes for workers deny workers the benefits of the bargain they reached, and hurl this nation into a devastating rail freight shutdown.” “[I]n this case,” he said, “where the economic impact of a shutdown would hurt millions of other working people and families—I believe Congress must use its powers to adopt this deal.” He asked lawmakers to get a bill to his desk immediately, well before December 9.

Railway Age, a trade magazine for the rail transport agency, reported that neither side in the negotiations could find a way to avoid a work stoppage, but since neither side wanted one, they were eager to have Congress overrule the small percentage of workers who opposed the deal and impose the one most workers have accepted. That way, neither side would have to face criticism from those who oppose the deal, and they would not have to deal with a Republican House as they seek to find a solution.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said that the House would take up a bill adopting the agreement this week. “It is my hope that this necessary, strike-averting legislation will earn a strongly bipartisan vote, giving America’s families confidence in our commitment to protecting their financial futures,” she said.

Meanwhile, former president Trump appears to be increasingly nervous about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Special Counsel Jack Smith to take over the investigations of Trump’s theft of national security documents and incitement of the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Trump is lashing out wildly, calling Smith, for example, “a hit man for Obama.”

Of perhaps more concern for his lawyers was his post on his social media network saying: "When will you invade the other Presidents’ homes in search of documents, which are voluminous, which they took with them, but not nearly so openly and transparently as I did?"

Meanwhile, a reporter for ABC News spotted Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway going into the offices of the January 6th Committee. A recent book by Jon Lemire cites Trump’s query of Conway how he could have lost “to f*cking Joe Biden,” indicating he did, in fact, understand that he had lost the election.

Committee member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said on November 20 that the committee will release to the public its report and all the evidence it has gathered “within a month.”