Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

  June 20, 2023 (Tuesday)

After years of accusations and rumors swirling around Hunter Biden, the 53-year-old son of President Joe Biden, the Department of Justice has reached a tentative deal with the younger Biden: He will plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of failing to file income tax returns for 2017 and 2018 by the filing date, for which he owed more than $100,000 each year. Biden’s representatives say he has since paid the Internal Revenue Service what he owed. Prosecutors will ask for two years’ probation.

Biden will also admit to the fact that he possessed a firearm as an addict, for which he and prosecutors have agreed he will enter a pretrial diversion agreement that will require that he stay clean for two more years, after which the charge will be removed from his record.

Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, promptly accused “the Bidens” of “corruption, influence peddling, and possibly bribery” and called the deal “a slap on the wrist.” Throughout the day, right-wing figures have insisted that the deal is proof that President Biden is using the Justice Department to shield his family and to persecute his enemies.

In fact, Biden worked hard to reestablish the independence of the Justice Department after Trump had used it for personal ends. Trump broke the tradition that FBI directors should serve out their ten-year term—a term chosen to emphasize that the position should not be political—by firing FBI director James Comey when Comey refused to stop the bureau’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russian operatives; Biden tried to reestablish the guardrails around the position when he declined to replace FBI director Christopher Wray, appointed by Trump.

Biden also left in place the U.S. attorney for the District of Delaware—the person overseeing the investigation into Hunter Biden that began in 2018—to make the independence of the investigation clear. That Trump appointee, U.S. Attorney David C. Weiss, is responsible for the deal. Georgetown University policy professor Don Moynihan pointed out that Weiss has been investigating Hunter Biden for five years and “[b]est they could do is tax charges which rarely get this level of attention. If Comer has anything real, the prosecutor would have used it.”

Indeed, rather than going easy on Hunter Biden, there are signs that prosecutors treated him more harshly than is typical for similar crimes. Roger Sollenberger, a senior political writer for the Daily Beast, explained that “Roger Stone and his wife settled a $2 million unpaid taxes civil case with DOJ last year—they weren't charged criminally, unlike Hunter Biden, so they didn't even get probation.” Justice reporter for NBC News Ryan Reilly noted that it is very rare for prosecutors to bring the addict in possession of a weapon charge they used against Biden. In the past it has been used to find a charge that will stick or alongside charges concerning violent crime.

As right-wing leaders, including House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), nonetheless attacked the Justice Department for what they claimed was a “two-tiered justice system” that went easy on Biden, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post noted, "The right doesn’t seem to care about the legal process—they care about the results. Their aim is the destruction of the independence of federal law enforcement in favor of a weaponized justice system, and they will keep creating new pretexts until they get it."

Trump had his own reaction to the Biden charges, calling them “a massive INTERFERENCE COVERUP & FULL SCALE ELECTION  ‘SCAM’ THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN IN OUR COUNTRY BEFORE. A ‘TRAFFIC TICKET,’ & JOE IS ALL CLEANED UP & READY TO GO INTO THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION - AND THIS AS CROOKED DOJ, STATE, & CITY PROSECUTORS, MARXISTS & COMMUNISTS ALL, HIT ME FROM ALL SIDES & ANGELS WITH BULL….! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” [sic]

Eric Lipton of the New York Times reported today on the Trump family’s ties to a multibillion-dollar project in Oman. The resort project is backed by the Omani government, which has put up the land for the project and is investing up to a billion dollars to upgrade the infrastructure near the project and to fund the project’s initial phase. It will also take a cut of the profits. A Saudi real estate firm closely allied with the Saudi government brought Trump into the deal. The Trump family will not put any money into the project, but the Omani government has paid the Trump Organization at least $5 million for the use of his name and will pay the Trump Organization to manage a hotel, golf course, and golf club for the next 30 years.

“There is a big wealth concentration in the world, which means that those people will more and more demand more exclusive products and more exclusive projects,” the chief executive of the London-based DarGlobal subsidiary of the Saudi real estate firm said earlier this year. The project is being constructed by migrants paid as little as $340 a month for ten hours a day of grueling work in heat above 100°F, or 38°C.

Tonight news broke that on Friday, Owen Shroyer, who worked alongside Alex Jones at the right-wing conspiracy media site InfoWars, will change his plea for charges associated with the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to “guilty,” which might signal that he has flipped.

Shroyer was at the so-called “War Room” on January 5 with Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, advisors Steve Bannon and Roger Stone, General Michael Flynn, and Christina Bobb, the lawyer who later signed off on Trump’s statement that he had returned all the classified documents in his possession (he had not). Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, repeatedly expressed interest to his aide Cassidy Hutchinson in joining the people in that command center, but in the end was talked into calling the group rather than going over.

Shroyer was also part of the 47-member “Friends of Stone” encrypted chat group that organized in 2019 to support Trump in the upcoming election and then to keep him in office after he lost in 2020. If Shroyer has, indeed, flipped, he could provide an important window into the upper levels of the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have recently reported that several months ago, officials in the Biden administration began indirect talks with Iran in hopes of stopping Iran’s proxy attacks on U.S. forces in Syria, bringing home three Iranian American business executives being held on charges the U.S. considers false—Emad Shargi (detained 2018), Morad Tahbaz (detained 2018), and Siamak Namazi (detained 2015)—and reining in that country’s nuclear weapons development program. In 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran that limited Iran’s nuclear research and development. Tehran quickly restarted its uranium enrichment, research and development of advanced centrifuges, and expansion of its stockpile of nuclear fuel. According to Colum Lynch of Foreign Policy, this cut in half the time Iran would need to produce enough weapons-grade fuel to build a nuclear weapon.

Biden yesterday announced a $600 million investment in addressing climate change, with that investment focused on coastal areas and communities around the Great Lakes. Funding for projects, including modernizing electrical grids to make them resilient to extreme weather events, national disasters, and wildfires, comes from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

  June 22, 2023 (Thursday)

“To rebuild I-95 on time, we need 12 hours of dry weather to complete the paving and striping process,” Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro tweeted. “With rain in the forecast, we reached out [to Pocono Raceway] for help—and they're bringing their jet dryer to Philly to help dry this section of I-95 and keep us on schedule.”

Pocono Raceway replied: “We are honored to be asked to lend a small hand if needed to assist in the reopening of I-95. It is inspiring to see the hard work that has went in by the men and women around the clock here in Philadelphia.”

On Sunday, June 11, an 8,500-gallon tanker truck on an off-ramp in Philadelphia flipped onto its side and crashed into a wall at a curve. The crash ignited the gasoline in the tank; the driver died and a stretch of I-95 over which an average of 160,000 vehicles a day travel collapsed. Two days later, authorities said fixing the road would take “months.”

Yesterday, Shapiro announced that six lanes of road—three in each direction— will reopen this weekend. Crews working around the clock have constructed a temporary road resting on a bed of aggregate made of recycled glass bottles. The fix should hold until a full reconstruction is complete. The governor had a camera set up to livestream the construction and has turned it into a source of pride.

”We haven’t always had a can-do attitude around here, that we can get big things done, that we can get it done quickly and safely,” Shapiro told reporters Tuesday. “I’m a governor who believes we can get things done again. We’re going to change that attitude of people being surprised to folks expecting excellence from us.”

Steven Ratner, economic analyst for Morning Joe, today noted that new manufacturing construction is growing fast and is on pace to be close to $190 billion this year. In the entire decade of the 2010s, it was less than $100 billion. This growth comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law), and the CHIPS and Science Act.

Today, the government announced a $9.2 billion loan to Ford Motor Company to support the construction of three battery factories in Kentucky and Tennessee. The factories are already under construction through a collaboration between Ford and a leading South Korean battery company.

More than 100 battery and electric-vehicle plants, representing about $200 billion in investments, are planned or already under construction thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act that funds such projects in order to attract private investment. That government investment and growth in manufacturing are strongest in Republican-dominated states, notwithstanding that not a single Republican voted for the Inflation Reduction Act that funds such investment, and that Republicans continue to try to gut that law. Republican-dominated states stand to get about $337 billion in investment, while Democratic-dominated states look to get about $183 billion.

Tonight the White House is holding its third state dinner, this one for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. State dinners are extravagant affairs: this one will have 400 guests who will be served the White House’s first entirely plant-based state dinner in honor of vegetarian Modi. They are intended to smooth differences and cement alliances, and this one is no exception. Along with other allies, the U.S. seeks to weaken China’s dominance in the Indo-Pacific region, and India is a key partner. It is part of the informal Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or the Quad, made up of Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S., and it is attracting western investment as China’s leaders react to their country’s contracting economy by favoring state-owned industries over foreign companies.

In their remarks together today, Biden and Modi emphasized their shared commitment to democracy and their collaboration on trade (which has doubled in the past decade to $191 billion), defense, climate solutions, and economic development in the global South.”The core philosophy of all of our collective efforts is to strengthen democracy and democratic values and democratic order,” Modi said. “Two of the world’s largest democracies, India and America, can together make an important contribution to global peace, stability, and prosperity.”

But this is a strategic balancing act for Biden. Modi’s government has rolled back political, press, and religious freedoms, especially against the Muslim minority in India. This week, 75 Democratic lawmakers wrote to Biden, agreeing that they want a “close and friendly” relationship with India but asking him to raise concerns about human rights directly with Modi. White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters it is "commonplace" for Biden to raise such concerns, but that was not enough for at least six House Democrats to boycott Modi’s speech to Congress. “We must never sacrifice human rights at the altar of political expediency,” Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Cori Bush (D-MO), Ilhan Omar D-MN), and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) wrote in a joint statement.

Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA), himself of Indian descent, disagreed. “We need to engage,” he said. India’s leaders are “not going to be open and receptive to something that comes off as the West lecturing.” That appears to be Biden’s approach.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, Georgia’s State Election Board officially cleared election workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss of election fraud during the 2020 presidential election. Accused by both Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani of passing USB drives to change vote totals—Moss explained to the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol that it was a ginger mint—the two women were so harassed by election deniers that Freeman had to flee her home out of concern for her safety. The board concludes that the fraud claims were “unsubstantiated and found to have no merit.”

Also on Tuesday, disciplinary proceedings began against John Eastman, the law professor who pushed the idea that Trump could steal the 2020 presidential election from winner Joe Biden if loyalists in the states would create alternative slates of electors. Vice President Mike Pence could then claim those states’ votes were contested and refuse to count them, thus either making Trump president or throwing the count to the House of Representatives, where each state would get one vote and the Republican-dominated states would overrule the Democratic ones.

Eastman’s plan was never legal, and he admitted as much, suggesting that the Trump team should just follow it because courts would decline to get involved out of reluctance to interfere in elections. In California, where Eastman faces disbarment, bar authorities are giving that theory a thorough hearing, and their disdain is clear. One called the plan “baseless, completely unsupported by historic precedent or law and contrary to our values as a nation.”

Eastman will argue that his theories were “tenable” and he simply wanted to make sure the election was “properly and legally certified and votes were properly counted.”

Last night, Special Counsel Jack Smith began to produce evidence in the case against Trump for retaining secret documents and endangering national security. The list seems thorough, including more than one interview with Trump and grand jury transcripts,

And it seems to have concerned Trump, who promptly begged in all caps on social media for Congress to “investigate the political witch hunts against me….”

And yet, a study out today by Media Matters shows that cable news networks are “obsessed over Biden’s age while overwhelmingly ignoring Trump’s.” Biden is only three years older than Trump—80 and 77, respectively—and apparently in significantly better health, but in the week after Biden announced his reelection campaign, CNN, the Fox News Channel, and MSNBC mentioned his age 588 times, suggesting it is a negative attribute rather than a positive reflection on his experience, while mentioning Trump’s only 72 times.

  June 24, 2023 (Saturday)

Yesterday, forces from the private mercenary Wagner Group crossed from Ukraine back into Russia and took control of the city of Rostov-on-Don, a key staging area for the Russian war against Ukraine. As the mercenaries moved toward Moscow in the early hours of Saturday (EDT), Russian president Vladimir Putin called them and their leader, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, traitors. This morning, they were bearing down on Moscow when they suddenly stopped 125 miles (200 km) from the Russian capital. This afternoon the Russian government announced that Belarus president Aleksandr Lukashenko had brokered a deal with Prigozhin to end the mutiny: Prigozhin would go to Belarus, the criminal case against him for the uprising would be dropped, the Wagner fighters who did not participate in the march could sign on as soldiers for the Russian Ministry of Defense, and those who did participate would not be prosecuted.

Prigozhin said he turned around to avoid bloodshed.

U.S. observers don’t appear to know what to make of this development yet, although I have not read anyone who thinks this is the end of it (among other things, Putin has not been seen today). What is crystal clear, though, is that the ability of Prigozhin’s forces to move apparently effortlessly hundreds of miles through Russia toward Moscow without any significant resistance illustrates that Putin’s hold over Russia is no longer secure. This, along with the fact that the Wagner Group, which was a key fighting force for Russia, is now split and demoralized, is good news for Ukraine.

In the U.S. the same two-day period that covered Prigozhin’s escapade in Russia covered the anniversaries of two historic events. Yesterday was the 51st anniversary of what we know as “Title 9,” or more accurately Title IX, for the part of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 that prohibited any school or education program that receives federal funding from discriminating based on sex. This measure updated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and while people today tend to associate Title IX with sports, it actually covers all discrimination, including sexual assault and sexual harrassment. Republican president Richard Nixon signed the measure into law on June 23, 1972 (six days after the Watergate break-in, if anyone is counting).  

Fifty years and one day later, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized a woman's constitutional right to abortion. That is, a year ago today, for the first time in our history, rather than expanding our recognition of constitutional rights, the court explicitly took a constitutional right away from the American people.

The voyage from Title IX to Dobbs began about the same time Nixon signed the Education Amendments Act. In 1972, Gallup polls showed that 64% of Americans, including 68% of Republicans, agreed that abortion should be between a woman and her doctor—a belief that would underpin Roe v. Wade the next year—but Nixon and his people worried that he would lose the fall election. Nixon advisor Patrick Buchanan urged the president to pivot against abortion to woo antiabortion Catholics, who tended to vote for Democrats.

As right-wing activists like Phyllis Schlafly used the idea of abortion as shorthand for women calling for civil rights, Republicans began to attract voters opposed to abortion and the expansion of civil rights. In his campaign and presidency, Ronald Reagan actively courted right-wing evangelicals, and from then on, Republican politicians spurred evangelicals to the polls by promising to cut back abortion rights.

But while Republican-confirmed judges chipped away at Roe v. Wade, the decision itself seemed secure because of the concept of “settled law,” under which jurists try not to create legal uncertainty by abruptly overturning law that has been in place for a long time (or, if they do, to be very clear and public about why).

So Republicans could turn out voters by promising to get rid of Roe v. Wade while also being certain that it would stay in place. By 2016 those antiabortion voters made up the base of the Republican Party. (It is quite possible that then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to permit President Barack Obama to fill a vacant seat on the Supreme Court because he knew that evangelicals would be far more likely to turn out if there were a Supreme Court seat in the balance.)

But then Trump got the chance to put three justices on the court, and the equation changed. Although each promised during their Senate confirmation hearings to respect settled law, the court struck down Roe v. Wade on the principle that the federal expansion of civil rights under the Fourteenth Amendment incorrectly took power from the states and gave it to the federal government. In the Dobbs majority decision, Justice Samuel Alito argued that the right to determine abortion rights must be returned “to the people’s elected representatives” at the state level.

Fourteen Republican-dominated states promptly banned abortion. Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas banned abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest; Mississippi banned it with an exception for rape but not incest; and North Dakota banned it except for a six-week window for rape or incest. West Virginia also has a ban with exceptions for rape and incest. In Wisconsin a law from 1849 went back into effect after Dobbs; it bans abortion unless a woman would die without one. Texas and Idaho allow private citizens to sue abortion providers. Other states have imposed new limits on abortion.

But antiabortion forces also tried to enforce their will federally. In April, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that the Food and Drug Administration should not have approved mifepristone, an abortion-inducing drug, more than 20 years ago. That decision would take effect nationally. It is being appealed.

When the federal government arranged to pay for transportation out of antiabortion states for service members needing reproductive health care, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) put a blanket hold on all military appointments—250 so far—until that policy is rescinded. For the first time in its history, the Marine Corps will not have a confirmed commandant after July 10. In the next few months, five members of the joint chiefs of staff, including General Mark Milley, its chair, are required by law to leave their positions. Tuberville says he will not back down.

On June 20, Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), chair of the House Republican conference, called for a federal abortion ban at 15 weeks, saying that the right to life “is fundamental to human rights and the American dream” and calling out the justices who decided Roe v. Wade as “radical judges who frankly took the voice away from the American people…. The people are the most important voices” on abortion, she said.

But, in fact, a majority of Americans supported abortion rights even before Dobbs, and those numbers have gone up since the decision, especially as untreated miscarriages have brought patients close to death before they could get medical care and girls as young as ten have had to cross state lines to obtain healthcare. Sixty-eight percent of OB-GYNs recently polled by KFF said Dobbs has made it harder to manage emergencies; 64% say it has increased patient deaths. A recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll shows that 80% of Americans—65% of Republicans and 83% of independents—oppose a nationwide ban on abortion while only 14% support one. Fifty-three percent of Americans want federal protection of abortion; 39% oppose it.

In politics, it seems the dog has caught the car. The end of Roe v. Wade has energized those in favor of abortion rights, with Democrat-dominated states protecting reproductive rights and the administration using executive power to protect them where it can. Republicans are now running away from the issue: the ad-tracking firm AdImpact found that only 1% of Republican ads in House races in 2022 mentioned abortion.

At the same time, antiabortion activists achieved their goal and stand to be less energized. This desperate need to whip up enthusiasm among their base is likely behind the Republicans’ sudden focus on transgender children. Right-wing media has linked the two in part thanks to the highly visible work of the American College of Pediatricians, which, despite its name, is a political action group of about 700 people, only 60% of whom have medical degrees. (They broke off from the 67,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics in 2002 after that medical organization backed same-sex parents.) They are prominent voices against both abortion and gender-affirming health care.

In Nebraska in May, a single law combined a ban on abortion after 12 weeks and on gender-affirming care for minors. “This bill is simply about protecting innocent life,” Republican state senator Tom Briese said.

Vice President Kamala Harris has made protecting reproductive rights central, traveling around the country to talk with people about abortion rights and pressing the administration to do more to protect them. At a rally in Washington, D.C., on Friday, she articulated the message of fifty years ago: “We stand for the freedom of every American, including the freedom of every person everywhere to make decisions—about their own body, their own health care and their own doctor,” she said. “So we fight for reproductive rights and legislation that restores the protections of Roe v. Wade. And here’s the thing. The majority of Americans are with us, they agree.”

  June 26, 2023 (Monday)

Today the Biden administration launched its “Investing in America” tour with the announcement of a $40 billion investment to make sure everyone in the United States has access to affordable, reliable high-speed internet by the end of the decade. Comparing the effort to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act during the New Deal, the White House noted today that 8.5 million households and small businesses live in areas without the infrastructure for high-speed internet, while millions more have limited or unreliable options (like me!). High-speed internet is no longer a luxury, the administration points out; it is not possible to participate equally in jobs, school, or healthcare, or to stay connected to family and friends without it (they didn’t mention shopping, but that’s an issue, now, too).

The Rural Electrification Act, which connected almost all Americans to the electrical grid, was the federal government’s demonstration that all Americans should move together into the modern world. In the 1930s that meant access to the infrastructure that could power refrigerators, radios, and, for farmers, technologies like milking machines. It also meant jobs, and lots of them, for the people running the wires and installing new outlets and fixtures in homes across the country.

The new internet investment mirrors that effort. It will provide more than $107 million to every state, with the top ten allocations going to Alabama, California, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington. It will also support both service jobs and manufacturing jobs, since the materials for the project will come from the United States.

For the next three weeks, President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, First Lady Dr. Jill Biden, members of the cabinet, and other senior administration officials will cross the country to talk about Biden’s economic agenda. On Wednesday, President Biden will be in Chicago to talk about “Bidenomics,” his plan to boost the middle class by investing directly in measures that will rebuild it, a vision that echoes FDR rather than the modern Republicans, who argue that cutting taxes will enable investors to amass wealth that they will then reinvest in the economy.

Bidenomics has strong numbers behind it. The U.S. has enjoyed the strongest post-pandemic recovery of any other major economy, with the highest level of growth and the lowest inflation. In early 2021 the Congressional Budget Office projected that it would take until 2026 for unemployment to fall below 4%, a number the U.S. actually achieved in 2021. The economy has added more than 13 million jobs since Biden took office, including almost 800,000 manufacturing jobs.

And, Biden’s people argue, the American people like this agenda. Polling from late last year says that 76% of voters like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law rebuilding our roads and bridges, and 72% of voters support the CHIPS and Science Act to strengthen supply chains and promote domestic manufacture of semiconductors.  

Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said of the internet investment today: “Whether it’s connecting people to the digital economy, manufacturing fiber-optic cable in America, or creating good paying jobs building Internet infrastructure in the states, the investments we’re announcing will increase our competitiveness and spur economic growth across the country for years to come.”

President Biden has been very clear that the U.S. and its allies had nothing to do with Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion against Russian military leaders over the weekend, “[W]e had to make sure we gave Putin no excuse — let me emphasize, we gave Putin no excuse — to blame this on the West, to blame this on NATO," he said. "We made clear that we were not involved. We had nothing to do with it. This was part of a struggle within the Russian system.”

While what, exactly, is going on in Russia remains unclear, there is no doubt that the events of the weekend have left Russian president Vladimir Putin badly weakened.

And then, as if in another timeline, CNN tonight published the audiotape of former president Trump talking in July 2021 about a classified document concerning Iran with a writer and others working on a biography of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows who did not have security clearances. In it, Trump says he cannot declassify the document since he is no longer president– undercutting his argument that he could declassify anything he wished at any time— and made it clear he knew he should not be showing the document to the people in the room, telling them it was “off the record” and “highly confidential.”

Journalist Garrett Graff, who wrote a history of President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, the one that led Nixon to resign under threat of impeachment and conviction, listened to the tape and tweeted: “Speaking as a Watergate historian, there’s nowhere on thousands of hours of Nixon tapes where Nixon makes any comment as clear, as clearly illegal, and as clearly self-aware as this Trump tape.”

  June 28, 2023 (Wednesday)

In Chicago today, President Joe Biden gave a historic speech at the Old Post Office Building downtown. In it, he was crystal clear that he has launched a new economic vision for the United States to stand against that of today’s Republicans. As he has said since he took office, he intends to build the economy “from the middle out and the bottom up instead of just the top down.”

His vision, he said, “is a fundamental break from the economic theory that has failed America’s middle class for decades now.”

That theory is “trickle-down economics,” the idea that cutting taxes for the wealthy and for corporations while shrinking public investment in infrastructure and public education will nurture the economy. Under that theory the most important metric was a company’s bottom line, Biden pointed out, so companies reduced costs by taking factories and supply chains overseas to find cheap labor, leaving “entire towns and communities…hollowed out.” It also meant cutting taxes, which led to dramatic cuts in public investments in infrastructure, research, social programs and so on, with the idea that concentrating money in a few hands would prompt private investment in the economy. That investment would, the theory went, provide more jobs and enable everyone to prosper.

This is the worldview that the Republicans have embraced since 1980 and that, Biden said, has “failed the middle class. It failed America. It blew up the deficit. It increased inequity. And it weakened…our infrastructure. It stripped the dignity, pride, and hope out of communities one after another…. People working as hard as ever couldn’t get ahead because it’s harder to buy a home, pay for a college education, start a business, retire with dignity. [For] the first time in a generation, the path of the middle class seemed out of reach,” Biden said.   

Biden came into office determined to reverse this policy by investing in the American people rather than in tax cuts. With the help of a Democratic Congress, the president backed legislation that invests in infrastructure, repairing our long-neglected roads and bridges, and in supply chains and manufacturing. Rather than scaring off private investment, as the trickle-down theory argued, that public investment has attracted more than $490 billion of private money into new industries. Manufacturing is booming. Together, infrastructure and manufacturing have created new jobs that pay well.

Central to Biden’s vision is the idea that the prosperity of the United States rests on its working people, rather than its elites. In Chicago he emphasized his administration’s focus on training and education, as well as its emphasis on the trades and unions. He also emphasized economic competition, noting that business consolidation has stifled innovation, reduced wages, made supply chains vulnerable, and raised costs for consumers.

To reduce the deficit that has exploded in the past decades and to pay for new programs, Biden reiterated the need for fair taxes on the wealthy and corporations after decades of cuts. “Big Oil made $200 billion last year and got a…$30 billion tax break,” he said, while billionaires pay an average of 8% in taxes, less than “a schoolteacher, a firefighter, or a cop.” He called for “making the tax code fair for everyone, making the wealthy and the super-wealthy and big corporations begin to pay their fair share, without raising taxes at all on the middle class.”

“We’re not going to continue down the trickle-down path as long as I’m president,” Biden said. “This is the moment we are finally going to make a break…. Here’s the simple truth about trickle-down economics: It didn’t represent the best of American capitalism, let alone America.  It represented a moment where we walked away… from… how this country was built…. Bidenomics is just another way of saying: Restore the American Dream because it worked before. It’s rooted in what’s always worked best in this country: investing in America, investing in Americans. Because when we invest in our people, we strengthen the middle class, we see the economy grow. That benefits all Americans. That’s the American Dream.”

Biden often points to the New Deal of the 1930s as his inspiration. In that era, under Democratic president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Congress responded to the economic crash spurred by unregulated capitalism by passing a wide range of laws that regulated business and protected workers, provided a basic social safety net including Social Security, and promoted infrastructure.

In his speech accepting the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination, FDR condemned the policies of his predecessors that turned the government over to businessmen, declaring that “the welfare and the soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.” He pledged to give the American people a “new deal” to replace the one that had led them into the Depression, and to lead a “crusade to restore America to its own people.”

But FDR was not the first president to see ordinary Americans as the heart of the nation and to call for a government that protected them, rather than an economic elite. FDR’s distant relative Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, made a similar argument as president thirty years earlier. Responding to a world in which a few wealthy industrialists—nicknamed “robber barons”—monopolized politics and the economy, he called for a “square deal” for the American people.

“[W]hen I say that I am for the square deal,” TR said in 1910, “I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service.” He called for conservation of natural resources, business regulation, higher wages, and “social” legislation to create a “new nationalism” that would rebuild the country. Overall, he wanted “a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.”  

But TR didn’t invent the idea of government investment in and protection of ordinary Americans either. In his New Nationalism speech, TR pointed back to his revered predecessor, Republican president Abraham Lincoln, who believed that the government must serve the interests of ordinary people rather than those of elite southern enslavers. When South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond told the Senate in 1858 that society was made up of “mudsills” overseen by their betters, who directed their labor and, gathering the wealth they produced, used it to advance the country, Lincoln was outraged.

Society moved forward not at the hands of a wealthy elite, he countered, but through the hard work of ordinary men who constantly innovated. A community based on the work and wisdom of farmers, he said in 1859, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.” In office, Lincoln turned the government from protecting enslavers to advancing the interests of workingmen, including government support for higher education.

Biden has recently embraced the term “Bidenomics,” a term coined by his opponents who insist that their embrace of tax cuts is the only way to create a healthy economy. But Bidenomics is simply a new word for a time-honored American idea.

  June 30, 2023 (Friday)

Today the Supreme Court followed up on yesterday’s decision gutting affirmative action with three decisions that will continue to push the United States back to the era before the New Deal.

In 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis the court said that the First Amendment protects website designer Lorie Smith from having to use words she doesn’t believe in support of gay marriage. To get there, the court focused on the marriage website designer’s contention that while she is willing to work with LGBTQ customers, she doesn’t want to use her own words on a personalized website to celebrate gay marriages. Because of that unwillingness, she said, she wants to post on her website that she will not make websites for same-sex weddings. She says she is afraid that in doing so, she will run afoul of Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws, which prevent public businesses from discriminating against certain groups of people.

This whole scenario of being is prospective, by the way: her online business did not exist and no one had complained about it. Smith claims she wants to start the business because “God is calling her ‘to explain His true story about marriage.’” She alleges that in 2016, a gay man approached her to make a website for his upcoming wedding, but yesterday, Melissa Gira Grant of The New Republic reported that, while the man allegedly behind the email does exist, he is an established designer himself (so why would he hire someone who was not?), is not gay, and married his wife 15 years ago. He says he never wrote to Smith, and the stamp on court filings shows she received it the day after she filed the suit.

Despite this history, by a 6–3 vote, the court said that Smith was being hurt by the state law and thus had standing to sue. It decided that requiring the designer to use her own words to support gay marriage violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech.

Taken together with yesterday’s decision ruling that universities cannot consider race as a category in student admissions, the Supreme Court has highlighted a central contradiction in its interpretation of government power: if the Fourteenth Amendment limits the federal government to making sure that there is no discrimination in the United States on the basis of race—the so-called “colorblind” Constitution—as the right-wing justices argued yesterday, it is up to the states to make sure that state laws don’t discriminate against minorities. But that requires either protecting voting rights or accepting minority rule.

This problem has been with us since before the Civil War, when lawmakers in the southern states defended their enslavement of their Black (and Indigenous) neighbors by arguing that true democracy was up to the voters and that those voters had chosen to support enslavement. After the Civil War, most lawmakers didn’t worry too much about states reimposing discriminatory laws because they included Black men as voters first in 1867 with the Military Reconstruction Act and then in 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and they believed such political power would enable Black men to shape the laws under which they lived.

But in 1875 the Supreme Court ruled in Minor v. Happersett that it was legal to cut citizens out of the vote so long as the criteria were not about race. States excluded women, who brought the case, and southern states promptly excluded Black men through literacy clauses, poll taxes, and so on. Northern states mirrored southern laws with their own, designed to keep immigrants from exercising a voice in state governments. At the same time, southern states protected white men from the effects of these exclusionary laws with so-called grandfather clauses, which said a man could vote so long as his grandfather had been eligible.

It turned out that limiting the Fourteenth Amendment to questions of race and letting states choose their voters cemented the power of a minority. The abandonment of federal protection for voting enabled white southerners to abandon democracy and set up a one-party state that kept Black and Brown Americans as well as white women subservient to white men. As in all one-party states, there was little oversight of corruption and no guarantee that laws would be enforced, leaving minorities and women at the mercy of a legal system that often looked the other way when white criminals committed rape and murder.

Many Americans tut-tutted about lynching and the cordons around Black life, but industrialists insisted on keeping the federal government small because they wanted to make sure it could not regulate their businesses or tax them. They liked keeping power at the state level; state governments were far easier to dominate. Southerners understood that overlap: when a group of southern lawmakers in 1890 wrote a defense of the South’s refusal to let Black men vote, they “respectfully dedicated” the book to “the business men of the North.”

In the 1930s the Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt undermined this coalition by using the federal government to regulate business and provide a social safety net. In the 1940s and 1950s, as racial and gender atrocities began to highlight in popular media just how discriminatory state laws really were, the Supreme Court went further, recognizing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s declaration that states could not deprive any person of the equal protection of the laws meant that the federal government must protect the rights of minorities when states would not. Those rules created modern America.

This is what the radical right seeks to overturn. Yesterday the Supreme Court said that the Fourteenth Amendment could not address racial disparities, but today, like lawmakers in the 1870s, it signaled that it would not protect voting in the states either. It rejected a petition for a review of Mississippi’s strict provision for taking the vote away from felons. That law illustrates just how fully we’re reliving our history: it dates from the 1890 Mississippi constitution that cemented power in white hands. Black Mississippians are currently 2.7 times more likely than white Mississippians to lose the right to vote under the law.

The court went even further today than allowing states to choose their voters. It said that even if state voters do call for minority protections, as Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws do, states cannot protect minorities in the face of someone’s religious beliefs. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that for “the first time in its history,” the court has granted “a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.”

It is worth noting that segregation was defended as a deeply held religious belief.

Today, using a case concerning school loans, the Supreme Court also took aim at the power of the federal government to regulate business. In Biden v. Nebraska the court declared by a vote of 6 to 3 that President Biden’s loan forgiveness program, which offered to forgive up to $20,000 of federally held student debt, was unconstitutional. The right-wing majority of the court argued that Congress had not intended to give that much power to the executive branch, although the forgiveness plan was based on law that gave the secretary of education the power to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs…as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a…national emergency…to ensure” that “recipients of student financial assistance…are not placed in a worse position financially in relation to that financial assistance because of [the national emergency]”.

The right-wing majority based its decision on the so-called major questions doctrine, invented to claw back regulatory power from the federal government. By saying that Congress cannot delegate significant decisions to federal agencies, which are in the executive branch, the court takes on itself the power to decide what a “significant” decision is. The court established this new doctrine in the West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency case, stripping the EPA of its ability to regulate certain kinds of air pollution.

“Let’s not beat around the bush,” constitutional analyst Ian Millhiser wrote today in Vox, today’s decision in Biden v. Nebraska “is complete and utter nonsense. It rewrites a federal law which explicitly authorizes the loan forgiveness program, and it relies on a fake legal doctrine known as ‘major questions’ which has no basis in any law or any provision of the Constitution.”

Today’s Supreme Court, packed as it has been by right-wing money behind the Federalist Society and that society’s leader, Leonard Leo, is taking upon itself power over the federal government and the state governments to recreate the world that existed before the New Deal.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona called out the lurch toward turning the government over to the wealthy, supported as it is by religious footsoldiers like Lorie Smith: “Today, the court substituted itself for Congress,” Cardona told reporters. “It’s outrageous to me that Republicans in Congress and state offices fought so hard against a program that would have helped millions of their own constituents. They had no problem handing trillion-dollar tax cuts to big corporations and the super wealthy.”

Cardona made his point personal: “And many had no problems accepting millions of dollars in forgiven pandemic loans, like Senator Markwayne Mullin from Oklahoma had more than $1.4 million in pandemic loans forgiven. He represents 489,000 eligible borrowers that were turned down today. Representative Brett Guthrie from Kentucky had more than $4.4 million forgiven. He represents more than 90,000 eligible borrowers who were turned down today. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia had more than $180,000 forgiven. She represents more than 91,800 eligible borrowers who were turned down today.”

In the majority opinion of Biden v. Nebraska, Chief Justice John Roberts lamented that those who dislike the court’s decisions have accused the court of “going beyond the proper role of the judiciary.” He defended the court’s decision and urged those who disagreed with it not to disparage the court because “such misperception would be harmful to this institution and our country.” But what is at stake is not simply these individual decisions, whether or not you agree with them; at stake is the way our democracy operates.

Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute didn’t offer much hope for Roberts's plea. “It is not just the rulings the Roberts Court is making,” he tweeted. “They created out of [w]hole cloth a bogus, major questions doctrine. They made a mockery of standing. They rewrite laws to fit their radical ideological preferences. They have unilaterally blown up the legitimacy of the Court.”

In a shot across the bow of this radical court, in her dissent to Biden v. Nebraska, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “the Court, by deciding this case, exercises authority it does not have. It violates the Constitution.”

   July 2, 2023 (Sunday)

On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress passed a “Resolution for Independence” declaring “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

Also known as the “Lee Resolution,” after Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee, who had proposed it, the resolution was the final break between the king and the thirteen colonies on the North American continent that would later become the United States of America.

The path to independence had been neither obvious nor easy.

In 1763, at the end of what was known in the colonies as the French and Indian War, there was little indication that the colonies were about to start their own nation. The war had brought an economic boom to the colonies, and with the French giving up control of land to the west, Euro-American colonists were giddy at the prospect of moving across the Appalachian Mountains. Impressed that the king had been willing to expend such effort to protect the colonies, they were proud of their identity as members of the British empire.

That enthusiasm soon waned.

To guard against another expensive war between colonists and Indigenous Americans, the king’s ministers and Parliament prohibited colonists from crossing the Appalachians. Then, to replenish the treasury after the last war, they passed a number of revenue laws. In 1765 they enacted the Stamp Act, which placed a tax on printed material in the colonies, everything from legal documents and newspapers to playing cards.

The Stamp Act shocked colonists, who saw in it a central political struggle that had been going on in England for more than a century: could the king be checked by the people? Colonists were not directly represented in Parliament and believed they were losing their fundamental liberty as Englishmen to have a say in their government. They responded to the Stamp Act with widespread protests.

In 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act but linked that repeal to the Declaratory Act, which claimed for Parliament “full power and authority to make laws and statutes…to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.” This act echoed the 1719 Irish Declaratory Act, which asserted that Ireland was subordinate to the British king and Parliament. It also imposed new taxes.

As soon as news of the Declaratory Act and the new taxes reached Boston in 1767, the Massachusetts legislature circulated a letter to the other colonies standing firm on the right to equality in the British empire. Local groups boycotted taxed goods and broke into warehouses whose owners they thought were breaking the boycott. In 1768, British officials sent troops to Boston to restore order.

Events began to move faster and faster. In March 1770, British soldiers in Boston shot into a crowd of men and boys harassing them, killing five and wounding six others. Tensions calmed when Parliament in 1772 removed all but one of the new taxes—the tax on tea—but then, in May 1773, it tried to bail out the failing East India Company by giving it a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. The result would be cheaper tea in the colonies, convincing people to buy it and thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose the tax.

Ships carrying the East India tea sailed for the colonies in fall 1773, but mass protests convinced the ships headed to every city but Boston to return to England. In Boston the royal governor was determined to land the cargo. On December 16, 1773, colonists dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded the Dartmouth, tied to a wharf in Boston Harbor, and tossed the tea overboard. Parliament promptly closed the port of Boston, strangling its economy.

In fall 1774, worried colonial delegates met as the First Continental Congress in Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia to figure out how to stand together against tyranny. In Massachusetts a provincial congress stockpiled weapons and supplies in Concord and called for towns to create companies of men who could be ready to fight on a minute’s notice.

British officials were determined to end the rebellion once and for all. They ordered General Thomas Gage to arrest Boston leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were rumored to be in Lexington, and to seize the supplies in Concord. On the night of April 18, 1775, the soldiers set out. The next morning, on the Lexington town green, the British regulars found several dozen minutemen waiting for them. The locals began to disperse when ordered to, but then a shot cracked through the darkness. The regulars opened fire. Eight locals were killed, another dozen wounded.

The regulars marched on to Concord, where they found that most of the supplies had been removed. Then, when they turned to march back to Boston, they found their retreat cut off by minutemen firing from behind boulders, trees, and farmhouses. Seventy-three regular soldiers were killed, another 174 were wounded, and 26 were missing. There were 96 colonial casualties: 49 killed, 41 wounded, and 5 missing.

Before disbanding the year before, the First Continental Congress had agreed to meet again if circumstances seemed to require it. After the events at Lexington and Concord, they regrouped in Philadelphia in late spring 1775, down the street from Carpenters’ Hall in the Pennsylvania State House, a building that we now know as Independence Hall.

The Second Continental Congress agreed to pull the military units around Boston into a Continental Army and put George Washington of Virginia in charge of it. But delegates also wrote directly to the king, emphasizing that they were “your Majesty’s faithful subjects.” They blamed the trouble between him and the colonies on “many of your Majesty’s Ministers,” who had “dealt out” “delusive presences, fruitless terrors, and unavailing severities” and forced the colonists to arm themselves in self-defense. They begged the king to use his power to restore harmony with the colonies. By the time the Olive Branch Petition made it to England in fall 1775, the king had already declared the colonies to be in rebellion.

In January 1776, a 47-page pamphlet, published in Philadelphia by newly-arrived immigrant Thomas Paine, provided the spark that inspired his new countrymen to make the leap from blaming the king’s ministers for their troubles to blaming the king himself. “In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Paine wrote.

Paine rejected the idea that any man could be born to rule others, and he ridiculed the idea that an island should try to govern a continent. “Where…is the King of America?” Paine asked in Common Sense. “I’ll tell you Friend…so far as we approve of monarchy…in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.

“A government of our own is our natural right: And when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance. If we omit it now, some [dictator] may hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.”

“We have it in our power,” Paine wrote, “to begin the world over again.”

As Common Sense swept the colonies, people echoed Paine’s call for American independence. By April 1776, states were writing their own declarations of independence, and a Virginia convention asked the Second Continental Congress to consider declaring “the United Colonies free and independent States, absolved from all allegiance to, or dependence upon, the Crown or Parliament of Great Britain.” On June 7, Lee put the resolution forward. Four days later, the Congress appointed a committee to draft such a declaration.  

Congress left time for reluctant delegates to come around to the resolution, so it was not until July 2 that the measure passed. “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America,” Massachusetts delegate John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3. While we celebrate the signing of the final form of the declaration two days later, the adoption of the Lee Resolution marked the delegates’ ultimate conviction that a nation should rest not on the arbitrary rule of a single man and his hand-picked advisors, but on the rule of law.

[Image: Adoption of the Resolution Calling for Independence from England; 7/2/1776; Reports on Administrative Affairs of the Congress; Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774 - 1789; Records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention, Record Group 360; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.]

  July 4, 2023 (Tuesday)

As soon as I caught this image at the Holland Harbor Light in Holland, Michigan, in March, I knew I would post it tonight. Our nation is a work in progress, as it has always been, but there is a whole new generation stepping into the fray.

Happy Independence Day.

We'll get back to work tomorrow.

  July 6, 2023 (Thursday)

The payroll processing firm ADP said today that private sector jobs jumped by 497,000 in June, far higher than the Dow Jones consensus estimate predicted. The big gains were in leisure and hospitality, which added 232,000 new hires; construction with 97,000; and trade, transportation and utilities with 90,000. Annual pay rose at a rate of 6.4%. Most of the jobs came from companies with fewer than 50 employees.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is a way to measure the stock market by aggregating certain stocks, tumbled 372 points as the strong labor market made traders afraid that the Fed would raise interest rates again to cool the economy. Higher interest rates make borrowing more expensive, slowing investment.

Today, as the Washington Post’s climate reporter Scott Dance warned that the sudden surge of broken heat records around the globe is raising alarm among scientists, Bloomberg’s Cailley LaPara reported that the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act for emerging technologies to address climate change have long-term as well as short-term benefits.

Dance noted that temperatures in the North Atlantic are already close to their typical annual peak although we are early in the season, sea ice levels around Antarctica are terribly low, and Monday was the Earth’s hottest day in at least 125,000 years and Tuesday was hotter. LaPara noted that while much attention has been paid to the short-term solar, EV, and wind industries in the U.S., emerging technologies for industries that can’t be electrified—technologies like sustainable aviation fuel, clean hydrogen, and direct air capture, which pulls carbon dioxide out of the air—offer huge potential to reduce emissions by 2030.

This news was the backdrop today as President Biden was in South Carolina to talk about Bidenomics. After touting the huge investments of both public and private capital that are bringing new businesses and repaired infrastructure to that state, Biden noted that analysts have said that the new laws Democrats have passed will do more for Republican-dominated states than for Democratic ones. “Well, that’s okay with me,” Biden said, “because we’re all Americans. Because my view is: Wherever the need is most, that’s the place we should be helping. And that’s what we’re doing. Because the way I look at it, the progress we’re making is good for all Americans, all of America.”

On Air Force One on the way to the event, deputy press secretary Andrew Bates began his remarks to the press: “President Biden promised that he would be a president for all Americans, regardless of where they live and regardless of whether they voted for him or not. He also promised to rebuild the middle class. The fact that Bidenomics has now galvanized over $500 billion in job-creating private sector investment is the newest testament to how seriously he takes fulfilling those promises.”

Bates listed all the economic accomplishments of the administration and then added: “the most powerful endorsement of Bidenomics is this: Every signature economic law this President has signed, congressional Republicans who voted 'no' and attacked it on Fox News then went home to their district and hailed its benefits.” He noted that “Senator Lindsey Graham called the Inflation Reduction Act ‘a nightmare for South Carolina,’” then, “[j]ust two months later, he called BMW’s electric vehicles announcement ‘one of the most consequential announcements in the history of the state of South Carolina.’” “Representative Joe Wilson blasted the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law but later announced, ‘I welcome Scout Motors’ plans to invest $2 billion and create up to 4,000 jobs in South Carolina.’ Nancy Mace called Bidenomics legislation a…‘disaster,’ then welcomed a RAISE grant to Charleston.”

“[W]hat could speak to the effectiveness of Bidenomics more than these conversions?” Bates asked.

While Biden is trying to sell Americans on an economic vision for the future, the Republican leadership is doubling down on dislike of President Biden and the Democrats. Early on the morning of July 2, Trump, who remains the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, shared a meme of President Biden that included a flag reading: “F*CK BIDEN AND F*CK YOU FOR VOTING FOR HIM!” The next morning, in all caps, he railed against what he called “massive prosecutorial conduct” and “the weaponization of law enforcement,” asking: “Do the people of this once great nation even have a choice but to protest the potential doom of the United States of America??? 2024!!!”

Prosecutors have told U.S. district judge Aileen Cannon that they want to begin Trump’s trial on 37 federal charges for keeping and hiding classified national security documents in December, and as his legal trouble heats up, Trump appears to be calling for violence against Democrats. On June 29 he posted what he claimed was the address of former president Barack Obama, inspiring a man who had been at the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to repost the address and to warn, “We got these losers surrounded! See you in hell,…Obama’s [sic].” Taylor Tarranto then headed there with firearms and ammunition, as well as a machete, in his van. Secret Service agents arrested him.

Indeed, those crossing the law for the former president are not faring well. More than 1,000 people have been arrested for their participation in the events of January 6, and those higher up the ladder are starting to feel the heat as well. Trump lawyer Lin Wood, who pushed Trump’s 2020 election lies, was permitted to “retire” his law license on Tuesday rather than be disbarred. Trump lawyer John Eastman is facing disbarment in California for trying to overturn the 2020 election with his “fake elector” scheme, a ploy whose legitimacy the Supreme Court rejected last week. And today, Trump aide Walt Nauta pleaded not guilty to federal charges of withholding documents and conspiring to obstruct justice for allegedly helping Trump hide the classified documents he had at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump Republicans—MAGA Republicans—are cementing their identity by fanning fears based on cultural issues, but it is becoming clear those are no longer as powerful as they used to be as the reality of Republican extremism becomes clear.

Yesterday the man who raped and impregnated a then-9-year-old Ohio girl was sentenced to at least 25 years in prison. Last year, after the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, President Biden used her case to argue for the need for abortion access. Republican lawmakers, who had criminalized all abortions after 6 weeks, before most people know they’re pregnant, publicly doubted that the case was real (Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost told the Fox News Channel there was “not a damn scintilla of evidence” to support the story). Unable to receive an abortion in Ohio, the girl, who had since turned 10, had to travel to Indiana, where Dr. Caitlin Bernard performed the procedure.

Republican Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita, complained—inaccurately—that Bernard had not reported child abuse and that she had violated privacy laws by talking to a reporter, although she did not identify the patient and her employer said she acted properly. Bernard was nonetheless reprimanded for her handling of privacy issues and fined by the Indiana licensing board. Her employer disagreed.

As Republican-dominated states have dramatically restricted abortion, they have fueled such a backlash that party members are either trying to avoid talking about it or are now replacing the phrase “national ban” with “national consensus” or “national standard,” although as feminist writer Jessica Valenti, who studies this language, notes, they still mean strict antiabortion measures. In the House, some newly-elected and swing-district Republicans have blocked abortion measures from coming to a vote out of concern they will lose their seats in 2024.

But it is not at all clear the issue will go away. Yesterday, those committed to protecting abortion rights in Ohio turned in 70% more signatures than they needed to get a measure amending the constitution to protect that access on the ballot this November. In August, though, antiabortion forces will use a special election to try to change the threshold for constitutional amendments, requiring 60% of voters rather than a majority.

  July 8, 2023 (Saturday)

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.

In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited enslavement on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after an actor had murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.

Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.

Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.

But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.

Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.

It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision declaring that Black men "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”

The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history; it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.

The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.

And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.

Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.

Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.

Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”