Letter From An American by Heather Cox Richardson

   April 3, 2024 (Wednesday)

The election of 2000 was back in the news this week, when Nate Cohn of the New York Times reminded readers of his newsletter, using a map by data strategist and consultant Matthew C. Isbell, that the unusual butterfly ballot design in Palm Beach County that year siphoned off at least 2,000 votes intended for Democratic candidate Al Gore to far-right candidate Pat Buchanan.

Those 2,000 votes were enough to decide the election, “all things being equal,” Cohn wrote. But of course, they weren’t equal: in 1998 a purge of the Florida voter rolls had disproportionately disenfranchised Black voters, making them ten times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected.

That ballot and that purge gave Republican candidate George W. Bush the electoral votes from Florida, putting him into the White House although he had lost the popular vote by more than half a million votes.

Revisiting the 2000 election reminds us that manipulating the vote through voter suppression or the mechanics of an election in even small ways can undermine the will of the people.  

A poll out today from the Associated Press/NORC showed that the vast majority of Americans agree about the importance of the fundamental principles of our democracy. Ninety-eight percent of Americans think the right to vote is extremely important, very important, or somewhat important. Only 2% think it is “not too important.” The split was similar with regard to “the right of everyone to equal protection under the law”: 98% of those polled thought it was extremely, very, or somewhat important, while only 2% thought it was not too important.

Recent election results suggest that voters don’t support the extremism of the current Republican Party. In local elections in the St. Louis, Missouri, area on Tuesday, voters rejected all 13 right-wing candidates for school boards, and in Enid, Oklahoma, voters recalled a city council member who participated in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and had ties to white supremacist groups.

Seemingly aware of the growing backlash to their policies, MAGA Republicans are backing away from them, at least in public. Earlier this year, Florida governor Ron DeSantis called for making it harder to ban books after a few activists systematically challenged dozens of books in districts where they had no children in the schools—although he blamed teachers, administrators, and “the news media” for creating a “hoax.”

Today, lawyers for the state of Texas told a federal appeals court that state legislators might have gone “too far” with their immigration law that made it a state crime to enter Texas illegally and allowed state judges to order immigrants to be deported. (Mexico had flatly refused to accept deported immigrants from other countries under this new law.) Nonetheless, Arizona legislators have passed a similar bill—that Democratic governor Katie Hobbs refuses to sign into law—and are considering another measure that would allow landowners to threaten or shoot people who cross their property to get into the U.S.

Indeed, the extremists who have taken over the Republican Party seem less inclined to moderate their stances than either to pollute popular opinion or to prevent their opponents from voting.

While Trump is hedging about his stance on abortion—after bragging repeatedly that he was the person responsible for overturning Roe v. Wade—MAGA Republicans have made their unpopular abortion stance even stronger.

Emily Cochrane of the New York Times reported today that the hospital at the center of the decision by the Alabama state supreme court that embryos used for in vitro fertilization have the same rights and protections as children has ended its IVF services. And on Monday, Florida’s supreme court, which Florida governor Ron DeSantis packed with extremists, upheld a ban on abortion after 15 weeks and allowed a new six-week abortion ban—before most women know they’re pregnant—to go into effect in 30 days.

In the past, people seeking abortions had gravitated to Florida because its constitution upheld the right to privacy, which protected abortion. But now the Florida Supreme Court has decided the constitution does not protect the right to abortion. Caroline Kitchener explained in the Washington Post that in the past, more than 80,000 women a year accessed abortion services in Florida. This ban will make it nearly impossible to get an abortion in the American South.

Anya Cook, who in 2022 nearly died after she was denied an abortion under Florida’s 15-week ban, gave Kitchener a message for Florida women experiencing pregnancy complications: “Run,” she said. “Run, because you have no help here.”

Extremist Republicans have managed to put their policies into place not by winning a majority and passing laws through Congress, but by creating cases that they then take to sympathetic judges. This system, known as “judge shopping,” has so perverted lawmaking that on March 12 the Judicial Conference, the body that makes policy for federal courts, announced a new rule that any lawsuit seeking to overturn statewide or national policies would be randomly assigned among a larger pool of judges.

On March 29, the chief judge of the Northern District of Texas, where many such cases are filed, told Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that he would not adhere to the new rules.

Rather than moderating their stances, extremist Republicans are doubling down on their attempt to create dirt on the president. With their impeachment effort against President Joe Biden in embarrassing ruins, House Republicans are casting around for another issue to hurt the Democrats before the 2024 election.

Jennifer Haberkorn of Politico reported today that in the last month, House Republican Committee chairs have sent almost 50 oversight requests to a variety of departments and agencies. Haberkorn noted that there is “significant political pressure on the party to produce results after months of promising it would uncover evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors involving Biden.”

But it is Trump, not Biden, who is in the news for questionable behavior. In The Guardian today, Hugo Lowell reported that Trump’s social media company was kept afloat in 2022 “by emergency loans provided in part by a Russian-American businessman under scrutiny in a federal insider-trading and money-laundering investigation.”

There is more trouble for the social media company in the news today, as two of its investors pleaded guilty to being part of an insider-trading scheme involving the company’s stock. They admitted they had secret, inside information about the merger between Trump Media and Digital World Acquisition Corporation and had used that insider information to make profitable trades.

Meanwhile, Trump is suing Truth Social’s founders to force them out of leadership and make them give up their shares in the company. His is a countersuit to their lawsuit accusing him of trying to dilute the company’s stock.

Of more immediate concern for Trump, Judge Juan Merchan denied yet another attempt by Trump—his eighth, according to prosecutors—to delay his election interference trial. The trial is scheduled to begin April 15.

Finally, in an illustration of extremists aiming not to moderate their stances but to impose the will of the minority on the majority, Republicans are putting in place rules to make it easier for individuals to challenge voters, removing them from the voter rolls before the 2024 election.

Marc Elias of Democracy Docket noted today that states and local governments have regular programs to keep voter registration accurate, while right-wing activists are operating on a different agenda. In one 70,000-person town in Michigan, a single activist challenged more than a thousand voters, Elias reported, and in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, right-wing activists have already challenged 16,000 voters and intend to challenge another 10,000.

One group boasted that their system “can and will change elections in America forever.”

Rather like the election of 2000.

   April 5, 2024 (Friday)

Today offered yet more evidence that Biden’s rejection of the Republicans’ supply-side economics in favor of investing in ordinary Americans is paying off with high growth, low unemployment, and strong wages.

Today’s jobs report from the U.S. Department of Labor for the month of March showed higher job growth than analysts anticipated. Instead of the 214,000 jobs expected, the U.S. added 303,000. The government also revised its estimate of job growth in January and February upward by a combined number of 22,000. President Joe Biden noted that this report meant that the administration had created more than 15 million jobs since he took office.

The unemployment rate was also good, dropping slightly to 3.8% in March. According to economist Steven Rattner of Morning Joe, the United States has now had 26 consecutive months—more than two years—of unemployment under 4%, the longest stretch of unemployment that low since the late 1960s.

Rattner pointed out that immigrants have helped to push U.S. growth since the pandemic by adding millions of new workers to the labor market. As native-born workers have aged into retirement, immigrants have taken their places and “been essential to America’s post-COVID labor market recovery.”

Heather Long of the Washington Post added that wage growth has been 4.1% in the past year, which is well above the 3.2% inflation rate.

“My plan is growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, investing in all Americans, and giving the middle class a fair shot,” Biden said in response to the new jobs report. That system, which resurrects the economy the United States enjoyed between 1933 and 1981, has been a roaring success.

Biden was in Baltimore, Maryland, today, where he flew over the remains of the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge, spoke with the response teams there, and met with the families of those who died when the bridge fell. Apparently trying to demonstrate that government can be both efficient and effective, the administration has emphasized speed and competence in its response to the bridge collapse of March 26, 2024.

Kayla Tausche of CNN reported today that the U.S. Coast Guard was onsite within minutes of the collapse, and that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was working the phone as soon as he heard. He had spoken with Maryland governor Wes Moore, Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott, and White House chief of staff Jeff Zients by 5:00 a.m. Biden was briefed early that morning, before he began to reach out to state and local leaders.

Baltimore County executive Johnny Olszewski told Tausche: “[Biden] demonstrated a clear understanding of the importance of the port, had a real empathy for myself and all the individuals impacted…. And he was unequivocal that he was going to do whatever he can, legally and within his power to expedite a response.”

The collapse of the bridge not only affected traffic around Baltimore, but also shut the Port of Baltimore. For 13 years, that port has led the nation in carrying cars and light trucks, as well as tractors and cranes, handling more than 847,000 vehicles in 2023. In that same year, the port handled more than 444,000 passengers and $80 billion worth of foreign cargo. The damage to the port is of national significance.

Less than four hours after it received an official request for funding for repairs on March 29, the Department of Transportation authorized funds to begin to address immediate needs, which officials say is a record. The Army Corps of Engineers says it expects to restore a narrow navigation channel for use by the end of April and to have the port reopened fully by the end of May. Until then, the federal government is improving the infrastructure at nearby Sparrows Point to enable it to handle more ships.

But the Republican Party remains committed to the idea that the government must be kept small and that private enterprise must be privileged over public investments. Today, the far-right House Freedom Caucus announced that it would not consider funding the bridge repairs until foreign shipping companies had paid in all they owe (Biden has called for funding the bridge immediately rather than waiting for insurance funds, which will come much later).  

They also say that they want the repairs to come out of money Congress has appropriated for other initiatives they dislike, that any new funds must be fully offset by other cuts, and that “burdensome regulations” such as labor agreements must be waived “to avoid all unnecessary delays and costs.”

They are also demanding that Biden reverse the administration’s “pause on approvals of liquified natural gas export terminals” before Congress will consider any funding for the bridge reconstruction. In January, under pressure from climate activists, Biden paused the construction of such terminals. Liquid natural gas is a valuable export, but it is also made up primarily of methane, a greenhouse gas significantly worse for the planet than carbon dioxide. Oil and gas interests are strongly in favor of developing the liquid natural gas industry while ignoring its effects on climate change.

One of the proposed plants affected by the pause would have been the largest in the U.S. It is planned for Louisiana, the home state of House speaker Mike Johnson. Johnson has already tried to tie funding for Ukraine to lifting the pause on liquid natural gas export terminals, and the White House refused. Now, apparently, extremist Republicans are trying the same gambit with repairs to the Francis Scott Key Bridge and access to one of the nation’s most important ports, although slowing repairs at that key juncture will directly affect many of their constituents.  

Indeed, despite the solid demonstration that government support for ordinary Americans is the best way to build the economy, Republicans continue to maintain that the way to promote economic growth is to concentrate money among a few men at the top of the economic ladder. The idea is that those few people will invest their money more efficiently than the government can, and that the businesses they create will employ more and more workers. To that end, Republicans since 1981 have focused on tax cuts and deregulation in order to give those they see as job creators a free hand.

That system, so-called “supply-side economics,” has never actually worked, but it has become an article of faith for Republicans. It is a system that is popular with the very wealthy, and Biden called that out today in a video he recorded with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

In the video, the two men comment on a video clip in which former president Trump, speaking at a private event, promises wealthy donors another tax cut. Biden says: “That’s everything you need to know about Donald Trump. When he thinks the cameras aren’t on, he tells his rich friends, ‘We’re gonna give you tax cuts.’”

Sanders chimes in: “Can anybody in America imagine that at a time of massive income and wealth inequality—billionaires are doing phenomenally well—that he’s going to give them huge tax breaks? And then at the same time, he’s going to cut Social Security, Medicare, and programs that our kids need….”

“That makes me mad as hell, quite frankly,” Biden says. “There are 1,000 billionaires in…this country. They pay an average of 8.2% [in] federal taxes. So…we have a plan: Asking his good buddies to begin to pay their fair share.”

   April 7, 2024 (Sunday)
 
In August 1870 a U.S. exploring expedition headed out from Montana toward the Yellowstone River into land the U.S. government had recognized as belonging to different Indigenous tribes.

By October the men had reached the Yellowstone, where they reported they had “found abundance of game and trout, hot springs of five or six different kinds…basaltic columns of enormous size” and a waterfall that must, they wrote, “be in form, color and surroundings one of the most glorious objects on the American Continent.” On the strength of their widely reprinted reports, the secretary of the interior sent out an official surveying team under geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden. With it went photographer William Henry Jackson and fine artist Thomas Moran.
 
Banker and railroad baron Jay Cooke had arranged for Moran to join the expedition. In 1871 the popular Scribner’s Monthly published the surveyor’s report along with Moran’s drawings and a promise that Cooke’s Northern Pacific Railroad would soon lay tracks to enable tourists to see the great natural wonders of the West.
 
But by 1871, Americans had begun to turn against the railroads, seeing them as big businesses monopolizing American resources at the expense of ordinary Americans. When Hayden called on Congress to pass a law setting the area around Yellowstone aside as a public park, two Republicans—Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas and Delegate William H. Clagett of Montana—introduced bills to protect Yellowstone in a natural state and provide against “wanton destruction of the fish and game…or destruction for the purposes of merchandise or profit.”
 
The House Committee on Public Lands praised Yellowstone Valley’s beauty and warned that “persons are now waiting for the spring…to enter in and take possession of these remarkable curiosities, to make merchandise of these bountiful specimens, to fence in these rare wonders so as to charge visitors a fee, as is now done at Niagara Falls, for the sight of that which ought to be as free as the air or water.” It warned that “the vandals who are now waiting to enter into this wonderland will, in a single season, despoil, beyond recovery, these remarkable curiosities which have required all the cunning skill of nature thousands of years to prepare.”
 
The New York Times got behind the idea that saving Yellowstone for the people was the responsibility of the federal government, saying that if businesses “should be strictly shut out, it will remain a place which we can proudly show to the benighted European as a proof of what nature—under a republican form of government—can accomplish in the great West.”
 
On March 1, 1872, President U. S. Grant, a Republican, signed the bill making Yellowstone a national park.
 
The impulse to protect natural resources from those who would plunder them for profit expanded 18 years later, when the federal government stepped in to protect Yosemite. In June 1864, Congress had passed and President Abraham Lincoln signed a law giving to the state of California the Yosemite Valley and nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort and recreation.”

But by 1890 it was clear that under state management the property had been largely turned over to timber companies, sheep-herding enterprises, and tourist businesses with state contracts. Naturalist John Muir warned in the Century magazine: “Ax and plow, hogs and horses, have long been and are still busy in Yosemite’s gardens and groves. All that is accessible and destructible is rapidly being destroyed.” Congress passed a law making the land around the state property in Yosemite a national park area, and the United States military began to manage the area.

The next year, in March 1891, Congress gave the president power to “set apart and reserve…as public reservations” land that bore at least some timber, whether or not that timber was of any commercial value. Under this General Revision Act, also known as the Forest Reserve Act, Republican president Benjamin Harrison set aside timber land adjacent to Yellowstone National Park and south of Yosemite National Park. By September 1893, about 17 million acres of land had been put into forest reserves. Those who objected to this policy, according to Century, were “men [who] wish to get at it and make it earn something for them.”

Presidents of both parties continued to protect American lands, but in the late nineteenth century it was New York Republican politician Theodore Roosevelt who most dramatically expanded the effort to keep western lands from the hands of those who wanted only their timber and minerals.

Roosevelt was concerned that moneygrubbing was eroding the character of the nation, and he believed that western land nurtured the independence and community that he worried was disappearing in the East. During his presidency, which stretched from 1901 to 1909, Roosevelt protected 141 million acres of forest and established five new national parks.

More powerfully, he used the 1906 Antiquities Act, which Congress had passed to stop the looting and sale of Indigenous objects and sites, to protect land. The Antiquities Act allowed presidents to protect areas of historic, cultural, or scientific interest. Before the law was a year old, Roosevelt had created four national monuments: Devils Tower in Wyoming, El Morro in New Mexico, and Montezuma Castle and Petrified Forest in Arizona.

In 1908, Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to protect the Grand Canyon.

Since then, presidents of both parties have protected American lands. President Jimmy Carter rivaled Roosevelt’s protection of land when he protected more than 100 million acres in Alaska from oil development. Carter’s secretary of the interior, Cecil D. Andrus, saw himself as a practical man trying to balance the needs of business and environmental needs but seemed to think business interests had become too powerful: “The domination of the department by mining, oil, timber, grazing and other interests is over.”

In fact, the fight over the public lands was not ending; it was entering a new phase. Since the 1980s, Republicans have pushed to reopen public lands to resource development, maintaining even today that Democrats have hampered oil production although it is currently, under President Joe Biden, at an all-time high.

The push to return public lands to private hands got stronger under former president Donald Trump. On April 26, 2017, Trump signed an executive order—Executive Order 13792—directing his secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke, to review designations of 22 national monuments greater than 100,000 acres, made since 1996. He then ordered the largest national monument reduction in U.S. history, slashing the size of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument by 85%—a goal of uranium mining interests—and that of Utah’s Escalante–Grand Staircase by about half, favoring coal interests.

“No one better values the splendor of Utah more than you do,” Trump told cheering supporters. “And no one knows better how to use it.”

In March 2021, shortly after he took office, President Biden announced a new initiative to protect 30% of U.S. land, fresh water, and oceans areas by 2030, a plan popularly known as 30 by 30. Also in March 2021, Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts urged opponents of land protection to push back against the Antiquities Act, saying the broad protection of lands presidents have established under it is an abuse of power.

In October 2021, President Biden restored Bears Ears and Escalante–Grand Staircase to their original size. “Today’s announcement is not just about national monuments,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, said at the ceremony. “It’s about this administration centering the voices of Indigenous people and affirming the shared stewardship of this landscape with tribal nations.”

In 2022, nearly 312 million people visited the country’s national parks and monuments, supporting 378,400 jobs and spending $23.9 billion in communities within 60 miles of a park. This amounted to a $50.3 billion benefit to the nation’s economy.

But the struggle over the use of public lands continues, and now the Republicans are standing on the opposite side from their position of a century ago. Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump presidency, demands significant increases in drilling for oil and gas. That will require removing land from federal protection and opening it to private development. As Roberts urged, Project 2025 promises to seek a Supreme Court ruling to permit the president to reduce the size of national monuments.

But it takes that advice even further.

It says a second Trump administration “must seek repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906."

  April 9, 2024 (Tuesday)

Yesterday, former president Trump released a video celebrating state control over abortion; today, a judicial decision in Arizona illuminated just what such state control means. With the federal recognition of the constitutional right to abortion gone since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, old laws left on state books once again are becoming the law of the land.

In a 4–2 decision, the all-Republican Arizona Supreme Court today said it would not interfere with the authority of the state legislature to write abortion policy, letting the state revert to an 1864 law that bans abortion unless the mother’s life is in danger. “[P]hysicians are now on notice that all abortions, except those necessary to save a woman’s life, are illegal,” the decision read.

The court explained: “A policy matter of this gravity must ultimately be resolved by our citizens through the legislature or the initiative process…. We defer, as we are constitutionally obligated to do, to the legislature’s judgment, which is accountable to, and thus reflects, the mutable will of our citizens.”

The idea that abortion law must be controlled by state legislatures is in keeping with the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. But it’s an interesting spin to say that the new policy is protecting the will of the citizens.

The Arizona law that will begin to be enforced in 14 days was written by a single man in 1864.

In 1864, Arizona was not a state, women and minorities could not vote, and doctors were still sewing up wounds with horsehair and storing their unwashed medical instruments in velvet-lined cases.

And, of course, the United States was in the midst of the Civil War.

In fact, the 1864 law soon to be in force again in Arizona to control women’s reproductive rights in the twenty-first century does not appear particularly concerned with women handling their own reproductive care in the nineteenth—it actually seems to ignore that practice entirely. The laws for Arizona Territory, chaotic and still at war in 1864, appear to reflect the need to rein in a lawless population of men.

The 1864 Arizona criminal code talks about “miscarriage” in the context of other male misbehavior. It focuses at great length on dueling, for example—making illegal not only the act of dueling (punishable by three years in jail) but also having anything to do with a duel. And then, in the section that became the law now resurrected in Arizona, the law takes on the issue of poisoning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although they did discuss his laws, the members later thanked Judge Howell for “preparing his excellent and able Code of Laws” and, as a mark of their appreciation, provided that the laws would officially be called “The Howell Code.” (They also paid him a handsome $2,500, which was equivalent to at least three years’ salary for a workingman in that era.) Judge Howell wrote the territory’s criminal code essentially single-handedly.

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

Then they established a county road near Prescott.

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

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

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

The legislature provided that “[n]o black or mulatto, or Indian, Mongolian, or Asiatic, shall be permitted to [testify in court] against any white person,” thus making it impossible for them to protect their property, their families, or themselves from their white neighbors. It declared that “all marriages between a white person and a [Black person], shall…be absolutely void.”

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

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

And in 2024, one of those laws is back in force in Arizona.

Now, though, women can vote.

Before the midterm elections, 61% of Arizona voters told AP VoteCast they believed abortion should be legal in most or all cases, while only 6% said it should be illegal in all cases. A campaign underway to place a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights on November’s ballot needs to gather 383,923 verified signatures by July; a week ago the campaign announced it already had 500,000 signatures.

It seems likely those voters will turn out in November to elect lawmakers who will represent the actual will of the people in the twenty-first century.

   April 11, 2024 (Thursday)

When Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida addressed a joint meeting of Congress today, he tried to remind lawmakers of who Americans are. “The U.S. shaped the international order in the postwar world through economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power,” he reminded them. “It championed freedom and democracy. It encouraged the stability and prosperity of nations, including Japan. And, when necessary, it made noble sacrifices to fulfill its commitment to a better world.”

He explained the bigger picture. “The United States policy was based on the premise that humanity does not want to live oppressed by an authoritarian state, where you are tracked and surveilled and denied from expressing what is in your heart and on your mind,” he said. “You believed that freedom is the oxygen of humanity.”

Keenly aware that MAGA Republicans have rejected the nation’s role in protecting freedom and democracy and are standing between Ukraine and U.S. aid, Kishida said: “The world needs the United States to continue playing this pivotal role in the affairs of nations.”

“Freedom and democracy are currently under threat around the globe,” he said. “Climate change has caused natural disasters, poverty, and displacement on a global scale. In the COVID-19 pandemic, all humanity suffered. Rapid advances in AI technology have resulted in a battle over the soul of AI that is raging between its promise and its perils. The balance of economic power is shifting. The Global South plays a greater role in responding to challenges and opportunities and calls for a larger voice…. China's current external stance and military actions present an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge, not only to the peace and security of Japan but to the peace and stability of the international community at large.”

In the midst of all this dramatic change, Kishida said, “the leadership of the United States is indispensable. Without U.S. support, how long before the hopes of Ukraine would collapse under the onslaught from Moscow?” he asked. “Without the presence of the United States, how long before the Indo-Pacific would face even harsher realities?”

He noted that Japan has pledged $12 billion to Ukraine and “will continue to stand with” the vulnerable country. In this fraught hour, he said, “[t]he democratic nations of the world must have all hands on deck. I am here to say that Japan is already standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States. You are not alone. We are with you.”

As Kishida gently warned lawmakers that the United States is abdicating its role in world affairs by its apparent abandonment of Ukraine, Russian forces last night destroyed the largest power plant in the Kyiv region. U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Bridget A. Brink reported that “Russia last night launched more than 40 drones and 40 missiles into Ukraine…. The situation in Ukraine is dire; there is not a moment to lose,” she wrote.

House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) surely knows the situation in Ukraine is dire; he has held up U.S. aid for six months. The Senate passed a national security supplemental bill that would provide aid to Ukraine back in February, but while Johnson has said he would bring the supplemental bill to the House floor, where it will certainly pass, somehow it has never been the right time.

American refusal to support Ukraine is causing global concern. When British foreign secretary David Cameron came to the U.S. this week, he not only met with lawmakers and State Department officials, but also traveled to Florida to meet with former president Trump at Mar-a-Lago in hopes of persuading him to support additional U.S. military aid to Ukraine. That Johnson refused to meet with Cameron when he returned to Washington, D.C., the next day suggests that Cameron’s effort achieved little.

Johnson is facing pressure from extremists in his conference like Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene who oppose aid to Ukraine and who are threatening to challenge his speakership if he brings the bill to the floor of the House. Those extremists fired another shot across his bow today when they blocked a law to extend a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after Trump urged them to kill it.

When the measure failed, security expert and former Trump administration official Miles Taylor wrote: “The House’s failure to renew FISA is *BAD.* If these powers lapse, it would be like blind-folding U.S. spies and tying their hands behind their backs as they try to protect Americans from China, Russia, terror groups & beyond. Get it together, Congress.”
 
To enable Johnson to ignore the extremists if it means getting aid to Ukraine, Democrats have thrown Johnson a lifeline, if only he will use it. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) suggested today that Democrats would vote against a challenge to Johnson’s speakership, keeping him in place. Jeffries said: "If the speaker were to do the right thing and allow the House to work its will with an up or down vote on the national security bill, then I believe there are a reasonable number of Democrats [who] would not want to see the speaker fall as a result of doing the right thing."

But instead of actually doing the people’s business and passing a measure the White House, Pentagon, and a majority of Congress think is vital to our national security, MAGA Republicans appear to be consumed by the effort to get Trump back into the presidency.

Today the House Rules Committee got a new chair as Michael Burgess (R-TX) took the reins from Tom Cole (R-OK). Burgess will oversee his first hearing on Monday as the committee meets to examine six bills that appear to be designed to feed the Republicans’ culture wars by denying the secretary of energy’s power to establish new energy conservation standards. Those bills are the “Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act,” the “Liberty in Laundry Act,” the “Clothes Dryers Reliability Act,” the “Refrigerator Freedom Act,” the “Affordable Air Conditioning Act,” and the “Stop Unaffordable Dishwasher Standards Act.”

Johnson is also in on the act. He is scheduled to visit Mar-a-Lago tomorrow to promote a bill to prevent noncitizens from voting. This is purely political theater: it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. Trump seems eager to push the idea of “election integrity” to bolster his lie that the 2020 election was stolen and the 2024 election will be too, evidently trying to chum up distrust of American elections.

Under its new co-chairs, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump and Trump loyalist Michael Whatley, the Republican National Committee last week sent out a robocall to voters’ phones saying that Democrats committed “massive fraud” in the 2020 presidential election and that “If Democrats have their way, your vote could be canceled out by someone who isn’t even an American citizen.” This is a straight-up lie, of course—Trump and his loyalists have never produced any evidence for their accusations and lost more than 60 court cases over it—but Trump clearly intends to make it a centerpiece of his campaign.

While Republicans are pushing the Big Lie, in The Bulwark today, conservative commentator Mona Charen noted that Ukraine president Volodomyr Zelensky this week warned the U.S. that Ukraine will lose the war against Russia’s aggression if it does not get U.S. aid.

“Putin seems to have pulled off the most successful foreign influence operation in American history,” Charen wrote. “If Trump were being blackmailed by Putin it’s hard to imagine how he would behave any differently. And though it started with Trump, it has not ended there. Putin now wields more power over the [Republicans] than anyone other than Trump…. [T]hey mouth Russian disinformation without shame. Putin,” she said, “must be pinching himself.”

 April 13, 2024 (Saturday)

There are really two major Republican political stories dominating the news these days. The more obvious of the two is the attempt by former president Donald Trump and his followers to destroy American democracy. The other story is older, the one that led to Trump but that stands at least a bit apart from him. It is the story of a national shift away from the supply-side ideology of Reagan Republicans toward an embrace of the idea that the government should hold the playing field among all Americans level.

While these two stories are related, they are not the same.

For forty years, between 1981, when Republican Ronald Reagan took office, and 2021, when Democrat Joe Biden did, the Republicans operated under the theory that the best way to run the country was for the government to stay out of the way of market forces. The idea was that if individuals could accumulate as much money as possible, they would invest more efficiently in the economy than they could if the government regulated business or levied taxes to invest in public infrastructure and public education. The growing economy would result in higher tax revenues, enabling Americans to have both low taxes and government services, and prosperity would spread to everyone.

But the system never worked as promised. Instead, during that 40-year period, Republicans passed massive tax cuts under Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump, and slashed regulations. A new interpretation of antitrust laws articulated by Robert Bork in the 1980s permitted dramatic consolidation of corporations, while membership in labor unions declined. The result was that as much as $50 trillion moved upward from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

To keep voters on board the program that was hollowing out the middle class, Republicans emphasized culture wars, hitting hard on racism and sexism by claiming that taxes were designed by Democrats to give undeserving minorities and women government handouts and promising their evangelical voters they would overturn the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion. Those looking for tax cuts and business deregulation depended on culture warriors and white evangelicals to provide the votes to keep them in power.

But the election of Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 proved that Republican arguments were no longer effective enough to elect Republican presidents. So in 2010, with the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission decision, the Supreme Court freed corporations to pour unlimited money into U.S. elections. That year, under Operation REDMAP, Republicans worked to dominate state legislatures so they could control redistricting under the 2010 census, yielding extreme partisan gerrymanders that gave Republicans disproportionate control. In 2013 the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision greenlighted the voter suppression Republicans had been working on since 1986.  

Even so, by 2016 it was not at all clear that the cultural threats, gerrymandering, and voter suppression would be enough to elect a Republican president. People forget it now because of all that has come since, but in 2016, Trump offered not only the racism and sexism Republicans had served up for decades, but also a more moderate economic program than any other Republican running that year. He called for closing the loopholes that permitted wealthy Americans to evade taxes, cheaper and better healthcare than the Democrats had provided with the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., and addressing the long backlog of necessary repairs to our roads and bridges through an infrastructure bill.

But once in office, Trump threw economic populism overboard and resurrected the Republican emphasis on tax cuts and deregulation. His signature law was the 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy at a cost of at least $1.9 trillion over ten years. At the same time, Trump continued to feed his base with racism and sexism, and after the Unite the Right rally at Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, he increasingly turned to his white nationalist base to shore up his power. On January 6, 2021, he used that base to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Republican senators declined to convict Trump of that attempt in his second impeachment trial, apparently hoping he would go away. Instead, their acquiescence in his behavior has enabled him to continue to push the Big Lie that he won the 2020 election. But to return to power, Trump has increasingly turned away from establishment Republicans and has instead turned the party over to its culture war and Christian nationalist foot soldiers. Now Trump has taken over the Republican National Committee itself, and his supporters threaten to turn the nation over to the culture warriors who care far more about their ideology than they do about tax cuts or deregulation.

The extremism of Trump’s base is hugely unpopular among general voters. Most significantly, Trump catered to his white evangelical base by appointing Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, and in 2022, when the court did so, the dog caught the car. Americans overwhelmingly support reproductive freedoms, and Republicans are getting hammered over the extreme abortion bans now operative in Republican-dominated states. Now Trump and a number of Republicans have tried to back away from their antiabortion positions, infuriating antiabortion activists.

It is hard to see how the Republican Party can appeal to both Trump’s base and general voters at the same time.

That split dramatically weakens Trump politically while he is in an increasingly precarious position personally. He will, of course, go on trial on Monday, April 15, for alleged crimes committed as he interfered in the 2016 election. At the same time, the $175 million appeals bond he posted to cover the judgment in his business fraud trial has been questioned and must be justified by April 14. The court has scheduled a hearing on the bond for April 22. And his performance at rallies and private events has been unstable.

He seems a shaky reed on which to hang a political party, especially as his MAGA Republicans have proven unable to manage the House of Representatives and are increasingly being called out as Russian puppets for their attacks on Ukraine aid.  

Regardless of Trump’s future, though, the Reagan Era is over.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have quite deliberately rejected the economic ideology that concentrated wealth among the 1%. On their watch, the federal government has worked to put money into the hands of ordinary Americans rather than the very wealthy. With Democrats and on occasion a few Republicans, they have passed legislation to support families, dedicate resources to making sure people with student debt are receiving the correct terms of their loans (thus relieving significant numbers of Americans), and invested in manufacturing, infrastructure, and addressing climate change. They have also supported unions and returned to an older definition of antitrust law, suing Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple and allowing the federal government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over drug prices.

Their system has worked. Under Biden and Harris the U.S. has had unemployment rates under 4% for 26 months, the longest streak since the 1960s. Wages for the bottom 80% of Americans have risen faster than inflation, chipping away at the huge disparity between the rich and the poor that the policies of the past 40 years have produced.

Today, in an interview with Jamie Kitman of The Guardian, United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain, who negotiated landmark new union contracts with the country’s Big Three automakers, explained that the world has changed: “Workers have realized they’ve been getting screwed for decades, and they’re fed up.”

  April 14, 2024 (Sunday)

Today, on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos asked New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu about his recent switch from supporting former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley for the Republican presidential nomination to supporting former president Trump.

“Just to sum up,” Stephanopoulos said, “You support [Trump] for president even if he's convicted in [the] classified documents [case]. You support him for president even though you believe he contributed to an insurrection. You support him for president even though you believe he's lying about the last election. You support him for president even if he's convicted in the Manhattan case. I just want to say, the answer to that is yes, correct?”

Sununu answered: “Yeah. Me and 51% of America.”

Aside from its overstatement of Trump’s national support, Sununu’s answer illustrated the triumph of politics over principle. Earlier in the interview, Sununu explained that he could swallow all of Trump’s negatives because he wanted a Republican administration. “This is about politics,” he said.

Sununu is part of the Republican faction that focuses on cutting taxes and slashing regulations. Trump has promised further tax cuts, while Biden has said he will raise taxes on the very wealthy and on corporations to make sure the nation does not have to cut Social Security benefits and Medicare. Republicans have suggested they will make those cuts to balance the budget, although at least 90% of the current budget deficit is not due to emergencies like Covid, but is a result of tax cuts under George W. Bush and Trump.  

Sununu may be embracing Trump for his fiscal policies. But there is possibly another dynamic at play in the shift of Republican leaders behind Trump. As Thomas Edsall outlined in the New York Times on April 10 in a piece about donors, they appear to be afraid of retaliation if they don’t join his team. Certainly he has worked to instill that fear, warning in January that anyone who contributed to Haley’s campaign “from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them, and will not accept them.”

Trump has been very clear that he intends to use the power of the state to crush those who he feels have been insufficiently supportive of him. There is every reason to take him at his word, as he tried to do exactly that during his presidency. He used the Internal Revenue Service to harass former FBI director James Comey—who refused to kill the investigation into the ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian operatives as Trump demanded—and Andrew McCabe, who took over as acting FBI director after Trump fired Comey.

He demanded investigations and indictments of former president Barack Obama and then–former vice president Joe Biden, former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, as well as a Democratic lawyer. Former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman, whom Trump appointed after he fired Preet Bharara, recalled: “Throughout my tenure as U.S. attorney, Trump’s Justice Department kept demanding that I use my office to aid them politically, and I kept declining—in ways just tactful enough to keep me from being fired.”

That dynamic already appears to be at work as people are obeying in advance. On April 10, Pulitzer Prize–winning photographer David Hume Kennerly resigned from the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation after his fellow trustees declined to present the Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service to former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney out of concern that a future President Trump would retaliate against the organization by taking away its tax-exempt status.

​​”The historical irony was completely lost on you,” Kennerly wrote. “Gerald Ford became president, in part, because Richard Nixon had ordered the development of an enemies list and demanded his underlings use the IRS against those listed. That’s exactly what the executive committee fears will happen if there’s a second coming of Donald Trump.”

Harking back to Ford’s service in the World War II Navy, Kennerly wrote: “Did [Lieutenant] Gerald Ford meet the enemy head-on because he thought he wouldn’t get killed? No. He did it despite that possibility. This executive committee, on the other hand, bolted before any shots were fired. You aren’t alone. Many foundations, organizations, corporations, and other entities are caught up in this tidal wave of timidity and fear that’s sweeping this country. I mistakenly thought we were better than that. This is the kind of acquiescent behavior that leads to authoritarianism. President Ford most likely would have come out even tougher and said that it leads directly to fascism.”

As Princeton sociology professor Kim Lane Scheppele told Edsall, those still operating under the impression that they will curry favor with a dictator are painfully unaware of how dictators actually operate: like Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, if he is returned to power, Trump will use the power of the state to squeeze the wealthy as well as his political opponents, threatening them with investigations, audits, regulation—even criminal charges—unless they do as they are told.

But Sununu’s cynical announcement that he would destroy American democracy if it meant his party could stay in power is not only a misguided approach to trying to appease a dictator. It is a profound rejection of the meaning of American democracy: that we all are created equal and have a right to a say in our government. Throughout our history, Americans have found those principles so fundamental to human self-determination that they have given their lives for them.

It’s hard to miss that Sununu’s statement fell on the anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who stood at the cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where those who had died to defend the United States in July 1863 were buried and asked his fellow Americans to rededicate themselves “to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we 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.”

  April 16, 2024 (Tuesday)

On Sunday, April 14, 2024, Iran fired about 170 drones, more than 120 ballistic missiles, and more than 30 cruise missiles from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and areas controlled by Hezbollah in Lebanon toward Israel. The strike was in retaliation for a strike on Iran’s diplomatic complex in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, which killed two top commanders in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, along with other officials. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the Syrian strike, but officials from other countries believe Israel is responsible. Iran warned its attack was coming, and Israel and the U.S., along with Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and France, shot the missiles down. Israel sustained almost no damage. One Arab-Israeli girl was critically injured.

In the leadup to the attack, Arab countries shared intelligence and radar tracking, opened their airspace while closing it to Iran, and even supplied forces to withstand Iran’s attack. According to David S. Cloud, Dov Lieber, Stephen Kalin, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal, in March 2022, top military officials from Israel and Arab countries met in Egypt at the invitation of U.S. Marine General Frank McKenzie, then the top U.S. commander in the region, to discuss coordination against Iran’s growing military capabilities.  

That prospective coordination had never been tested, but the fact that Arab states stood alongside Israel against Iran highlights changing dynamics in the Middle East. In the aftermath of the attack, a source connected to the Saudi royal family charged Iran with instigating the Gaza war to stop normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hezbollah in Lebanon are Iran’s proxies.

Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing 1,200 people and kidnapping more than 250 others, President Joe Biden’s apparent top priority has been making sure the crisis doesn’t spread. On October 10, he warned: “to any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation, I have one word: Don’t. Don’t.”

The U.S. moved two of its eleven carrier battle groups, which usually consist of an aircraft carrier, at least four other ships, and about 7,500 personnel, to the region. At the same time, while Biden has been careful to note that the U.S. cannot dictate policy to another country, he warned Israel against a planned preemptive strike against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The U.S. has also led the effort to stop Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen from attacking ships in the Red Sea. The attacks have disrupted global shipping, forcing ships to reroute around Africa.

Since the early days of the conflict, the approach of Israel’s government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to destroying Hamas has caused a deepening rift with the Biden administration. While the U.S. supports Israel’s right to self-defense and “legitimate military objectives,” it has repeatedly called out mounting Palestinian civilian casualties. Then, while the administration has consistently called for the establishment of a Palestinian state, the plan for a postwar settlement Netanyahu finally proposed in February rejected that policy and instead called for Israel to maintain military control of Gaza indefinitely.

Increasingly, the Israeli government has rejected U.S. requests to protect civilian lives, including by allowing more humanitarian aid into Gaza, where people are starving. After a brief humanitarian pause in fighting in November, efforts to achieve another pause to get more humanitarian aid into Gaza have failed repeatedly. Frustration in the U.S. over mounting civilian deaths and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has led to widespread protests against Biden as well as against Israel, and has led Democratic critics of Israeli policy to demand that the U.S. condition military aid to Israel on a ceasefire.

Tensions rose higher when Israel announced it would launch a ground offensive against Hamas in Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, without a plan for protecting civilians. More than a million Palestinians have taken shelter there. In March, national security advisor Jake Sullivan said that the president would not support “a military operation in Rafah that does not protect civilians, that cuts off the main arteries of humanitarian assistance and that places enormous pressure on the Israel-Egypt border.”

Israel did not notify the U.S. when on April 1 it attacked the Iranian diplomatic complex in Syria, a strike U.S. defense officials believed put U.S. forces at risk. Also on April 1, Israeli forces killed seven aid workers—including individuals from Australia, Poland, and the United Kingdom, as well as a Palestinian and a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen—with the humanitarian aid group World Central Kitchen. The workers had coordinated with the military and were in three separate marked vehicles.

On April 3, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directly called out Israel’s silence about its attack on Iranian leaders in Syria in a telephone call to his Israeli counterpart, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

On April 4, in a telephone call, Biden told Netanyahu that “the strikes on humanitarian workers and the overall humanitarian situation are unacceptable.” He said Israel must “announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers.” He reiterated support for Israel but appeared to distinguish between Israel and its current government. Vice President Kamala Harris, who was on the call, told a reporter: "The president made clear we will make sure Israel isn't left without the ability to defend itself. At the same time, if there are no changes to their approach, we are likely to change our approach.”

Israel has pointed to the inefficient distribution of aid within Gaza as a cause of hardship, but three hours after the call, Israel announced that it would open the Erez crossing into northern Gaza for the first time since October 7, use the Port of Ashdod in Israel as a hub for supplies, and allow more Gaza-bound aid trucks into Israel from Jordan. Days later, Israeli officials dropped the plan to open Erez, and the Ashdod port is not yet accepting aid shipments; Defense Minister Gallant said, “We plan to flood Gaza with aid and we are expecting to reach 500 trucks per day,” but he did not say when that would happen.

While this was taking place, according to the four Wall Street Journal reporters, the administration pressed Arab states for intelligence about a retaliatory strike from Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia shared intelligence, and Jordan allowed warplanes to use its airspace while also intercepting Iranian missiles with its own planes. The White House coordinated Israeli and Arab defensive measures. According to U.S. officials, officials from the State Department, the Defense Department, and the National Security Council were “in constant, ongoing, continuous contact with Israelis, with other partners in the region, as well as Iran with a series of direct communications through the Swiss channel and other relevant players,” as well as with “Turkey and China,” “in anticipation of the events that transpired.”

This was the background when Iran attacked Israel on Sunday.

In the aftermath of the attack, Iran’s mission to the United Nations said, “The matter can be deemed concluded.” The White House immediately gathered the leaders of the Group of 7 wealthy democracies, who issued a statement calling on all parties to “avoid further escalation.” Then Biden urged Netanyahu to “think very carefully and strategically” about retaliation and noted that Israel had “got the best of it,” as it had killed senior Iranian military commanders but lost none of its own leaders. Netanyahu is under great pressure from his right-wing coalition to retaliate, but some members of his war cabinet have stressed that they want “to establish an international coalition and strategic alliance to counter the threat posed by Iran.”

The U.S. warned Israel it would not participate in any offensive counterstrike against Iran, although it has announced new economic sanctions against Iran. Matt Bradley of NBC News pointed out that an aggressive Israeli response would run the risk of dissolving the fragile cooperation between Arab states and Israel that helped to repel the Iranian attack. That cooperation illustrated that Iran is increasingly isolated, but as Oraib Al Rantawi, director of a Jordanian think tank, told Bradley, “Those Arab countries are in a very critical situation. There is no easy position to take….”

In the U.S., Republicans, including House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner (R-OH) and Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton, immediately said the U.S. should join Israel if it launched a retaliatory attack, saying they hoped to destroy Iran’s nuclear program. (David Sanger of the New York Times reminded readers yesterday that in 2015, in a deal with seven countries after two years of negotiations, Iran agreed to surrender 97% of its uranium, but Trump pulled out of that deal in 2018, and Iran returned to developing weapons-grade uranium.)

In the House, Republicans who have been refusing to pass the national security supplemental bill that provides additional funding for Ukraine and Israel, as well as the Indo-Pacific and humanitarian aid to Gaza, have suddenly snapped to and are demanding additional funding for Israel. A researcher at an Israeli think tank estimated the cost of Israel’s interception of the Iranian weapons on Sunday at more than $550 million.

The Senate passed the measure in February, and the House is expected to as well if House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) brings it up for a vote. But Johnson is facing a revolt from MAGA Republicans who are so adamantly opposed to aiding Ukraine they threatened to oust him as speaker if he tries to pass it. Yesterday, Johnson said he would break the measure up and try to pass it in four pieces. Extremists don’t like this either. Two Republicans—Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kentucky’s Thomas Massie—have said they will challenge Johnson’s speakership, meaning that Johnson will have to rely on Democratic votes not only to pass an aid measure, but also to keep his speakership.

The House is due to recess from Thursday, April 18, until Monday, April 29. This afternoon, House Intelligence Committee chair Turner and the top Democrat on the committee, Jim Himes (D-CT), released a statement: “We must pass Ukraine aid now,” they wrote. “Today, in a classified briefing, our Committee was informed of the critical need to provide Ukraine military aid this week. The United States must stand against Putin’s war of aggression now as Ukraine’s situation on the ground is critical.”

Today the House finally delivered impeachment articles against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate, two months after approving them, and demanded a full trial.

  April 18, 2024 (Thursday)
 
I will not spend the rest of 2024 focusing on Trump and the chaos in the Republican Party, but today it has been impossible to look away.
 
In Trump’s election interference trial in Manhattan, Judge Juan Merchan this morning dismissed one of the selected jurors after she expressed concern for her anonymity and thus for her safety. All of the reporters in the courtroom have shared so much information about the jurors that they seemed at risk of being identified, but Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters not only ran a video segment about a juror, he suggested she was “concerning.” Trump shared the video on social media.
 
The juror told the judge that so much information about her had become public that her friends and family had begun to ask her if she was one of the jurors. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance noted jurors’ fear for their safety was a concern normally seen only “in a case involving violent organized crime.”

Nonetheless, by the end of the day, twelve people had been chosen to serve as jurors. Tomorrow the process will continue in order to find six alternate jurors.

It is a courtesy for the two sides at a trial to share with each other the names of their next witnesses so the other team can prepare for them. Today the prosecution declined to provide the names of their first three witnesses for the defense out of concern that Trump would broadcast them on social media. “Mr. Trump has been tweeting about the witnesses. We’re not telling them who the witnesses are,” prosecutor Joshua Steinglass said.

Merchan said he “can’t blame them.” Trump’s defense attorney Todd Blanche offered to "commit to the court and the [prosecution] that President Trump will not [post] about any witness" on social media. "I don't think you can make that representation," Merchan said, in a recognition that Trump cannot be trusted, even by his own lawyers.

An article in the New York Times today confirmed that the trial will give Trump plenty of publicity, but not the kind that he prefers. Lawyer Norman L. Eisen walked through questions about what a prison sentence for Trump could look like.
 
Trump’s popular image is taking a hit in other ways, as well. Zac Anderson and Erin Mansfield of USA Today reported that Trump is funneling money from his campaign fundraising directly into his businesses. According to a new report filed with the Federal Election Commission, in February and March the campaign wrote checks totaling $411,287 to Mar-a-Lago and in March a check for $62,337 to Trump National Doral Miami.
 
Experts say it is legal for candidates to pay their own businesses for services used by the campaign so long as they pay fair market value. At the same time, they note that since Trump appears to be desperate for money, “it looks bad.”
 
Astonishingly, Trump’s trial was not the biggest domestic story today. Republicans in Congress were in chaos as members of the extremist Freedom Caucus worked to derail the national security supplemental bills that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has introduced in place of the Senate bill, although they track that bill closely.

The House Rules Committee spent the day debating the foreign aid package, which appropriates aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan separately. The Israel bill also contains $9.1 billion in humanitarian aid for Gaza and other countries. A fourth bill focuses on forcing the Chinese owners of TikTok to sell the company, as well as on imposing sanctions on Russia and Iran.

At stake in the House Rules Committee was Johnson’s plan to allow the House to debate and vote on each measure separately, and then recombine them all into a single measure if they all pass. This would allow extremist Republicans to vote against aid to Ukraine, while still tying the pieces all together to send to the Senate. As Robert Jimison outlined in the New York Times, this complicated plan meant that the Rules Committee vote to allow such a maneuver was crucial to the bill’s passage.

The extremist House Republicans were adamantly opposed to the plan because of their staunch opposition to aid for Ukraine. They wrote in a memo on Wednesday: “This tactic allows Johnson to pass priorities favored by President Biden, the swamp and the Ukraine war machine with a supermajority of House members, leaving conservatives out to dry.”

Extremists Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) vowed to throw House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) out of the speakership, but Democrats Tom Suozzi of New York and Jared Moskowitz of Florida have said they would vote to keep him in his seat, thereby defanging the attack on his leadership.
 
So the extremists instead tried to load the measures up with amendments prohibiting funds from being used for abortion, removing humanitarian aid for Gaza, opposing a two-state solution to the Hamas-Israel war, calling for a wall at the southern border of the U.S., defunding the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and so on.

Greene was especially active in opposition to aid to Ukraine. She tried to amend the bill to direct the president to withdraw the U.S. from NATO and demanded that any members of Congress voting for aid to Ukraine be conscripted into the Ukraine army as well as have their salaries taken to offset funding. She wanted to stop funding until Ukraine “turns over all information related to Hunter Biden and Burisma,” and to require Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to resign. More curiously, she suggested amending the Ukraine bill so that funding would require “restrictions on ethnic minorities’, including Hungarians in Transcarpathia, right to use their native languages in schools are lifted.” This language echoes a very specific piece of Russian propaganda.

Finally, Moskowitz proposed “that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene…should be appointed as Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.”

Many congress members have left Washington, D.C., since Friday was to be the first day of a planned recess. This meant the partisan majority on the floor fluctuated. Olivia Beavers of Politico reported that that instability made Freedom Caucus members nervous enough to put together a Floor Action Response Team (FART—I am totally not making this up) to make sure other Republicans didn’t limit the power of the extremists when they were off the floor.
 
The name of their response team seems likely to be their way to signal their disrespect for the entire Congress. Their fellow Republicans are returning the heat. Today Mike Turner (R-OH) referred to the extremists as the Bully Caucus on MSNBC and said, “We need to get back to professionalism, we need to get back to governing, we need to get back to legislating.” Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) told Juliegrace Brufke of Axios:  "The vast majority of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives...are sick and tired of having people who...constantly blackmail the speaker of the House.”

Another Republican representative, Jake LaTurner of Kansas, announced today he will not run for reelection. He joins more than 20 other Republican representatives heading for the exits.

After all the drama, the House Rules Committee voted 6–3 tonight to advance the foreign aid package to the House floor. Three Republicans voted nay. While it is customary for the opposition party to vote against advancing bills out of the committee, the Democrats broke with tradition and voted in favor.